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I don't understand why so many people are criticizing twitter for trying to monetize here on HN. Twitter is not a startup anymore, they have real investors and

I don't understand why so many people are criticizing twitter for trying to monetize here on HN. Twitter is not a startup anymore, they have real investors and have to earn real revenue, and thus they cut everything that can potentially affect that. Is trying to be profitable now considered a bad thing? Is selling a startup to big company that will close it down the only exit strategy that HN praise? I know that some people feel betrayed by twitter for cutting something that used to be free. But what should twitter do? Jeopardy its own business in order to make others happy? That's not how business works. edit: s/that/they/

math0ne 14y ago
The reason that they were successful is because of the developer ecosystem they created around their technology. They simply can't just cut that off, that IS what they are. They are literally giving up the one thing that made them successful, perhaps they can glide on the success they have now, but eventually it will end badly for them. As an outsider that doesn't use twitter and has never made a twitter app this seems obvious to me, I'm surprised it's not obvious to them.
ForrestN 14y ago
I think it's healthy and productive for a user base to complain about behavior of a company that affects them negatively. I don't hear anyone saying "screw Twitter for trying to earn money." Rather they are saying "Twitter is making itself a worse product." I think a more interesting question is this: can a business be important, useful, and have a huge user base and yet be best suited to be a smaller company? Is it a problem with the current system that a company sometimes delivers less value to its customers as it gets bigger?
- geoka9 14y ago
  But have they been profitable even as a small company?
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    Yes. http://rcs.seerinteractive.com/money/ http://rcs.seerinteractive.com/money/
adamauckland 14y ago
The problem isn't the monetization, the problem is the shutting down of services which arguably _made_ Twitter what it is. I was late to the Twitter game and it's running continually on my machine, but the programmer in me screams "This is a monolithic service dressed up as a protocol!". What we need is a P2P protocol which does the same thing.
- majormajor 14y ago
  A P2P-protocolized Twitter sounds pretty non-trivial to implement at scale due to the broadcast nature, compared to email. Seems like you'd have all the same issues Twitter did internally, without the VC-backed resources to throw at them. How realistic is it?
  - justincormack 14y ago
    Already been done, see status.net/identi.ca
    - majormajor 14y ago
      I thought those were centrally hosted (aka, you can set up your own instance, but you're not serving as a peer server on one big network), and business-backed too? And not handling anything like the traffic of Twitter.
  - creamyhorror 14y ago
    Already been done: Tent.io - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904 "Tent is a new protocol for open, distributed social networking. Tent is decentralized, not federated or centralized. Any Tent server can connect to any other Tent server. All features are available to any server as first-class citizens. Anyone can host their own Tent server." They're already running a beta service for end users at http://tent.is/ http://tent.is/.
mtrimpe 14y ago
@math0ne: It seems like you've been hell-banned since your first post 4 1/2 years ago.
- jaytaylor 14y ago
  I'm confused, what do you mean?
  - georgemcbay 14y ago
    Hacker News has a user state in which the user can login and appear to post as normal except that nobody else sees their posts unless the other person has the switch "show dead" set to yes, which is not the default, so basically very few people can see their posts and they are all greyed out like super-downvoted posts. This is an implementation of the "hellban": http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-hellban.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h... AFAIK you can get hellbanned automatically (site flags you as a likely spammer) or by a moderator. In most cases the people getting hellbanned deserve it, but in a few the call is questionable (IMO; but this is YC's site and not a democracy). math0ne is currently in this state. He has a response to this thread that is marked dead (I can see it, you won't see it unless you toggle showdead to yes on your account page). The fact that he has been in this state for so long and still posts (though not very often) is somewhat mind-boggling.
    - zem 14y ago
      > The fact that he has been in this state for so long and still posts (though not very often) is somewhat mind-boggling. well, even if you are not hellbanned, there's very little to show whether your comments are being read or not. hn's commenting model is far more soapbox than discussion.
      - georgemcbay 14y ago
        Well, there's upvotes (you can still see your own at least) and replies. If I consistently got no replies or upvotes to my posts here I'm pretty sure I'd stop posting at some point but YMMV.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I always wondering if its monetization that people are criticizing or the path. Perhaps it is a bit of both. If people have something they like, and it was 'free', and you ask them to start paying for it, well they are going to grumble. And economics tells us that for some there is no amount of money they would 'pay' to be part of the twitter universe. So those people will leave in a huff and complain loudly. But more interestingly for me it seems that the way they have gone about this seems like they are trying to piss people off. Their actions have the same sort of uncomfortable feeling around them that you get when a sensitive relative asks how you like their plaid and striped outfit. The words conflict with the reality and its clear to everyone that is the case. So why doesn't Twitter just charge for API access? $X per K API calls? They charged for the 'firehose' (too much though, nobody seems to want to pay that much) but still. It may be there is no pricing model underwhich the current company can survive, perhaps its the tech equivalent of Hostess. For me is it always comes back to what they want to be, what is their "mission" statement? Is their mission to be real time news? Is it to be social situational awareness? Is it to be a highly focussed advertising channel? A club house? I wonder if they have a mission, does it tell them what to do next? If not why not? Yes, I'm just as confused by them as everyone else.
- DanielRibeiro 14y ago
  I believe that the criticism comes from the fact that Twitter is now trying to capture more value than they create[1]. And as Tim O'Reilly had put it: Focusing on big goals rather than on making money, and on creating more value than you capture are closely related principles. The first one is a test that applies to those starting something new; the second is the harder test that you must pass in order to create something enduring [1] http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...
- 001sky 14y ago
  For me is it always comes back to what they want to be, what is their "mission" statement? But there are many paths. Like an architect or a slum-lord: both in the game of real-estate. There is a difference between the hi road and the lo one. In terms of social standing.
- 14y ago
mdasen 14y ago
The issue is one of lock-in. I think that we here on HN are a reasonable bunch. It's why I like this community. We don't begrudge our local pizza place earning profit off of us for providing us with a service. Similarly, we don't mind people in our own industry earning profit in exchange for a service. However, when a business involves network effects, the morality changes. If WordPress.com started charging exorbitant fees, cutting off functionality, or putting annoying ads everywhere, I could simply move my blog to any number of other hosts or self-host it and none of my readers would be any the wiser. However, Twitter grew because it offered this liberal, API-driven architecture that allowed tools to flourish and whatnot. Now, we're feeling like we're in a bait-and-switch moment and we can't leave because our followers have followed us on Twitter. If we left, we could no longer connect with them. We're stuck and unless Twitter does something so crappy that we're willing to start over, we have to live with it. Heck, if Twitter was like this from the beginning, would a competitor have gotten the growth that we gave Twitter? Let's say that Twitter and Jaiku committed to a 15-year feature set as part of a community promise in 2006. Twitter told us as users and prospective users (before we built large follower networks) that they were going to shut down third party access and plaster ads over the feeds while Jaiku told us that they would commit to ensuring third party access, but might run ads. Would we have looked at Twitter and Jaiku and given Jaiku the growth and network? I know it's unreasonable to ask a company to commit to a 15 year feature set. I'm not suggesting that we have any rights to force Twitter to act how we deem proper. However, when a company creates a lock-in system (like Twitter does with followers) and they perform a bait-and-switch, I think we do have the right to be mildly annoyed and to point out that this might not be the most moral way of acting. Lock-in allows companies to act against their users in a way we should be against. That doesn't mean we're against profit. For example, there was a pizza place near me that offered a large cheese pizza for $5. It wasn't especially good pizza, but it was $5 and my roommate and I loved it for that. Later, they raised the price to $7.80 (IIRC). I assume it wasn't so profitable at $5. However, at nearly $8, we felt we'd rather pay an additional couple dollars to get better pizza. We didn't begrudge the store their price hike. We didn't feel they owed us cheap pizza. Why? Because they held no power over us. We could re-make our decision as things changed. For those of us using Twitter, we can't re-make that decision. Twitter got some of us to use their service because of things they're now taking away. Maybe other competitors would have had more traction if Twitter acted this way from the start. But they locked us in and then acted in a way inconsistent to what got them the lock-in. That's bad. It isn't take to the streets bad. It isn't quit the service bad. But it is bad enough to blog and/or comment about. The issue isn't that we want to deny Twitter the ability to profit. The issue is that Twitter locked us in and now we feel like we don't have other options for that style of communication. Twitter has become a sort-of monopoly over that type of communication and they might start using that monopoly power not to merely become profitable, but to become more profitable than a competitive market would allow - at our expense. In some ways, it's tough to be a monopolist. Everyone gets to take shots at you. In a competitive market, people generally don't take shots so much because they don't care: they'll just move along to something else that makes them happy. Twitter's changes are making some people unhappy. Maybe no other service could be profitable doing less - that is entirely possible. It's entirely possible that Twitter is being as awesome as possible and that they're nearly saintly in their devotion to their users needs - as much as is humanly and technologically possible. However, we don't and won't know that because of Twitter's lock-in and because of that lock-in, these changes might not feel like Twitter trying to merely continue along and earn a modest profit for its investors, but an exercise of power over us. That sounds more dramatic than I meant it to. I mean, it's Twitter, not the heart surgery that someone needs. Still, it's annoying when we feel someone isn't dealing with us in a square way. When there are loads of competitors, we can say "well, it just costs about that much to get me a pizza." When there's only one competitor, we become less forgiving because monopoly power has been levied against us in the past to our detriment. There are loads of alternatives to 37signals' products. There are loads of alternatives to WordPress.com. There are loads of other local pizza places. The same isn't true of Twitter.
zem 14y ago
consider this analogy: a new nightclub opens up in your neighbourhood. now there are lots of popular nightclubs in the city, so it's pretty hard for a new one to establish itself. therefore they go after the "local" market, have a relaxed dress code, don't overcharge too terribly much for drinks, and play atypical music. this works, they start becoming popular. now they're the new place to see and be seen. all of a sudden, there's one line for celebrities and another line for everyone else. dress codes have become a lot stricter, to "keep up the club's image". drink prices go up sharply. there's a new dj, who plays music the old clientele don't care for all that much, but which appeals to the new, trendy crowd. of course, the nightclub is a business, and are just maximising their profits along good old-fashioned lines of supply and demand, and as an early patron you had no formal relationship with it, but it is far from unreasonable to feel disgruntled nonetheless.
bpatrianakos 14y ago
I feel the same way. Underneath all the high ideals people like to spout off about Twitter it all just comes off as sour grapes and armchair quarterbacking. Everyone knows how to solve Twitter's problem unless you work for Twitter seems to be the message but we've heard all those ideas enough times and I'm quite sure Twitter is aware of alternative ways to run the company. So are we really going to think so highly of ourselves as to think we have the solution and the people running Twitter are just morons? Large companies do some idiotic things but I think we need to give them a little more credit than that. Now, am I saying we shouldn't blame Twitter? Of course not! The people, particularly and especially developers, have every right to be upset and the criticism of them locking down their API, changing the rules, bending the rules unfairly, and just generally acting in bad faith are justified. That said, in the end your point still stands. Twitter is a business and this is how it has chosen to become profitable. We have two choices now. Either deal with it or not use/develop for it. In my own personal opinion, I think that despite the anti-Twitter sentiment within the developer and tech community Twitter will still thrive precisely because of what they're doing now whether it's right or not. Obviously Twitter has decided that the prospect of losing the developer community is worth the risk. Hey, that's business.
polynomial 14y ago
It's not (just) about monetization, path, lock-in* or sour grapes, though the first 2 figure into what really drives the interest the HN startup community has in analyzing Twitter's "pivot" –which analysis tends toward criticism for more semantic reasons. Entrepreneurs and developers building startups want to find the best vectors to balance offering things people want with things they're willing to pay for (whether directly or indirectly) and it's thus interesting when a company that's veered to far in one direction has to change its course. There's a judgement here (meaning in the larger discussion and not just Dalton's post) however it's more evaluative than merely moral. *to be fair, lock-in is kind of annoying.

math0ne 14y ago

The reason that they were successful is because of the developer ecosystem they created around their technology. They simply can't just cut that off, that IS what they are. They are literally giving up the one thing that made them successful, perhaps they can glide on the success they have now, but eventually it will end badly for them. As an outsider that doesn't use twitter and has never made a twitter app this seems obvious to me, I'm surprised it's not obvious to them.

ForrestN 14y ago

I think it's healthy and productive for a user base to complain about behavior of a company that affects them negatively. I don't hear anyone saying "screw Twitter for trying to earn money." Rather they are saying "Twitter is making itself a worse product." I think a more interesting question is this: can a business be important, useful, and have a huge user base and yet be best suited to be a smaller company? Is it a problem with the current system that a company sometimes delivers less value to its customers as it gets bigger?

geoka9 14y ago
But have they been profitable even as a small company?
- ThomPete 14y ago
  Yes. http://rcs.seerinteractive.com/money/ http://rcs.seerinteractive.com/money/

adamauckland 14y ago

The problem isn't the monetization, the problem is the shutting down of services which arguably _made_ Twitter what it is. I was late to the Twitter game and it's running continually on my machine, but the programmer in me screams "This is a monolithic service dressed up as a protocol!". What we need is a P2P protocol which does the same thing.

majormajor 14y ago
A P2P-protocolized Twitter sounds pretty non-trivial to implement at scale due to the broadcast nature, compared to email. Seems like you'd have all the same issues Twitter did internally, without the VC-backed resources to throw at them. How realistic is it?
- justincormack 14y ago
  Already been done, see status.net/identi.ca
  - majormajor 14y ago
    I thought those were centrally hosted (aka, you can set up your own instance, but you're not serving as a peer server on one big network), and business-backed too? And not handling anything like the traffic of Twitter.
- creamyhorror 14y ago
  Already been done: Tent.io - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4418904 "Tent is a new protocol for open, distributed social networking. Tent is decentralized, not federated or centralized. Any Tent server can connect to any other Tent server. All features are available to any server as first-class citizens. Anyone can host their own Tent server." They're already running a beta service for end users at http://tent.is/ http://tent.is/.

mtrimpe 14y ago

@math0ne: It seems like you've been hell-banned since your first post 4 1/2 years ago.

jaytaylor 14y ago
I'm confused, what do you mean?
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  Hacker News has a user state in which the user can login and appear to post as normal except that nobody else sees their posts unless the other person has the switch "show dead" set to yes, which is not the default, so basically very few people can see their posts and they are all greyed out like super-downvoted posts. This is an implementation of the "hellban": http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-hellban.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h... AFAIK you can get hellbanned automatically (site flags you as a likely spammer) or by a moderator. In most cases the people getting hellbanned deserve it, but in a few the call is questionable (IMO; but this is YC's site and not a democracy). math0ne is currently in this state. He has a response to this thread that is marked dead (I can see it, you won't see it unless you toggle showdead to yes on your account page). The fact that he has been in this state for so long and still posts (though not very often) is somewhat mind-boggling.
  - zem 14y ago
    > The fact that he has been in this state for so long and still posts (though not very often) is somewhat mind-boggling. well, even if you are not hellbanned, there's very little to show whether your comments are being read or not. hn's commenting model is far more soapbox than discussion.
    - georgemcbay 14y ago
      Well, there's upvotes (you can still see your own at least) and replies. If I consistently got no replies or upvotes to my posts here I'm pretty sure I'd stop posting at some point but YMMV.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I always wondering if its monetization that people are criticizing or the path. Perhaps it is a bit of both. If people have something they like, and it was 'free', and you ask them to start paying for it, well they are going to grumble. And economics tells us that for some there is no amount of money they would 'pay' to be part of the twitter universe. So those people will leave in a huff and complain loudly. But more interestingly for me it seems that the way they have gone about this seems like they are trying to piss people off. Their actions have the same sort of uncomfortable feeling around them that you get when a sensitive relative asks how you like their plaid and striped outfit. The words conflict with the reality and its clear to everyone that is the case. So why doesn't Twitter just charge for API access? $X per K API calls? They charged for the 'firehose' (too much though, nobody seems to want to pay that much) but still. It may be there is no pricing model underwhich the current company can survive, perhaps its the tech equivalent of Hostess. For me is it always comes back to what they want to be, what is their "mission" statement? Is their mission to be real time news? Is it to be social situational awareness? Is it to be a highly focussed advertising channel? A club house? I wonder if they have a mission, does it tell them what to do next? If not why not? Yes, I'm just as confused by them as everyone else.

DanielRibeiro 14y ago
I believe that the criticism comes from the fact that Twitter is now trying to capture more value than they create[1]. And as Tim O'Reilly had put it: Focusing on big goals rather than on making money, and on creating more value than you capture are closely related principles. The first one is a test that applies to those starting something new; the second is the harder test that you must pass in order to create something enduring [1] http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-...
001sky 14y ago
For me is it always comes back to what they want to be, what is their "mission" statement? But there are many paths. Like an architect or a slum-lord: both in the game of real-estate. There is a difference between the hi road and the lo one. In terms of social standing.
14y ago

mdasen 14y ago

The issue is one of lock-in. I think that we here on HN are a reasonable bunch. It's why I like this community. We don't begrudge our local pizza place earning profit off of us for providing us with a service. Similarly, we don't mind people in our own industry earning profit in exchange for a service. However, when a business involves network effects, the morality changes. If WordPress.com started charging exorbitant fees, cutting off functionality, or putting annoying ads everywhere, I could simply move my blog to any number of other hosts or self-host it and none of my readers would be any the wiser. However, Twitter grew because it offered this liberal, API-driven architecture that allowed tools to flourish and whatnot. Now, we're feeling like we're in a bait-and-switch moment and we can't leave because our followers have followed us on Twitter. If we left, we could no longer connect with them. We're stuck and unless Twitter does something so crappy that we're willing to start over, we have to live with it. Heck, if Twitter was like this from the beginning, would a competitor have gotten the growth that we gave Twitter? Let's say that Twitter and Jaiku committed to a 15-year feature set as part of a community promise in 2006. Twitter told us as users and prospective users (before we built large follower networks) that they were going to shut down third party access and plaster ads over the feeds while Jaiku told us that they would commit to ensuring third party access, but might run ads. Would we have looked at Twitter and Jaiku and given Jaiku the growth and network? I know it's unreasonable to ask a company to commit to a 15 year feature set. I'm not suggesting that we have any rights to force Twitter to act how we deem proper. However, when a company creates a lock-in system (like Twitter does with followers) and they perform a bait-and-switch, I think we do have the right to be mildly annoyed and to point out that this might not be the most moral way of acting. Lock-in allows companies to act against their users in a way we should be against. That doesn't mean we're against profit. For example, there was a pizza place near me that offered a large cheese pizza for $5. It wasn't especially good pizza, but it was $5 and my roommate and I loved it for that. Later, they raised the price to $7.80 (IIRC). I assume it wasn't so profitable at $5. However, at nearly $8, we felt we'd rather pay an additional couple dollars to get better pizza. We didn't begrudge the store their price hike. We didn't feel they owed us cheap pizza. Why? Because they held no power over us. We could re-make our decision as things changed. For those of us using Twitter, we can't re-make that decision. Twitter got some of us to use their service because of things they're now taking away. Maybe other competitors would have had more traction if Twitter acted this way from the start. But they locked us in and then acted in a way inconsistent to what got them the lock-in. That's bad. It isn't take to the streets bad. It isn't quit the service bad. But it is bad enough to blog and/or comment about. The issue isn't that we want to deny Twitter the ability to profit. The issue is that Twitter locked us in and now we feel like we don't have other options for that style of communication. Twitter has become a sort-of monopoly over that type of communication and they might start using that monopoly power not to merely become profitable, but to become more profitable than a competitive market would allow - at our expense. In some ways, it's tough to be a monopolist. Everyone gets to take shots at you. In a competitive market, people generally don't take shots so much because they don't care: they'll just move along to something else that makes them happy. Twitter's changes are making some people unhappy. Maybe no other service could be profitable doing less - that is entirely possible. It's entirely possible that Twitter is being as awesome as possible and that they're nearly saintly in their devotion to their users needs - as much as is humanly and technologically possible. However, we don't and won't know that because of Twitter's lock-in and because of that lock-in, these changes might not feel like Twitter trying to merely continue along and earn a modest profit for its investors, but an exercise of power over us. That sounds more dramatic than I meant it to. I mean, it's Twitter, not the heart surgery that someone needs. Still, it's annoying when we feel someone isn't dealing with us in a square way. When there are loads of competitors, we can say "well, it just costs about that much to get me a pizza." When there's only one competitor, we become less forgiving because monopoly power has been levied against us in the past to our detriment. There are loads of alternatives to 37signals' products. There are loads of alternatives to WordPress.com. There are loads of other local pizza places. The same isn't true of Twitter.

zem 14y ago

consider this analogy: a new nightclub opens up in your neighbourhood. now there are lots of popular nightclubs in the city, so it's pretty hard for a new one to establish itself. therefore they go after the "local" market, have a relaxed dress code, don't overcharge too terribly much for drinks, and play atypical music. this works, they start becoming popular. now they're the new place to see and be seen. all of a sudden, there's one line for celebrities and another line for everyone else. dress codes have become a lot stricter, to "keep up the club's image". drink prices go up sharply. there's a new dj, who plays music the old clientele don't care for all that much, but which appeals to the new, trendy crowd. of course, the nightclub is a business, and are just maximising their profits along good old-fashioned lines of supply and demand, and as an early patron you had no formal relationship with it, but it is far from unreasonable to feel disgruntled nonetheless.

bpatrianakos 14y ago

I feel the same way. Underneath all the high ideals people like to spout off about Twitter it all just comes off as sour grapes and armchair quarterbacking. Everyone knows how to solve Twitter's problem unless you work for Twitter seems to be the message but we've heard all those ideas enough times and I'm quite sure Twitter is aware of alternative ways to run the company. So are we really going to think so highly of ourselves as to think we have the solution and the people running Twitter are just morons? Large companies do some idiotic things but I think we need to give them a little more credit than that. Now, am I saying we shouldn't blame Twitter? Of course not! The people, particularly and especially developers, have every right to be upset and the criticism of them locking down their API, changing the rules, bending the rules unfairly, and just generally acting in bad faith are justified. That said, in the end your point still stands. Twitter is a business and this is how it has chosen to become profitable. We have two choices now. Either deal with it or not use/develop for it. In my own personal opinion, I think that despite the anti-Twitter sentiment within the developer and tech community Twitter will still thrive precisely because of what they're doing now whether it's right or not. Obviously Twitter has decided that the prospect of losing the developer community is worth the risk. Hey, that's business.

polynomial 14y ago

It's not (just) about monetization, path, lock-in* or sour grapes, though the first 2 figure into what really drives the interest the HN startup community has in analyzing Twitter's "pivot" –which analysis tends toward criticism for more semantic reasons. Entrepreneurs and developers building startups want to find the best vectors to balance offering things people want with things they're willing to pay for (whether directly or indirectly) and it's thus interesting when a company that's veered to far in one direction has to change its course. There's a judgement here (meaning in the larger discussion and not just Dalton's post) however it's more evaluative than merely moral. *to be fair, lock-in is kind of annoying.