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Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Ad

Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

dragontamer 4y ago
But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before. And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired. Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the complaints anymore. > Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated. You can't automate news. News is constantly changing. Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively. Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > Not because sales staff were laid off. There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented. What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter is failing at.
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      If I were an advertiser (and I have in the past), I would look at the metrics of engagement for my ads to assess their efficacy, not talk to a representative. Either you're happy with the revenue lift or you're not. To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to a human?
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        I'm talking about the $100+ Million advertisers, not small ones like you. Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War. As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, please stop that" problem. Its impossible to predict X, its impossible to predict Y. You just gotta have email lines with these big companies and promptly issue your programmers / machine learning / data scientists the new algorithms to keep advertisers happy. ------- Twitter is 100% the grounds where furry porn, Airplane Disasters, and Ukrainian War disasters are constantly being discussed and shared. Advertisers want protection of their brand, despite the online discourse.
        luckylion 4y ago
        Twitter didn't have a keyword list to exclude after being in the business for like 20 years? They needed ad buyers to manually contact them and then needed someone to add that with a developer?
        dragontamer 4y ago
        IIRC, those tools were in an incomplete state before the takeover... but at least they were somewhat working and Twitter's executives were prompt in responding to any issues. But the APIs have been degenerating rapidly after the takeover. When the tools aren't working as expected, the advertisers then emailed Twitter's API teams. All of those teams have been dismantled, the executives have been fired. With no one left to contact, the advertisers have begun to leave.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated Feature velocity for users. Not customers. Also, the deprecation of APIs strongly intimates Twitter Blue was a failure.
    - sleepybrett 4y ago
      > Also, the deprecation of APIs ... and has driven away, or may drive away, many of the core content providers for their network effects. People who buy a third party client for twitter are generally not casual users. I reached out to a few friends I would consider 'posters' a couple of journos, a couple of 'personal brand' advertiser types... all of their twitter engagement is way down .. from both sides of the conversation. Two of them are now in a 'mostly I just post now' mode. Having conversations has become to hard. The other two are struggling along but they've had to cut way back, one said 'It was like I was building a house with a nailgun, but it got taken away and someone handed me a rock.' It took me two days without tweetbot to realize it was was one of the only things that kept me actually using twitter. Finally causing me to mothball my account and throw up a personal mastodon install and start re-finding my personal follows there (I'm at about 50% of my list, but i'm finding that mostly what I'm missing is retweets from a few degrees out). My feed's incoming posts per hour are certainly down from twitter by about 60% but I was honestly expecting much lower numbers.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        Why isn’t there a Tweetbot for Mastodon? Onboarding is a PITA. With Twitter ceding the ground, this could be a real differentiator. Hell, you could build a licensing component paid to the servers.
        sleepybrett 4y ago
        There is, it's just in beta. It's called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/ It won't help you, currently or maybe ever, pick a server, but it's a great client even in it's beta form.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    > Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. I mean, yeah? If someone fired all my contacts at a company and didn’t return my emails as my revenue dropped as a result of their changes I would also stop paying them?
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      Thanks for confirming
      - ReflectedImage 4y ago
        Twitter has lost 75% of it's employees, 50% of it's revenue and gained 25% more debt. It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination. Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company. Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.
        adam_arthur 4y ago
        He overpaid massively for the company, yes. That was a critical mistake and why its now encumbered with debt.
        sleepybrett 4y ago
        It seems like playing chicken with "Don't make me pay this hugely overinflated price I promised or I'll crash the company." as your strategy maybe wasn't such a smart idea. Now he's out the money and has literally nothing to show for it. Meanwhile his other ego stock, which he somehow had manipulated into a wild overvaluation, is now crashing because everyone can plainly see that he's just kinda a dumb motherfucker.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      And Twitter needs advertisers more than advertisers need Twitter. Maybe there are exceptions but I can't imagine Twitter is this uniquely wonderful channel for the vast bulk of advertisers.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y. It would be interesting to have a UI that lets them say that they don't want to be next to X, or they do want to be next to Y, and they pay different prices to appear next to more/less popular things.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    This is table stakes for ad platforms. You still also need to be reactive to new events.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Why not use the same tools?
      - morelisp 4y ago
        Internally they probably are, it's just a question of whether the advertiser or agency or platform is pushing the buttons. For obvious reasons the platform owner can usually push them fastest, and can earn more money for doing so, so why shouldn't they do it?
objclxt 4y ago
> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. I don't know if deliberately breaking their developer API for third party clients counts as "shipping features faster than ever".
- astrange 4y ago
  They also put back the "for you" tab to force people into algorithmic timelines, which they already tried once and pulled back since everyone hated it.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it. Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    This is "obviously" based on... no communication whatsoever from the company yet. Another comment of yours says "quite obvious" about advertising, which doesn't seem to be an industry segment in which you work. It seems your observations are right in line with Twitter's new owner, to whom everything that's happened over the last few months has also been "obvious," and mostly wrong.
    - adam_arthur 4y ago
      Yes, Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years, and likely many more over the next two decades is a totally incompetent buffoon. I’d rather take his side than the small minded and intellectually weak detractors. Just because things tend to be a certain way, doesn’t make it optimal or right. Evidence, all of history where bad practices were pervasive and common and later usurped by better practices. Maybe use forethought and critical thinking rather than credentialism and groupthink
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jwilber 4y ago
Twitter has been objectively worse since the layoffs. I get tons of sex-bot accounts liking my posts that never existed before, the app constantly refreshes itself, there’s a few second loading message every time I view my timeline that didn’t exist beforehand, and my timeline is much worse than before (instead of seeing mostly tech stuff in the area of my interest, 60% has become fluff akin to my instagram story rec’s).
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  Opposite experience here. I've had almost 0 porn spammers as opposed to at least weekly before.
- kfarr 4y ago
  For me it's the crypto bots. Out of control. Stopped looking at notifications for a while because it was always randos pumping air drops and nfts
HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs Desperation from the remaining devs? I mean, I can crank out crap as fast as anyone wants me to if it doesn't have to work right.
- bg24 4y ago
  Another approach to look at this: - They are experimenting more aggressively. - Depends on what features you build and time that it take to build those. - How much can you afford to delay the tech debt. When the CEO is focused on rolling out features faster, everyone rallies behind. Does it mean the company is operating great. End of 2023 will be a good indicator. Also note that recent tooling around LLMs (eg. ChatGPT) will improve aggregate efficiency.
pwinnski 4y ago
So far every new feature has been a previously-developed canceled feature. Even Twitter Blue was an existing feature repurposed, and it took two tries to release.
vkou 4y ago
> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Do we have an independent source that doesn't have a history of dishonesty confirming this? Does it have a creative definition of 'shipping', 'feature', and 'faster'? Are there any long-tail dangers that have, or have the potential to blow up in Twitter's face from it? My car goes faster and gets better MPG ever since I stripped out the weight of the braking system...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

dragontamer 4y ago

But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before. And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired. Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the complaints anymore. > Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated. You can't automate news. News is constantly changing. Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.

adam_arthur 4y ago
Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively. Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > Not because sales staff were laid off. There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented. What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter is failing at.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    If I were an advertiser (and I have in the past), I would look at the metrics of engagement for my ads to assess their efficacy, not talk to a representative. Either you're happy with the revenue lift or you're not. To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to a human?
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      I'm talking about the $100+ Million advertisers, not small ones like you. Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War. As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, please stop that" problem. Its impossible to predict X, its impossible to predict Y. You just gotta have email lines with these big companies and promptly issue your programmers / machine learning / data scientists the new algorithms to keep advertisers happy. ------- Twitter is 100% the grounds where furry porn, Airplane Disasters, and Ukrainian War disasters are constantly being discussed and shared. Advertisers want protection of their brand, despite the online discourse.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        Twitter didn't have a keyword list to exclude after being in the business for like 20 years? They needed ad buyers to manually contact them and then needed someone to add that with a developer?
        dragontamer 4y ago
        IIRC, those tools were in an incomplete state before the takeover... but at least they were somewhat working and Twitter's executives were prompt in responding to any issues. But the APIs have been degenerating rapidly after the takeover. When the tools aren't working as expected, the advertisers then emailed Twitter's API teams. All of those teams have been dismantled, the executives have been fired. With no one left to contact, the advertisers have begun to leave.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated Feature velocity for users. Not customers. Also, the deprecation of APIs strongly intimates Twitter Blue was a failure.
  - sleepybrett 4y ago
    > Also, the deprecation of APIs ... and has driven away, or may drive away, many of the core content providers for their network effects. People who buy a third party client for twitter are generally not casual users. I reached out to a few friends I would consider 'posters' a couple of journos, a couple of 'personal brand' advertiser types... all of their twitter engagement is way down .. from both sides of the conversation. Two of them are now in a 'mostly I just post now' mode. Having conversations has become to hard. The other two are struggling along but they've had to cut way back, one said 'It was like I was building a house with a nailgun, but it got taken away and someone handed me a rock.' It took me two days without tweetbot to realize it was was one of the only things that kept me actually using twitter. Finally causing me to mothball my account and throw up a personal mastodon install and start re-finding my personal follows there (I'm at about 50% of my list, but i'm finding that mostly what I'm missing is retweets from a few degrees out). My feed's incoming posts per hour are certainly down from twitter by about 60% but I was honestly expecting much lower numbers.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      Why isn’t there a Tweetbot for Mastodon? Onboarding is a PITA. With Twitter ceding the ground, this could be a real differentiator. Hell, you could build a licensing component paid to the servers.
      - sleepybrett 4y ago
        There is, it's just in beta. It's called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/ https://tapbots.com/ivory/ It won't help you, currently or maybe ever, pick a server, but it's a great client even in it's beta form.
- morelisp 4y ago
  > Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. I mean, yeah? If someone fired all my contacts at a company and didn’t return my emails as my revenue dropped as a result of their changes I would also stop paying them?
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    Thanks for confirming
    - ReflectedImage 4y ago
      Twitter has lost 75% of it's employees, 50% of it's revenue and gained 25% more debt. It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination. Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company. Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.
      - adam_arthur 4y ago
        He overpaid massively for the company, yes. That was a critical mistake and why its now encumbered with debt.
        sleepybrett 4y ago
        It seems like playing chicken with "Don't make me pay this hugely overinflated price I promised or I'll crash the company." as your strategy maybe wasn't such a smart idea. Now he's out the money and has literally nothing to show for it. Meanwhile his other ego stock, which he somehow had manipulated into a wild overvaluation, is now crashing because everyone can plainly see that he's just kinda a dumb motherfucker.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    And Twitter needs advertisers more than advertisers need Twitter. Maybe there are exceptions but I can't imagine Twitter is this uniquely wonderful channel for the vast bulk of advertisers.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y. It would be interesting to have a UI that lets them say that they don't want to be next to X, or they do want to be next to Y, and they pay different prices to appear next to more/less popular things.
- morelisp 4y ago
  This is table stakes for ad platforms. You still also need to be reactive to new events.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Why not use the same tools?
    - morelisp 4y ago
      Internally they probably are, it's just a question of whether the advertiser or agency or platform is pushing the buttons. For obvious reasons the platform owner can usually push them fastest, and can earn more money for doing so, so why shouldn't they do it?

objclxt 4y ago

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. I don't know if deliberately breaking their developer API for third party clients counts as "shipping features faster than ever".

astrange 4y ago
They also put back the "for you" tab to force people into algorithmic timelines, which they already tried once and pulled back since everyone hated it.
adam_arthur 4y ago
They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it. Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were
- pwinnski 4y ago
  This is "obviously" based on... no communication whatsoever from the company yet. Another comment of yours says "quite obvious" about advertising, which doesn't seem to be an industry segment in which you work. It seems your observations are right in line with Twitter's new owner, to whom everything that's happened over the last few months has also been "obvious," and mostly wrong.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    Yes, Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years, and likely many more over the next two decades is a totally incompetent buffoon. I’d rather take his side than the small minded and intellectually weak detractors. Just because things tend to be a certain way, doesn’t make it optimal or right. Evidence, all of history where bad practices were pervasive and common and later usurped by better practices. Maybe use forethought and critical thinking rather than credentialism and groupthink

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jwilber 4y ago

Twitter has been objectively worse since the layoffs. I get tons of sex-bot accounts liking my posts that never existed before, the app constantly refreshes itself, there’s a few second loading message every time I view my timeline that didn’t exist beforehand, and my timeline is much worse than before (instead of seeing mostly tech stuff in the area of my interest, 60% has become fluff akin to my instagram story rec’s).

artificialLimbs 4y ago
Opposite experience here. I've had almost 0 porn spammers as opposed to at least weekly before.
kfarr 4y ago
For me it's the crypto bots. Out of control. Stopped looking at notifications for a while because it was always randos pumping air drops and nfts

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs Desperation from the remaining devs? I mean, I can crank out crap as fast as anyone wants me to if it doesn't have to work right.

bg24 4y ago
Another approach to look at this: - They are experimenting more aggressively. - Depends on what features you build and time that it take to build those. - How much can you afford to delay the tech debt. When the CEO is focused on rolling out features faster, everyone rallies behind. Does it mean the company is operating great. End of 2023 will be a good indicator. Also note that recent tooling around LLMs (eg. ChatGPT) will improve aggregate efficiency.

pwinnski 4y ago

So far every new feature has been a previously-developed canceled feature. Even Twitter Blue was an existing feature repurposed, and it took two tries to release.

vkou 4y ago

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs. Do we have an independent source that doesn't have a history of dishonesty confirming this? Does it have a creative definition of 'shipping', 'feature', and 'faster'? Are there any long-tail dangers that have, or have the potential to blow up in Twitter's face from it? My car goes faster and gets better MPG ever since I stripped out the weight of the braking system...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]