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"stagnant company" Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. Twitter does w

"stagnant company" Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it), yet armchair generals cry out that twitter's refusal to turn into "not twitter" is somehow a failure of engineering and management, or some form of incompetence. So, I disagree, I guess.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
The shareholders ain't here to fuck spiders.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Why do they need so many engineers though. It's not like twitter is facebook or gmail or apple tv where things are constantly shifting? I think the point was why does it take so many people? They should be raking in the cash after a 25% cull. Just saying this from the point of view if I was interested in buying their stock.
sllewe 5y ago
Because that growth is used as a substitute for profit (or net income or EBITDA - take your pick). For a public company having one or the other (or rarely, both) keeps the ticker price moving in the right direction.
0xffff2 5y ago
While I agree with you, at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? I don't think there's anything wrong with being a stable, profitable company, but logically it should also come with a whole lot of layoffs.
- kyawzazaw 5y ago
  Maybe maintenance of current user base itself requires lots of innovation although not ground breaking(thus jobs)? Why the need for layoffs? They did make Twitter Spaces and so far, that move alone has shadowed Clubhouse even though itself is not doing well. Also built discontinued Fleets.
- MisterSandman 5y ago
  > at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with. Also, what's up with people saying twitter is stagnant? They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. They're all trash, but that's besides the point.
  - ceeplusplus 5y ago
    Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users. Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't do anything useful. A small minority deliver the majority of the impact. On top of that at companies like Twitter and Google some of those useless employees spend their time complaining about social justice initiatives rather than doing work.
    - throwanem 5y ago
      Speaking out of what experience? You've just appealed to your own authority; it seems not out of line to ask whence that comes.
      - ceeplusplus 5y ago
        Working at several big tech companies in industry. I can't say my experience is fully representative but I do start to see a pattern when my experiences line up with that of all my friends. There are a _lot_ of internal tools and anecdotally many of them seem like they're designed to abstract away things which wouldn't need abstracting for a company that exclusively hired high performing engineers.
        WesternWind 5y ago
onelovetwo 5y ago
Well even their team disagrees with you, they have for the last years chosen to focus on things like stories (dead), clubhouse (soon dead)instead of working on removing spam/scams
- astrange 5y ago
  Twitter Spaces is good. Twitter is also very popular in Japan and Spaces isn't only a Clubhouse competitor, it's also a Twitcasting competitor over there. Though, twitcasting has more monetization options and Twitter only has super followers which nobody actually uses yet.
  - onelovetwo 4y ago
    Twitter Spaces will die, its only a matter of time.
fleddr 5y ago
I get what you're saying from a moral point of view, but we live in the real world. In the real world, Twitter is a public company. It has existed for a long time and has barely every made a penny. It fails in comparison to other high growth networks (Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube). And it's not an armchair comment. Twitter's own PMs have openly admitted to some of its flaws, it's failure to appeal to the masses. They're self-aware about their own incompetence.
imtringued 5y ago
Because investors have options like sitting on their money until a recession comes along and buying things during the fire sale.
pengaru 5y ago
> Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it) Last I checked not even half the US population is on twitter, not even close to half. Who is this "all" in "they all use it?"
- olliej 5y ago
  The 217 million active daily users? It is "only" $~80 million in the US, I'd love to know how a quarter of the US population using it daily represents an insignificant user base.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    > I'd love to know how a quarter of the US population using it daily represents an insignificant user base I'd love to know which variant of the English language treats "all" as analogous to not "insignificant".
    - saurik 5y ago
      Near as I have ever seen, most English speakers actually do mean something more like that when they say "all": maybe it would be good to mentally model it as "it feels as if it would be hard to choose at random and not find this statement to be true".
      - pengaru 5y ago
        If you say "all" you better at least mean "most". We're not even over half in this case. If this person actually believes most people are already using twitter, it's clearly a problem when it comes to informing a judgement of stagnant growth.
        saurik 5y ago
        Sort of? The thing to realize is that your average speaker leans heavily into the "no true scotsman" fallacy in order to make sense of the world quickly, and so they heavily bias that random distribution from which they are selecting candidates. While I wouldn't personally say "all" in this exact case, it certainly does feel to me as if there isn't anyone new for Twitter to really target, as you have to first discount most of the old people, "all" ;P of the young people, and a depressing number of people who really don't have the resources--time or money--to buy into technological society. Do you seriously believe there is some useful untapped market of people using other social networks--or are even in the target market for a social network but who somehow haven't started using one yet--who aren't using Twitter? I hate Twitter--I'd dare say it is by far my least favorite major social network by far--and even I use the damned thing :(.
slickdork 5y ago
Your post reminded me of one of my favorite quotes. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
- spurgu 5y ago
  Love it! Thanks for sharing, I just discovered Edward Abbey. > Abbey also left instructions on what to do with his remains: Abbey wanted his body transported in the bed of a pickup truck and wished to be buried as soon as possible. He did not want to be embalmed or placed in a coffin. Instead, he preferred to be placed inside of an old sleeping bag and requested that his friends disregard all state laws concerning burial. "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree," said the message. For his funeral, Abbey stated, "No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple and brief." He requested gunfire and bagpipe music, a cheerful and raucous wake, "[a]nd a flood of beer and booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking." Putting Desert Solitaire on my reading list.
  - devmunchies 5y ago
    if you're interested in some more hot takes, try Pentti Linkola's "Can Life Prevail". Be warned about his views of democracy and the US. He opposed the consumerism of the US and sees democracy as "me, me, me" politics, where people vote for what they want now (or what they're told they want) rather doing the uncomfortable thing today for the sake of tomorrow.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - spurgu 4y ago
      I actually started reading it a couple of days ago. :)
ergocoder 5y ago
I agree with you. Not every company wants to grow. But Twitter and twitter employees want the company to grow. But they fail to do so.
kumarvvr 5y ago
I think the correct word is a "changing" company. In a static environment, without competing products like IG, FB etc, Twitter can afford to stay the way it is and probably do incremental improvements. However, in a competitive environment, and with proof that the market is expanding (Newer generation of kids are using social media), if it fails to capture the market, the company will die out. So, there is this need to focus on user number growth. I am sure that if the company was only adding older people, the stock would be punished inspite of growing numbers.
nullc 5y ago
Well, if they're not going to develop new things they could take big hunk of the billion dollars a year that they're spending on it and return it to the shareholders.
ehnto 5y ago
I agree on one hand, it's a perversion of business that seems to manifest in venture capital bubbles that growth is never satisfied. On the other hand, what are they doing with all that talent?
- cudgy 4y ago
  The question is “what is all that talent doing with Twitter?” Truly talented people are typically restless and discontent with mediocrity. Perhaps, the talent is overrated?
octodog 5y ago
You can disagree but you're wrong. Twitter is the definition of a stagnant company. The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend. It has revenue of $5bn but cannot seem to turn a meaningful profit and is not growing. So far it has been a massive failure for shareholders, who are the stakeholders that the board and management are actually there to serve.
- spanktheuser 5y ago
  > The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend. This is a terribly short-sighted and impoverished definition of stagnation. If Elon shakes things up and Twitter generates 2x the profit and 2x the social destruction as Facebook would you call them a vibrant and successful concern?
  - octodog 4y ago
    If things were radically different would I describe Twitter differently? Yes. Is Twitter currently generating twice the profit of Facebook? No. Pretty straightforward.
wolframhempel 4y ago
I appreciate this sounds counterintuitive, but even in order to stay where it is, a company needs to grow. "Staying where you are" would mean to grow by at least as much as the current inflation rate - which in Feb 22 was 7.9% annualized in the US. Anything below that would be decline - and we're not even talking about fighting off competition, offsetting the dollar value against other currencies etc.
tharne 4y ago
> Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. I agree with you on this, but I think the parent commenter was implying that if you're going to be employing thousands of engineers, you ought to have something to show for it. It's fine to move into a "steady state", but your engineering team should eventually reflect that reality.

IIAOPSW 5y ago

The shareholders ain't here to fuck spiders.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

Why do they need so many engineers though. It's not like twitter is facebook or gmail or apple tv where things are constantly shifting? I think the point was why does it take so many people? They should be raking in the cash after a 25% cull. Just saying this from the point of view if I was interested in buying their stock.

sllewe 5y ago

Because that growth is used as a substitute for profit (or net income or EBITDA - take your pick). For a public company having one or the other (or rarely, both) keeps the ticker price moving in the right direction.

0xffff2 5y ago

While I agree with you, at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? I don't think there's anything wrong with being a stable, profitable company, but logically it should also come with a whole lot of layoffs.

kyawzazaw 5y ago
Maybe maintenance of current user base itself requires lots of innovation although not ground breaking(thus jobs)? Why the need for layoffs? They did make Twitter Spaces and so far, that move alone has shadowed Clubhouse even though itself is not doing well. Also built discontinued Fleets.
MisterSandman 5y ago
> at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with. Also, what's up with people saying twitter is stagnant? They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. They're all trash, but that's besides the point.
- ceeplusplus 5y ago
  Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users. Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't do anything useful. A small minority deliver the majority of the impact. On top of that at companies like Twitter and Google some of those useless employees spend their time complaining about social justice initiatives rather than doing work.
  - throwanem 5y ago
    Speaking out of what experience? You've just appealed to your own authority; it seems not out of line to ask whence that comes.
    - ceeplusplus 5y ago
      Working at several big tech companies in industry. I can't say my experience is fully representative but I do start to see a pattern when my experiences line up with that of all my friends. There are a _lot_ of internal tools and anecdotally many of them seem like they're designed to abstract away things which wouldn't need abstracting for a company that exclusively hired high performing engineers.
      - WesternWind 5y ago

onelovetwo 5y ago

Well even their team disagrees with you, they have for the last years chosen to focus on things like stories (dead), clubhouse (soon dead)instead of working on removing spam/scams

astrange 5y ago
Twitter Spaces is good. Twitter is also very popular in Japan and Spaces isn't only a Clubhouse competitor, it's also a Twitcasting competitor over there. Though, twitcasting has more monetization options and Twitter only has super followers which nobody actually uses yet.
- onelovetwo 4y ago
  Twitter Spaces will die, its only a matter of time.

fleddr 5y ago

I get what you're saying from a moral point of view, but we live in the real world. In the real world, Twitter is a public company. It has existed for a long time and has barely every made a penny. It fails in comparison to other high growth networks (Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube). And it's not an armchair comment. Twitter's own PMs have openly admitted to some of its flaws, it's failure to appeal to the masses. They're self-aware about their own incompetence.

imtringued 5y ago

Because investors have options like sitting on their money until a recession comes along and buying things during the fire sale.

pengaru 5y ago

> Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it) Last I checked not even half the US population is on twitter, not even close to half. Who is this "all" in "they all use it?"

olliej 5y ago
The 217 million active daily users? It is "only" $~80 million in the US, I'd love to know how a quarter of the US population using it daily represents an insignificant user base.
- pengaru 5y ago
  > I'd love to know how a quarter of the US population using it daily represents an insignificant user base I'd love to know which variant of the English language treats "all" as analogous to not "insignificant".
  - saurik 5y ago
    Near as I have ever seen, most English speakers actually do mean something more like that when they say "all": maybe it would be good to mentally model it as "it feels as if it would be hard to choose at random and not find this statement to be true".
    - pengaru 5y ago
      If you say "all" you better at least mean "most". We're not even over half in this case. If this person actually believes most people are already using twitter, it's clearly a problem when it comes to informing a judgement of stagnant growth.
      - saurik 5y ago
        Sort of? The thing to realize is that your average speaker leans heavily into the "no true scotsman" fallacy in order to make sense of the world quickly, and so they heavily bias that random distribution from which they are selecting candidates. While I wouldn't personally say "all" in this exact case, it certainly does feel to me as if there isn't anyone new for Twitter to really target, as you have to first discount most of the old people, "all" ;P of the young people, and a depressing number of people who really don't have the resources--time or money--to buy into technological society. Do you seriously believe there is some useful untapped market of people using other social networks--or are even in the target market for a social network but who somehow haven't started using one yet--who aren't using Twitter? I hate Twitter--I'd dare say it is by far my least favorite major social network by far--and even I use the damned thing :(.

slickdork 5y ago

Your post reminded me of one of my favorite quotes. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey

spurgu 5y ago
Love it! Thanks for sharing, I just discovered Edward Abbey. > Abbey also left instructions on what to do with his remains: Abbey wanted his body transported in the bed of a pickup truck and wished to be buried as soon as possible. He did not want to be embalmed or placed in a coffin. Instead, he preferred to be placed inside of an old sleeping bag and requested that his friends disregard all state laws concerning burial. "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree," said the message. For his funeral, Abbey stated, "No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple and brief." He requested gunfire and bagpipe music, a cheerful and raucous wake, "[a]nd a flood of beer and booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking." Putting Desert Solitaire on my reading list.
- devmunchies 5y ago
  if you're interested in some more hot takes, try Pentti Linkola's "Can Life Prevail". Be warned about his views of democracy and the US. He opposed the consumerism of the US and sees democracy as "me, me, me" politics, where people vote for what they want now (or what they're told they want) rather doing the uncomfortable thing today for the sake of tomorrow.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - spurgu 4y ago
    I actually started reading it a couple of days ago. :)

ergocoder 5y ago

I agree with you. Not every company wants to grow. But Twitter and twitter employees want the company to grow. But they fail to do so.

kumarvvr 5y ago

I think the correct word is a "changing" company. In a static environment, without competing products like IG, FB etc, Twitter can afford to stay the way it is and probably do incremental improvements. However, in a competitive environment, and with proof that the market is expanding (Newer generation of kids are using social media), if it fails to capture the market, the company will die out. So, there is this need to focus on user number growth. I am sure that if the company was only adding older people, the stock would be punished inspite of growing numbers.

nullc 5y ago

Well, if they're not going to develop new things they could take big hunk of the billion dollars a year that they're spending on it and return it to the shareholders.

ehnto 5y ago

I agree on one hand, it's a perversion of business that seems to manifest in venture capital bubbles that growth is never satisfied. On the other hand, what are they doing with all that talent?

cudgy 4y ago
The question is “what is all that talent doing with Twitter?” Truly talented people are typically restless and discontent with mediocrity. Perhaps, the talent is overrated?

octodog 5y ago

You can disagree but you're wrong. Twitter is the definition of a stagnant company. The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend. It has revenue of $5bn but cannot seem to turn a meaningful profit and is not growing. So far it has been a massive failure for shareholders, who are the stakeholders that the board and management are actually there to serve.

spanktheuser 5y ago
> The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend. This is a terribly short-sighted and impoverished definition of stagnation. If Elon shakes things up and Twitter generates 2x the profit and 2x the social destruction as Facebook would you call them a vibrant and successful concern?
- octodog 4y ago
  If things were radically different would I describe Twitter differently? Yes. Is Twitter currently generating twice the profit of Facebook? No. Pretty straightforward.

wolframhempel 4y ago

I appreciate this sounds counterintuitive, but even in order to stay where it is, a company needs to grow. "Staying where you are" would mean to grow by at least as much as the current inflation rate - which in Feb 22 was 7.9% annualized in the US. Anything below that would be decline - and we're not even talking about fighting off competition, offsetting the dollar value against other currencies etc.

tharne 4y ago

> Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. I agree with you on this, but I think the parent commenter was implying that if you're going to be employing thousands of engineers, you ought to have something to show for it. It's fine to move into a "steady state", but your engineering team should eventually reflect that reality.