There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter.
Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs. Nevermind that the average high profile tweet is much more culturally significant than the averge high profile Facebook post. Heck most of Facebook isn't even original content, it's just really slick distribution for content from elsewhere.
Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will. But, Twitter has cracked public discourse in a way that no other company has period. Think about it, all previous internet fora have imploded as they've grown large, or collapsed into micro-communities like sub-reddits. Twitter has definitely faced challenges with trolling and witch-hunts, etc, but by and large they've put together a super interesting product. The only problem is that it's not going to displace Facebook because it's a different thing that's not quite as big. This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. It's just a really sad statement on modern business culture that Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers.
You're addressing like 10% of the article. The article lays out tons of issues, including:
1. Shrinking product - this isn't about comparing to facebook, it's about comparing to 2015 twitter.
2. Unhappy employees - especially high turnover at the top, which is universally a bad sign.
3. Unhappy users - users spending way less time on twitter.
4. Unhappy investors - stock price is wayyy down.
5. Happy competitors - a lot of the "cultural significance" is moving to instagram, snapchat, and others.
Twitter isn't a successful medium sized company, it's a large company that is in trouble. Maybe it will become a successful medium sized company one day, but that process will be painful for a lot of people.
You're making some broad generalization that are not necessary true.
"Shrinking product" - This is not true. It's important to note that Twitter is not shrinking. It's simply not growing as fast as it used to. Generally this is not too bad for a company this size, considering the massive userbase it already has. Twitter only pales in comparison to Facebook.
"Unhappy users" - People spending less time on Twitter does not mean they are unhappy with the product. Twitter does not lend itself to long and continuous browsing sessions like Facebook. It's just the nature of the product. People open it up, read a few tweets and then close it.
Re: Shrinking product, the article says, "Americans who use the service via their smartphones spend around 2.8 minutes on it each day, which is around a third less than they did two years ago ...".
I think that qualifies as a shrinking product: slight increase in the number of users combined with a massive decrease in the time of use per day.
Twitter is a boat taking on water in a rising tide. Yes, the boat may be rising, but the boat is also taking on enough water that soon it will sink entirely to the bottom.
Every journalist worth their salt uses it, and it's essentially the public front for any media facing company. Sure, every day users may be contributing less, but it still seems to be a pretty meaningful megaphone for brands. I don't exactly see that changing: I don't contribute to Twitter, but I do consume the tweets of brands / companies / significant people that publish them.
It's not so bad to survive as a service for news and press releases. You can't do that very well on Instagram and definitely not on Snapchat. It means Twitter is going to shrink (points 1 to 4) but it will keep paying salaries. Not world domination but still a success.
Both pieces of their business model, advertising and users, strongly benefit or hurt because of network effects. As the network shrinks, the value does not drop linearly. This is an assault from both sides. Because Twitter's growth is now definitely flat and likely is shrinking this is pretty bad.
While you can't do X or Y on Instagram or Snapchat now doesn't mean you won't in the future. Clearly both took a big chunk of Twitter's users. Tweeting pictures was previously a large use case. So was tweeting and sharing things with friends. That you can create a video of what happened rather than typing it out isn't necessarily a different product or use case.
In terms of news - FB, Google, Apple are all going after that market hard right now. The mass use case for Twitter probably made this sub use case look bigger than it was - news and instant events. Things could still change, but it is hard to see Twitter out-innovating their problems when they no longer have the social tail winds pushing them forward. And at some point the cash is going to matter a lot too.
Does it make a lot of sense for someone with a lot of users to buy Twitter and try to revamp it? Plausibly, but the brand damage definitely has been done with the growth demographics. That is kind of the mistake Myspace's acquirers have made. At some point a brand goes from valuable to doing just the opposite.
I bought Twitter shares and ended up selling them all once this settled in. There still probably is a threshold where an executive that is looking for value vs growth tries to acquire and you can arbitrage the difference.
Unfortunately the bulk of Twitter's remaining value is probably going to be realized by there competitors as a case study for the survivors - FB/IG, Snapchat, and future players.
None of Google, Apple, and FB have any public discourse worth reading, or even readable conversation threads at all. You're comparing apples and oranges.
I wonder if a Google acquisition would be a natural step forward? It would tidily wrap up this tumultuous chapter in Twitter's history. And it would finally, at long last give Google something approximating a legitimate social network.
I was thinking the same thing. Something about Twitter's model makes it virtually impossible to follow as a user (too much of a firehose problem), BUT news organizations who can afford to pay someone to sit on Twitter all day can find useful content on it to report.
But if users lose enough interest, there won't be anyone to do free reporting for the news media.
Well twitter may lose employees, but is that really interesting? Twitter is certainly huge as a product and isn't going anywhere.
In fact, I do not and never will use twitter for more than reading and sso--but it is still irreplaceable for that reading. Is twitter just the next newspaper?
Twitter is being judged negatively by the business community and elsewhere because, simply, it's a terrible business that's losing money hand over fist.
I consistently fail to understand why the present company isn't just 75 people in a basement somewhere. If that was the case they'd be raking in cash and Twitter would be considered a smashing success.
I wouldn't think they'd need more than 30 or so people, 20 selling ads. Kind of comical when a company hires hundreds of people and tells them "we need to GROW this thing because of all our costs!!"
> Because running the ads team at Twitter alone would take 75 people.
Then make it 150 people. 75 for tech and 75 for ad sales. Right now it's something like 3500-4000 people working there. What do they do?
I think WhatsApp had something like 50-60 employees around the time they got acquired by Facebook. Sure the request/response ratios are different (few publishers, lots of subscribers), but at the end of the day I don't understand how you can have, literally, thousands of people to run something like that.
> Right now it's something like 3500-4000 people working there. What do they do?
I can't find it now, but there was a comment on here a few months back from someone who worked at Twitter for a while (in the recent past). Supposedly there's a lot of staff basically hanging around playing ping-pong, waiting for the chance to cash out their shares.
I worked at Twitter for about 2 years, ending 3 years ago. By the end of my time there I was working maybe 4 hours a day and most of that was in meetings. At the same time, I got told off by my manager for meeting too many of my quarterly goals and he held a meeting to tell the whole team to be less productive in general. If we were waiting on an A/B test to validate the outcome of project 1, we were not to start working on project 2 until that experiment was complete and a launch decision could be made. A/B tests typically last 1-2 weeks, during which there is nothing more to be done on project 1.
It sounds too crazy to be true, but that's the situation I was in when I left Twitter. I was told that meeting all of my goals meant that I wasn't taking enough risks in setting my goals. Being a bit burnt out after working long hours to meet these goals, I responded by working less.
Our team was told that we were letting projects slip past their external deadlines because we'd shifted our focus to the next thing. In order to prevent that, we were no longer going to start on a second project until the first one was finished. When a company has over a thousand engineers and is heavily committed to not innovating on its core product, predictability is more important than productivity.
Pretty much what paulddraper guessed, the stated goal was to ensure that the first project is completed as quickly as possible so that our output would be more reliable for other teams. That meeting happened during my last week, so I can only hope that it wasn't strictly enforced.
Was this a play to grab more budget and resources (and thus power)? "We need to do XYZ, but the team is all tied up on these things. We need to grow headcount."
There is a popular theory that most people, or at least white collar workers, are employed in jobs that aren't economically necessary/worthwhile. Because of the way corporate politics incentivizes having more employees and making people busy. This would seem to add evidence to that.
The stated reason was that we needed to be more predictable so other teams could rely on our output. By focusing on one project at a time, it was less likely that the project would fall behind schedule.
It's fear. Twitter was a neat little idea that scaled easily. It doesn't need many people to keep it going. Twitter could have been the next Craigslist - so cheap to run it takes only a tiny team, but so powerful in concept it crushed the classified ad industry.
But it's such a simple idea that Facebook or Google or WeChat could add a "tweet" capability and perhaps crush Twitter. So there's a desperate attempt to get big enough to fight back, or come up with a second product, or something. Sometimes that doesn't work.
> But it's such a simple idea that Facebook or Google or WeChat could add a "tweet" capability and perhaps crush Twitter.
So why don't they?
The reality is that both Google and Facebook have made their attempt to own "real time" and both efforts failed. Google even had to pay for the Twitter firehouse for a while, and eventually just gave up.
When people need to know what's going on RIGHT NOW, neither Google nor Facebook is where they turn. Twitter is the fastest publishing platform on the planet. Tweets beat an earthquake from Virginia to New York, just like XKCD joked they would. Contrary to popular belief, this is is not easy to do.
The little bits of the funding process that I've been able to observe tell me that you can get a round of funding on hype, but if you can't get it on hype then the investors tend to demand a better burn rate from the company. Or at least that's always the story I've heard right before the startup I or a friend worked at started making big changes.
It's entirely plausible at this point that the next time they go for more cash, they'll have to lay off 10% of their workforce to make their financials look more appealing.
This is a really good point. I remember when all of Rackspace had just that many.. Around when swift launched there were about 1k employees in the cloud division, and about the same number as twitter across all business segments.
>Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs.
No, the criticism is more fundamental than that. The problem is that Twitter has taken ~$2.8 billion of investors' money and has never made a profit.[1] Any comparisons to Facebook regarding audience size or engagement is way down the list of priorities compared to the basic task of not losing millions every single quarter.
>The problem is that Twitter has taken ~$2.8 billion of investors' money and has never made a profit.
I see this type of thing all the time about various companies, i really dont understand the thinking behind it.
Why is it Twitter's fault that people handed them 2.8 billion dollars?
The investors were the ones who created the terms of the agreement, they wrote the check - how could it possibly be anyone but their fault that their investment didn't work out?
If i bet on 33 black and lose a hundred bucks - is it because 33 black did something wrong?
>Why is it Twitter's fault that people handed them 2.8 billion dollars?
It's not about "fault" as if it's some kind of moral argument. E.g. When the Twitter founders asked Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal to invest an additional $300 million in 2011[1], they had a set of revenue & profit projections to convince him to write that check. Obviously, their financial predictions didn't happen. Therefore, Twitter is judged harshly for not delivering.
The parent poster framed Twitter's criticism in terms of "Facebook envy". Instead, we should just look at the real underlying problem: Twitter has never made any money.
It's ok to be a much smaller company than Facebook if you're making profits and/or growing. Twitter doesn't seem to have an obvious path to profits. They also are not growing.
Linkedin is making profits. Snapchat is growing; it's reportedly losing money but at least it's still growing. Both are smaller companies than Facebook and yet they don't get the doom and gloom writings from the press.
>It's not about "fault" as if it's some kind of moral argument.
It seemed to me that a moral argument was being made, that twitter took too much money and that that is bad because they aren't profiting (i.e. earning the investors money)
Of course a business wants to make profits, but i dont see how its immoral for twitter to have taken so much investment.
Would it be fine if they weren't making profits, but had only taken 10 million in investment? if so, why?
Unless the argument is that twitter somehow purposefully deceived investors in order to get money, i dont see how the amount of money they've taken makes a difference.
i wasnt trying to speak so specifically to this exact case, but more generally the idea that its a company's fault that they took so much investment and arent seeing the expected success. (i see this about uber and tesla a lot as well)
Are you seriously wondering why some people might think (although it hasn't been said once in this thread by anyone other than you) that taking people's money with an argument that you'll use that money to make more money, then failing to make any money might have a moral component?
Saying that Twitter expected success is just both a projection and an anthropomorphization on your part. As you are not psychic, and as Twitter is made up of a large number of people, not a person with expectations, you have no way of knowing if any of them expected success as they marketed themselves for more cash.
They either deceived investors or are failures. Take your pick. It's just odd that you can't even understand how someone could see a moral component to it.
First of all, not sure I understand why you're being so hostile.
Next, why would a business failing to make a profit be immoral? What exactly is immoral about a business failing?
If it is so obvious, maybe you can explain how it is immoral and exactly who is being immoral.
Next, it seems like you didn't understand what I meant when I said they failed to meet expectations. I meant the investors expectations.
Nothing is immoral about failing to make a profit.
However I think you're mistaking harsh criticism of Twitter's execution and return on investment, for a moral criticism.
Just as it is "ok" for a business to fail, it should also be "ok" for people to criticize that failure, especially if they believe that critical mistakes were made by the leadership they entrusted with their money.
They are failures because they didn't meet the goals they had set themselves and sold investors on. Either that or they are frauds because they never had any intention to meet the goals.
Then that personality type should also believe that "they were either defrauding their investors or they failed at what they wanted to do" doesn't prove immoral behavior -- they could have been defrauding their investors.
>It's just odd that you can't even understand how someone could see a moral component to it.
I'd assume they tried and failed. It's the simplest explanation. On the other hand, attributing a moral component to it implies deliberate malfeasance (such as deceiving investors), which would require evidence.
So, in the absence of that evidence, attributing a moral component to it would seem hard to differentiate from conspiracy theory.
If I say that a piece of software has a fault, am I implying a moral failing?
If twitter have raised $2.8billion but show no signs of giving a return on that investment, then there is a fault somewhere, either in the valuation, the execution, the business model.
As many pointed out in this thread, if twitter had raised 50 million or so, and where operating with the efficiency of a Snapchat, they would be considered successful and profitable (though probably bought by a bigger company a long time ago). Whether there ever was scope to deliver on their actual valuation is a much harder question to answer.
> Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs
> Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers
I feel like it was Twitter, not the press, that decided to get rid of the things that made it unique and decided to be a forever 2nd-place Facebook clone. Twitter lost me when it got rid of the chronological feed and decided it was better than I am at deciding what I want to see and whether others should see what I post.
FWIW the timeline is only ranked when you were away for an extended period of time - when you haven't been away you get regular, chronological tweets. You can also opt out of the ranking and be fully chronological.
It's interesting how nowadays a founder of a public company could become a cash billionaire with his company always losing money. This was not possible even 50 years ago, at least not typical.
Very interesting point. The investors and the general public loose their money. where is all the money going? In the end the only party in profit is the founders & CEOs and top management. I guess everybody in the top management realizes that they will be doomed and everyone just focuses their energy on developing personal assets.
"In the end the only party in profit is the founders & CEOs and top management."
Well... this includes everybody who had vested twitter stock after they went public and had strike price lower than sellable stock price (outside of any lockdown periods etc.). Twitter's stock price was doing pretty well during 2014. I'd bet at least 100's of early employees had significant cashout opportunities.
>There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter.
Those institutions are equally responsible for the historical hype Twitter has received.
>This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community.
This isn't the fault of anyone but Twitter management. No one forced them to take outside investment or go public. When you do that, investors want a return. If that isn't in your plan, and you want full creative control, don't take the money.
>by and large they've put together a super interesting product.
I loved it until they started manipulating my timeline, making it difficult to read streams chronologically. I haven't opened the app for months. It's too bad, because I agree, it was a great product and my goto aggregator.
I agree, Twitter's management definitely has to take the blame here. It was their responsibility to manage the narrative, and I remember early on all the rumors of management squabbles. It's clear that those inside the company who wanted to build a cool dev platform lost out to those with dollar signs in their eyes who wanted to go for a moonshot.
I can't help but feel there was a third path which is to say: we've now outgrown our free-for-all dev roots, and we need to standardize the experience so we can improve it unilaterally, but let's do so with the acknowledgement that we have something special, something which may be worth more than 10x growth or 100x growth achieved by a tremendous cash burn. Obviously hindsight is 20/20, so I can't hold it against them too strongly, but it still really makes me sad.
Twitter is supposed to be a business to its investors. Anyone can make a Twitter clone that can do exactly what you say, e.g. host provocative Trump tweets.
This is not a 'technology' company. It's an online sounding board. A good one at that, that can make some ad money, but let's not pretend this thing should be worth so much.
Is there any evidence for this claim that a Tweet has more "cultural significance" than a Facebook post with objectively higher engagement?
I think this illusion comes about because the media prefers to use Tweets as the minimum unit of cultural exchange, so Twitter receives attention as the medium in which these exchanges take place - even though it isn't, really.
There a lot of people I follow on Twitter who value their anonymity, like https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus, and being able to see them debate others real-time about issues of substance is valuable to me.
Twitter encourages interactivity in way that Facebook does not (though that might have more to due with the existing userbase than the UX), and it's text-focused in a way that Instagram, Snapchat, etc., are not.
Why do you think that conversation couldn't have happened on another social network? Specifically, I find that the character limit always makes any actual discussion very hard on twitter. Anything deeper than pop culture and I don't have enough space.
Facebook is a walled garden w/ no anonymity. Privacy (specifically, most posts are only seen by friends of poster) can be good but it can also stifle discussion. Google Plus might have been good (and got some notable adoption among academics initially) but could never accumulate enough of a network for a variety of reasons. Reddit actually has a lot going for it for these purposes, but doesn't work well for "personal brand" building, so doesn't get much uptake among experts.
Other social networks I can think of are mostly focused on sharing pictures and experiences among close friends.
I don't understand at all why you think that is the case. I don't even spend that much time on G+, but I get linked there every once in a while and I've seen plenty of discussions of equal or higher quality (generally higher, because the character limit is incredibly damaging to quality conversation). Obviously Twitter has more by volume, but the assertion that that kind of conversation is even close to unique to Twitter is really bizarre. Hell, I've even seen conversations of that quality on Facebook occasionally (and tons of times on smaller boards). Even complaints about lack of anonymity on G+ (and certainly on smaller boards) have been based entirely in ignorance for the last several years. It's really easy (and policy-compliant) to make and use a pseudonym on every network I can think of that I've seen high-quality conversation on (with the possible exception of Facebook: I've never tried pseudonymity there).
G+ was good (a lot of academics were using it heavily for a while and I think John Baez, for example, still is), but it never accumulated much of a userbase (the reason I don't spend much time on it and probably the same reason you don't).
I don't think the character limit is a boon. Sina Weibo removed it, and that seemed to go well.
edit:
One thing I forgot to mention: I use Twitter lists a lot and have various ones assigned to different fields (econ, genetics, politics/current events, microfiction, etc.). Twitter search can filter by list, so, eg, I can see any idle comment any of ~70 economists has ever made about: real business cycles, endogenous vs. exogenous effects, moral hazard, regression discontinuities, etc., at least on Twitter. I can't really do that on Facebook (no real search, right?) or G+ (might have something similar but not enough people using it).
Twitter certainly beats G+ and the boards that I like in terms of quantity. I just took issue with your claim that you can't imagine conversation of that quality taking place on another network. That's a much stronger claim than "Twitter has a higher quantity of good conversation",whjch I don't disagree with at all.
Yeah I was skimming replies and didn't notice the thrust of your comment. But I stand by my statement about that particular conversation.
Based off what I've seen, if Twitter goes under, I expect one of the participants (pseudoerasmus) would not switch to another social network and would just stick to blogging.
I would say yes then. The fact that the cable news media prefer it gives it more "cultural significance." However even though Twitter "breaks news" newspapers still set the agenda.
There's some interesting number is the Pew Poll, particularly the first bullet point:
at core, I think it's because twitter was 'public first', with some notions of private communication grafted on later (DM, etc). But the first and primary purpose of twitter is short form public posting. Many other platforms all try for social/friends/community first (or exclusively) and end having built-in limits.
No one worries if a tweet is seen by the 'wrong' people - it's meant to be seen by everybody. Facebook is the opposite - private/groups/friends first/only, with some notion of 'public' visibility after the fact.
> Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will.
It's the chat feature. It's the only thing that keeps me on facebook and I suspect I'm not alone. I rarely hear it talked about and I think it's underappreciated that facebook chat replaced AIM. That's a big deal.
sure twitter is allowed to be a success and i wouldnt call a 13B market cap medium sized. but in 2 years as a public company it's stock has only ended up below its ipo price, so pretty fair to say they've had trouble.
i agree twitter has introduced a form of communication that probably isnt going anywhere, but i dont really think it has a large cultural impact. aside from trump this election cycle i feel most 'famous' tweets are about as significant as here come dat boi.
> ...but i dont really think it has a large cultural impact. aside from trump this election cycle i feel most 'famous' tweets are about as significant as here come dat boi.
That's absurd. I've seen numerous articles in online entertainment media sites (e.g. People, US Mag, TMZ, Buzzfeed) that are solely made up of embedded tweets. CNN and MSNBC (and even Fox News) reference tweets all the time. Maybe Twitter as a company has failed to monetize the platform properly and shareholders have taken a loss but to downplay Twitter's cultural impact seems largely misguided.
But it's where you can see news before it's on the news. As a politics junkie (even in the UK) this is the prime reason I've always spent much more time on twitter than on facebook or any other social network (which are, you know, too social).
I have recently stopped using twitter because it was becoming too much on an addiction. I went back for a few days around Brexit, but I've not been back since. If I want to follow a political story in real time in the future though, I know where I'll go.
Well the simple answer Twitter is judged harshly is because they're losing a lot of money and Facebook or Google isn't. Sometimes that is ok if the company grows but it apparently isn't.
I have always wondered why Twitter bothers with trying to make money with advertising rather than commercializing their value offered to press, PR, the rich and famous. There's pretty much no other platform now that's as uniquely suited to mass PR, why not commercialize that directly?
I also think that the user growth issue may have something to do with the platform's unique suitability to PR. Perhaps there's limited percentage of population that wants or has the ability to engage in witty one liner public discussion.
It seems like neither company solved the social dilemma of popularity contests and influence, nor appears to have a desire to do so.
On these platforms, their users have to compete against a well funded media campaign of celebrities, media orgs, etc... even for their own family and friends' attention. It is a really absurd level of engagement.
edit: The way American tech companies have approached the social evolution and communication via internet is centered around their propaganda influence and reach. In every respect, they have insinuated themselves into the communicative aspects of the "users" by introducing subversive practices, manipulation, surveillance and the continued active threat of loss of privacy to very adversarial actors.
Maybe it should be a public service though. Would be nice to see IPFS tackle this in a distributed, uncensorable manner, or maybe some kind of Torrent-based Twitter.
My theory is just that: it should have been a public service. But no, we can't do that! Everything has to be "monetized" in startup land, meaning it must have an unstoppable growth curve. Nobody wants a nice service that is functional and deeply imbedded in cultural discourse, like a version of IRC that your Mom knows about.
There are lots of companies like Twitter, in the sense that they are probably not going to be the next Facebook. But Twitter is also unique, and IMO, more socially weighty than Facebook.
Think about this where have the most controversial comments from Trump come from in the past few months? Almost all of them have come from twitter. Twitter is were people go to make daily comments and air their thoughts and plans to the world. It is much different than facebook and instagram where people share their life experiences and things that already happend
Completely agree. There is undeniably enormous value in Twitter and it's so important it's not going away. So what if they haven't figured out how to make money off it yet? They will.
This is probably an unpopular opinion and for certain I lack the qualification to run a public company of about 4000 people and hence to make snarky comments on the internet.
However it's my common sense that tells me there's something going very wrong with Twitter: let's be honest, their product is a message server with a fancy website wrapped around it and an attached ad-business. There's absolutely NO WAY it takes 4000 employees to run this thing! For comparison Whatsapp had ~ 60 employees when it was bought by FB and Instagram had 13. And I'd venture to say that both of these companies had more data to manage than Twitter has now.
Because he is often working at Square, many managers arrive late, depart early and generally show up just to “punch the time card”, says one former senior executive who has sold all of his shares.
And my common sense tells me it's probably not just the managers but also about 90% of the engineers. I don't mean to be derogatory towards Twitter employees but I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day. The product is not improving in any meaningful way. The few innovations that they launched were all acquired businesses.
Twitters quarterly expenses are now around 700 million. Let me make a very conservative estimate: It would probably not take more than 100 million per quarter to run the business (including their ad business). Likely much less. Their revenue is 600 million per quarter. If Twitter were a properly run company they could be making half a billion per quarter in profit which they could use to explore new business opportunities, products, or if there's a total lack of ideas, pay out to shareholders. I'd argue that any of these options would be a whole lot better than the status right now.
> I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day.
when a business lacks proper product focus there are an infinite amount of issues to work on each day. it is in this kind of environment that everything seems important and all prioritization is treated as urgent. people burn out in this kind of workplace and this is what it looks like is happening over at twitter.
When Snapchat (a pretty good comparable for Twitter) raised in 2014, they said they had 100 million monthly active users [1]. According to leaked financials [2] they were doing it on about 10 million a month, or just 30 million per quarter.
Twitter supposedly has 300 million MAUs, so your estimate of 100 million/quarter may be right on the money.
So it's safe to say that Twitter needs more of an organizational shakeup and not a feature one? Because that's what's always annoyed me about Twitter since I've been using more regularly as of 2014 is how badly managed it is and how often they focus on putting in features no one cares about (who exactly uses moments?). And all the while their existing features and phone apps are just a mess. There's abuse reports often go unanswered for weeks, yet suspensions are doled out for the silliest thing like sharing a gif but if someone doxes nothing happens. It's a wonder anyone who I follow sticks around.
There's a difference between $2.5B/year hard, and $500M/year hard, and between those and $50M/hard.
The front end (tight "amount of data and latency requirements") are probably doable on $50M/year, as WhatsApp was doing something comparable on much less than that.
I know where some of the money went - tens of projects like Bootstrap, which have benefited the community at large, but whose value to twitter is probably not on par with the costs. But that still does not explain even a small fraction of where the money goes.
to be fair, an issue with whatsapp is fundamentally inward facing. lose a couple of old messages? you're on the free tier, what do you want?
twitter on the other hand - a publicly liked and massively supported tweet/twitter account disappears or starts having malfunctions and the whole service is maligned. "free speech is being threatened" etc etc
twitter has been used for mass protests/revolutions because of it's reach and stability. do you think whatsapp would have done the same? they were still transmitting plain text between users and it was trivially easy to view someone else's texts for quite some time
I disagree. There are whatsapp groups of hundreds of members, some used for political action. If they indeed lose messages, people notice.
I'm not sure why you bring up plaintext (it is irrelevant, regardless of Twitter still being plaintext itself).
Engineering wise, the user-visible side of Twitter is more or less as complex as the user visible side of whatsapp. Both can be done on very modest hardware with modest operations if they are properly done. Whatsapp was lean (and probably still is). Twitter never was.
apologies i brought up plaintext as an example of a thing messaging clients should fundamentally not do but whatsapp never got around to fixing until it became a real issue for them, hell p2p encryption was only done this year
Maddening how incompetent Twitter is at strategic thought. They have arguably the most politically and civically important property on the internet but wish they were Facebook.
Twitter is a Bentley in a market that wrongly thinks it should be Honda. The value of a network is as much the value of its participants as it is size. There is nothing wrong with Twitter, quite the opposite
Twitter's key users are making, reporting and breaking news. The second and third order effects of this are enormous, far surpassing Facebook.
The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to compete in the social media gutter.
Unfortunately I think they're still chasing the wrong dollar. They should be monetising their publishers and not just their audience.
Twitter should let publishers paywall their articles and then authorise and take micropayments via http://t.co on their behalf.
Almost everybody would benefit from this arrangement:
- Users would no longer need to buy multiple newspaper subscriptions.
- Journalists would be better positioned to ask for revenue share.
- Publishers could gain a larger paying market without needing to coax user's through the account creation and subscription signup hoops.
They'd finally be a viable business. And their incentives would be aligned with publishers.
Twitter could create a micro payment tip system as a button next to the heart. Give popular users a way to monetize their followers, creating a virtuous cycle attracting more content publishers.
That's also true but I was also imagining a system which generated and sent on a micropayment authentication id via a redirect when paywalled links are clicked.
Rather than users visiting publishers to find that they'd already read their 10 free articles, publishers would be able to use the id to grant them access to the article for a small fee that Twitter collected on their behalf at the end of the month.
Zero-friction low price articles for users. And customer acquisition costs fall for publishers.
It would also enable small time bloggers to also monetise their audiences.
> The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to compete in the social media gutter.
Okay, expanding... revenue currently based on broadcast value alone. No value is being extracted from communications loops, redirected communications, related content, drill downs, prioritized versions of the aforementioned items, filters (including location-based filters) or monetized karma (eg. Reddit gold). All of these can be accomplished without polluting the UI or purity of the tweet. Additionally, the highest value network members have got to be cultivated, incentivized for tweets, interaction with other network members and tolerating the occasional flame. A mesh networked solution should be in the works with a moderation-bridged pipeline to the conventional twitterverse.
The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem. The attacked the very developers and companies that taught people how to use Twitter and developed solutions that made it a viable use case. Without those myriad of solutions built upon it, Twitter is a very basic SMS broadcast medium. It has a sloppy unsegmented home feed full of noise and its mechanics are horrible so it does a poor job of burying hate.
With that in mind, the numbers show. The people that get it are on it. Most of the rest of us just see glimmers of it embedded in news articles. Sadly, it is too late to reverse this. Trust has been lost.
Twitter had to kill their ecosystem in order to make any money on advertising. There was just no way to sell ads if so many users were going to be using 3rd party clients.
You may be right that killing off the 3rd party ecosystem hurt their usage, but from a business perspective, there wasn't any point keeping it if it was damaging their business model.
Not really. The vast majority of their ads are in the timeline. I don't see why they couldn't just serve those to third party developers. If the third parties try to block or prevent them then you revoke their API keys. Done.
I dunno, I think to do that they'd have to have an Apple App Store level of oversight on their third party devs products, which would be about as restrictive to the devs as the changes they actually did make, plus prohibitively expensive for Twitter.
That's not true at all. As someone who had multiple Twitter API apps killed by them, I would have welcome app store level review processes. Limiting tokens (killing any popular app) and killing games that let you tweet easily because they are too much like general purpose clients like they did was just ridiculous. The best apps I know, like Foursquare, just switched back to asking users for username and password at the time because the token limitation basically broke integration.
Seems doable. They have over 3,500 people there (really don't see why they're not at, say, 150). Surely they have enough resources to handle the necessary oversight. I would imagine most could be automated with spot checking by actual people.
Back in 2008 (or so), I was under impression that Twitter will be become "informational highway": all messages will go thru their pipe. Something like world wide message queue. Twitter website and Twitter mobile app would be just one of many views to that pipe.
And people had crazy ideas how to make something like Slack on top of Twitter, payment systems, voting, encrypted channels, integration with games, apps for customer support, etc.
But, now, Twitter is just a social web app very similar to other social networks but without no clear advantage over others.
>The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem
I honestly don't think that matters that much. Yes it sucked to be the developer of a profitable Twitter client, but from Twitters point of view, those clients where potentially in the way of profit. Unless Twitter charged the third party clients for access to their API, how where they suppose to help Twitter make money? Increased user based? If Twitter can't make money on the users they have now, getting more won't help them.
So many people claim that love Twitter, it's their only source news, the way they keep in contact and so on. Fine, pay Twitter $20 per year, that seem reasonable, and it would keep spammers and trolls of Twitter.
You are viewing the 3rd party clients as a negative. This was their greatest asset. Instead of destroying them, why not give them an SDK? If they put that SDK to show promoted tweets and other adverts in the stream, they could have sold far more inventory and still have all the metrics they need to show advertisers.
Instead, they destroyed them, destroyed the user growth they provided, destroyed the engagement they provided, and worse destroyed far more earnings potential they could have had if they instead just worked with all the clients to get the ad placements in there. They tried to copy Facebook and how they did things, but instead destroyed their most prized asset.
The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown. So I doubt that would sit well with advertisers. Even if tracking normal online ads is just as sketchy.
Still don't feel it like would have made much of a difference. Twitter still have more than enough traffic, on which is fails to monetize.
And again, what's wrong with paying for Twitter? $20 per year for personal account, $300 for businesses.
The SDK would only be able to show the advertisers that the ads where pushed to the clients, not that it was actually shown.
The apps themselves wouldn't have been anonymous. If many of one's ads were seen through TwitView3000, one might have had reason to examine TwitView3000 to see how ads were handled in that app. If one had discovered that ads were dropped, a single phone call would have been enough to revoke the app's API key.
Completely agree. An SDK with advertising that led to revenue for the developers would have been a major boon.... and potentially unlocked a lot of innovative ideas and approaches.
They, for example, could have added an adsAllowed flag to the API. If you deselect it, you get a 15min delayed feed. Want the recent one? Show the ads. Even an affiliate program for popular clients, sharing ad revenue with them, is not something I would consider totally unreasonable.
But the reality is, unless somebody from Twitter shows up, we will not know which options they investigated, and why the alternatives could not beat the solution they went with.
I believe the problem with Twitter, as it's always been, is that it's just too polarizing. Either people get it, or they don't. It's not general enough, the mechanics of hash tags, nonsensical short messages, retweeting, the signal to noise ratio is horrible, coupled with an often confusing interface, don't allow for the second half of the adoption curve to ever happen. For such a simple mechanic, they make it difficult for a lot of people to just "get it".
I've got multiple accounts for various projects, my own personal account, and I still don't see the value in it for me personally.
The bulk of a social network's value is in who is using it. Unfortunately, the medium that twitter provides is so crippled that, for me, that value is too low, no matter who I follow and interact with.
I don't participate much on Twitter, but as a developer I find it's one of the easiest ways to stay up to date on what the software community is up to.
I studied how people perceive each other over twitter, specifically how inferred gender changes our perceptions of personality. I tried to design the the study to make it's results inferable to any micropublishing platform, like this one, for example.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to run the study with enough participants to get significant results, I'm afraid. Academic politics and favouritism got in the way :(
For those that do "get" twitter, can you tell why it's useful? I've been on twitter for about 5 years now. I go through phases where I visit just about every day, and tweet a decent amount, trying to find the worth. And I can honestly say I see almost no value at all. I'm really trying hard to cross into the "get" category, and it just isn't happening. Lately I've been considering closing my account and being done with it.
The signal/noise ratio is horrific, and the insistence on 140 characters is far more aggravating and frustrating than anything. Nowadays I see people dividing their thoughts into 8+ tweets (prefacing each with 1/8, 2/8, etc) and I just shake my head.
Nothing on the Internet delivers news faster than Twitter. Every other platform is either too slow (websites with CMS's and editors), or too filtered (Facebook or chat apps, on which posts are private by default).
If you want to know what's happening right now, Twitter will give you better results than anything else, including a Google search. Tweets famously beat an earthquake from Virginia to New York, fulfilling an XKCD joke. And it's almost all searchable by the public in real time.
So that's one thing: it's a close as you're going to get to a real-time tap in the zeitgeist.
Another use is comedy; you get everything from corny puns and "dad jokes," to multi-year character humor arcs, to biting political humor, all in one place, as fast as you want it.
Another is the ability to drill down into a wide variety of subcultures. Various niches within politics, programming, sports, finance, etc. all have robust conversations going on constantly, and many of them internationally.
Candidly, it took a long time for me to get Twitter. Ultimately for me the secret was to follow a bunch of folks I might like, see what they said, unfollow the ones I didn't like, and then follow the folks who the others (the ones I kept) retweeted.
I spend more time on Twitter now than any other social network or app. And I only really started "gettting it" a year or two ago.
this is pretty spot on, for people who like being "in the know" twitter is like your favorite publicly available and easy find-able crack
"oh hey what is that guy from the scrubs tv show doing nowadays" "he just tweeted about a charity/podcast thing he's doing tomorrow we should check it out"
as much as snapchat/facebook etc are "innovating" with their live video and infinitely desirable ephemeral messaging, twitter remains the way to get info right now without having to dig too deep into a social graph
I see value in it as a news spreading platform... But the short messages and tagging system really mess with trying to have any sort of actual discussion.
I think Twiiter spreads news better than Google Now/Plus, so it's what I use to stay current in news/tech.
I guess I'm just not in a position, where I need news faster than Google News. Which seems to do just fine for me. If the only value Twitter is providing to people, is low latency news article posting, then I think they should position themselves to be that, instead of the 99.99999% of crap that just spread around. Thoughts?
Not sure. I see it as news distribution + a little chatter with friends. Others might see it differently. You don't see any use for it, really, so others might see uses in the other crap, as well. Sometimes streamlining a business or model results in something worse than the original mess.
In my experience, you have that one friend who uses Twitter a lot, so you look through their mutuals and you discover "oh, these couple other real-life friends of mine use it," so you follow them any they follow back. You see them retweet or you poke through their followers/following and you see people you don't know, but who post good content, so you follow and maybe interact. Sometimes they follow back. Sometimes you end up DMing them and becoming online or maybe irl friends.
Your network continues growing like this until you've got too much on your feed to follow, and you need to take a step back and maybe eliminate some follows. It's a pretty organic thing and you end up with a couple close friends plus a ton of other people semi-connected to your real life friend network.
Twitter makes me think of a public good on the internet. It's fun to imagine it being funded by tax dollars instead of investment money, with no ads whatsoever and 1/20th of its staff size. The priorities would have to be different entirely, but I think it would be for the better.
Actually, I can imagine a few internet properties that might make more sense to be run like this. Some things just don't really make sense when you try to do them for profit.
I find so much value in it, mostly in the form of tweet deck with multiple columns giving me real time "news" on multiple different subjects/companies.
Yet, I don't pay for it and I can't see why anyone would pay for it. Advertising doesn't seem like a viable business model as I have yet to see any add that is of any value what so ever from the main site.
Can anyone make the case that within 2 years Twitter isn't owned by one of Google, Microsoft, or Facebook? With Steve Balmer's large investment Microsoft seems like the leader here.
Or one of the big media companies, though I like this idea less as I can't see them wanting to subsidies the company forever.
I mean what is Twitter's business model?
Can they really make a go of advertising?
I mean they've done prety well so far but IMHO I wouldn't be surprised that the ad money they've made so far is from people who feel like they need to advertise on Google and Facebook and Twitter. And once they get a few year of data to show which ads are actually helping, the twitter ad money is the first to be yanked.
Do the go the financial markets model and sell their data/firehose? Does that generate anywhere near the amount they'd need?
If/when the advertising dollars go away, what does Twitter do? Or is Twitter banking on being able to compete directly with Facebook and Google for ad dollars as an equal?
My Twitter advertising experiences were pretty good. I was using it for hiring, and it provided much better value for dollar than the other things we tried. Its ability to micro-target was great for my use case. I imagine it's not very good for big-brand advertising, but if you're trying to reach niche audiences, I think it's great.
Twitter can sell high speed access to all tweets, and their costs should be really low. Long term it could be a midsize, but profitable company as long as they don't get into debt.
They already do this [1]. They used to sell this access to 'value-add' data analytics resellers as well, but in 2015 they acquired one instead [2] and stopped reselling it [3].
Seems sensible. They wouldn't need the gazillions of staff they have at the moment working on building and selling an advertising platform. If they were bought by a Google, there would be economies of scale on the hosting side.
But it's become an almost toxic brand because as well as realtime news, it is a troll's paradise. I guess this is one reason why the big guys are hesitant to take it on.
It seems like Facebook is eating up more and more of this market because they are better at keeping the trolls out.
i always thought that the deal was that you should pay for more featureful tweets, on a per tweet basis
you know when people do like 20 tweets in a row? they could pay 50c and post an essay. pictures and such could be capped at some freebies monthly and then cost if you're doing pics all the time.
I like Twitter too. I don't use it too much, but I've used it to correspond with famous people and people like the pinboard guy make it fun.
Twitter is really only useful for following influencers, famous public figures, popular people, however you'd like to describe them. There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent users. Everything people go to Twitter for therefore can be done without having an actual account yourself; everything is public, so why have an account other than to curate a list of things prominent users say.
Which might not even be a bad model if you think about it. To have it be the premier "find out what they said" space, without the hoopla from idiots, trolls, etc. Would people pay to visit a site like that? I'm not sure. Would there be a way to monetize that sort of experience? I think so. Just my $0.02.
> There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent users
I think you've misjudged the value of Twitter for a normal user.
In my experience as one of these "normal" users, Twitter's major use case is like Facebook before the "adults" (older people) and extended family showed up. You can type out whatever you want, and your Twitter buddies will see it (often a different circle than your Facebook friends).
Because messages are so short, interaction is much easier. Discussions take place in 140 characters rather than paragraphs. Sure, it's less deep than Facebook, but it's also satisfyingly immediate.
It's also a lot more possible to make new friends over Twitter than Facebook. It's relatively normal to interact with people you've never met before, whereas on FB that'd be a big faux pas outside of a post in a common-interest group.
All the brand stuff? Powerful users and influence and news? Not super relevant for a pretty decent swath of users (although it is pretty funny when I subtweet a utilities company or something when I'm having an issue and they send me an official DM). I personally do not follow any major brands or celebrities, although occasionally I see them through retweets.
> Twitter's major use case is like Facebook before the "adults" (older people) and extended family showed up. You can type out whatever you want, and your Twitter buddies will see it
I'm in the twentysomething, white demographic, and in my circle of friends we used Twitter in such a way around ~2009-2011. But we've all moved on to Tumblr, Instagram, and then Snapchat.
Tumblr has better discoverability of people whose content you may legitimately enjoy, and endless reblogging is encouraged and not a faux-pas, which is a great way to fill your "timeline" when you have nothing to say, or a great way to counterbalance personal posts that all implicitly solicit your friends' attention (however briefly).
Instagram flips the 'attachment' and the 'tweet' into 'image' and 'caption', and people like visuals. The image either provides aesthetic gratification on its own, or it's a social icebreaker used to carry the content in its caption. Snapchat is used the same way, with the added benefit that Snapchat is private one-on-one by default, friends-only on demand, whereas Instagram makes your entire timeline public or friends-only per your choice.
Between these three services and the ever-present Facebook, the need for Twitter is not so great -- since we've subsumed every other usecase in a service that does it better, all that we use Twitter for is to broadcast stuff pseudonymously to the entire world, hoping it garners some likes. It usually doesn't. It's not particularly fun to shout into the ether; so Twitter doesn't even do that function well.
I think we have different use cases, despite being in the same demographic.
You speak of using Twitter "in [your] circle of friends", but I'd say about half of my "Twitter friends" (mutuals who I regularly interact with) aren't within my "friend circle." My high school circle keeps in touch with an FB group chat, and the occasional Snapchat. My college circle keeps in touch with some FB and Instagram posting. Twitter is a different beast.
> Tumblr has better discoverability of people whose content you may legitimately enjoy, and endless reblogging is encouraged and not a faux-pas, which is a great way to fill your "timeline" when you have nothing to say, or a great way to counterbalance personal posts that all implicitly solicit your friends' attention (however briefly).
For me, this is a negative. I don't WANT endless reblogging filling up my page. I like seeing content created by the people I follow, even if it's all personal posts, which I often enjoy more than other sorts of content.
Twitter also has a real-time aspect that Tumblr does not. Many people use queues on Tumblr, which, to me, would completely defeat the purpose of having a "feed." Just let me browse individuals' queues at my own leisure.
> Instagram flips the 'attachment' and the 'tweet' into 'image' and 'caption', and people like visuals. The image either provides aesthetic gratification on its own, or it's a social icebreaker used to carry the content in its caption
I very rarely see people having actual conversation on Instagram. I enjoy seeing the content, but I doubt that I'd ever meet someone completely new over Instagram unless I had an OC art/photography/etc account.
> Snapchat is used the same way
I don't think that's true either. Instagram seems to be carefully considered and orchestrated photos, while Snapchat is quick, low quality and one-off. It's a conversational way of using images (which is clever), but it also requires more investment for each conversation.
> It's not particularly fun to shout into the ether; so Twitter doesn't even do that function well.
This is my main point of disagreement. I personally DO find it fun (or at least cathartic) to shout into the ether, when that ether is a loosely anonymous group of quasi-friends (with a couple actual friends tossed in there too). No other service provides this.
I also like seeing the raw, real-time stream-of-thought posts. Facebook and Instagram are too curated, Tumblr is too rebloggy and non-real-time, and Snapchat is too personal/one-on-one.
Anyway, hope this justification makes sense. Obviously if you don't see a use case for it, you're not under obligation to use it. I wouldn't use it either if I had a really solid local social circle, but in lieu of constant online interaction with actual friends, Twitter works well enough.
I'm a counter-example, I find Twitter extremely useful for sending quick notes of appreciation above all else when sending an email usually strikes me as overkill.
I have always felt Twitter could do a better job doing recommendations. Sort of help me find things I like better. Not just content. I have really started to like Four Square automatically giving me tips when I walk into places. It seems like Twitter should know more about what I like/dislike perhaps even more than Facebook, Amazon, and Google considering I have actively told it so.
Going back to Four Square... Twitter also really doesn't leverage geo. Why the hell doesn't it show me tweets near me in real time? That would be pretty damn useful. It could be the event engine. I can't tell you how many times some body says to me "I have this great idea for startup that shows you cool things happening right near you" ... and yet twitter could have this now.
Streaming live events with partnerships can be big for them. They streamed the NFL Thursday Night Football game last night and quality was impeccable (aside from my Bills getting the L). Much better experience IMO than Facebook's attempts at streaming sports.
I think the core problem is that Twitter should be a protocol, not a company. There's just no need for there to be any servers: users could send messages to one another, each running his own agents.
Since the Twitter experience doesn't need the Twitter corporation, there's always going to be friction and centrifugal force.
Even as a protocol, there'd still need to be some means of governing the distribution, storage, and retrieval of tweets. A simple P2P network would make it much harder to gain a foothold when nobody is mirroring your content.
I think Twitter the corporation could make a viable business of filling that role by selling access to infrastructure for the protocol to developers of end-user applications and various data hounds.
All sorts of very mis guided comments below. Here are some points:
1/ Im an advertiser I can tell you that big brands still love the platform (and spend heavily)
2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful?
3/ Balance sheet has $1bn+
4/ NFL deal is huge, ditto bloomberg streaming
5/ Product needs to ship much quicker than Facebook does to stay relevant
6/ It is the only place that has nailed real time properly, if there is a bomb in a major city you will hear it first on twitter no where else has this edge, nowhere
7/ The worlds most important people are on this platform and readily accessible in most cases, not true on FB in terms of accessibility
8/ 80% Gross Margin business
9/ Needs to stay independent and ramp up advertising spend once logged out tweets ad product rolls out
10/ True reach of Twitter is almost 1bn users when we consider tweets appearing on TV, off the platform, in newspapers etc. This is comparable to FB
Some of the ignorant stuff people are saying about all the employees is disrespectful.
WhatsApp and IG when they were acquired were making very little money, if they had stayed independent and no one acquired them they would not be running today (they would exhaust the capital chain). WhatsApp maybe was making £10ml a year but was losing money; IG was making £0. I can tell you with certainty if they were independent and around today the growth would be stalling and there is a high chance they would not be able to continue raising venture money, it is very easy to grow products to 1bn users when you add FB growth's team which is best in class to an already solid product.
Twitter has been generating solid revenue from around 2009/10 (someone correct me if im off here) and big brands love it and there is lots of data I have seen to support the value to advertisers around the world.
Twitter does however need to tell its story a lot better afterall a Tweet means many different things to many people, its just not as easy to communicate as Facebook to an outside but this doesn't mean it is not valuable or should not exist independently.
> 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful?
It's not successful because their expenses are $2.6 billion a year which exceeds the revenue of $2.2 billion collected.[1]
This means they lost $450 million. They have no profits. They've never had a profitable year. In short, if you spend more than you make, you're not financially successful.
Why do many people think companies like Twitter and Spotify (also $2 billion revenue and still losing money) are "successful" ?!? I'm guessing the confusion happens because observers don't understand the difference between revenue and profit.
Is there a breakdown somewhere of where those costs are coming from and what they can probably knock out to hit profitable? It's only a few, hundred million over revenue. I mean, that's a big problem but I've seen rebounds from worse when better management came along.
Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community?
Regarding monetization: Twitter creates a lot of value - but its hard to monetize because the value is primarily positive externalities. News media benefits by publishing news on twitter, celebs reach their fans, politicians use it as a campaign tool. And Twitter makes very little from all this.
The irony: while telcos are fighting hard to avoid becoming commoditized dumb pipes; Twitter by design are a dumb pipe ferrying tweets.
I saw an article not long ago that clarified for me what Twitter is: it's the community for journalism. It's the perfect place for journalists to quickly pick up the current vibe on a given topic, then repackage what they learn as a news story.
Lots of people fancy themselves as part-time journalists, so the community of journalists is much larger than people who have the job title. I am a Twitter community member because I see myself as a part-time journalist.
As I see it, Facebook is trying to become your daily newspaper, but I think Twitter has a better chance of achieving that goal, because differences in the way Twitter and Facebook treat privacy mean that Twitter can theoretically draw upon a much larger body of content. Twitter ought to consider using a news feed prioritization algorithm similar to Facebook, since Facebook is turning out to be rather good at showing me what I care to see and pushing down the chaff. Twitter still makes me wade through it all.
In short, I think Twitter should focus on being better at what it already is: the central gathering place for journalism.
Twitter is useful to break "news" of public relevance: be it a natural disaster, political news, celeb news etc.
Personal news like new job, birth, marriage, etc already has a network: FBK.
> the central gathering place for journalism.
An unmoderated place of journalism.
The difficulty lies in the interesting development of news outlets increasingly moderating their boards or disabling them completely for certain posts to combat abuse by trolls, racists, etc, the very problem Twitter has not been seen to do much to counter.
The difficulty, of course, is reducing the amount of abuse against people without reducing the amount of discourse. Twitter is having serious issues figuring that out.
Sometimes they intersect, and conversation happen on Twitter, or "broadcast" happens on Facebook, but there is at least a different social expectation about engagement, for better or for worse
Personally, as someone relatively asocial, this is why I prefer Twitter. Ironically, because of the reduced social expectations, I end up having more conversations of Twitter than on Facebook. Facebook simply gets too "personal" for me; I don't want everything I post to start a conversation (and on Twitter it doesn't nearly as often) - I'm just throwing it out there for whomever might find it interesting.
On one hand this makes advertising trickier. On the other hand, I think advertising weaved into the content is more accepted on Twitter than facebook, and maybe they will manage to leverage that over time.
Can't you do something like broadcast on Facebook with pages or something that have commenting disabled? Or it just usually doesn't work out? Just curious.
> Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community?
Twitter communities are formed by people with similar interests or opinions. This was THE promise of the internet at some point in the past - communication with people all over the world. Why is it beneficial to limit our communities to geographic or otherwise circumstantial boundaries which we often have little control over?
I'll point out that before the whole Web 2.0 and "social networking" thing happened, we had... forums. Which were actually communities. You would actually recognise names, grow a connection with people, probably wind up messaging them through PM systems and maybe getting their Messenger handles.
Now, to replace forums, we have... Reddit and Hacker News. Where even though you might recognise nicknames once in a while, you're unlikely to PM them, and in the case of HN that's actively impossible. And so people desire some system which gives them some sense of community, which Twitter (along with Tumblr, and a couple of other sites) gives them.
Indeed. If twitter is for news, then the people who create the "news" - politicians, celebs, artists, journos - are the foundation of the network.
Most of us live mundane lives and while events in our lives may be news to friends (marriage/births/etc) there is already a network to share that kinda news: fbk.
Twitter, deep down, has the exact same problem as Blogger or Reddit or Livejournal or Tumblr. It's ultimately a community where people post text posts. This is notoriously hard to monetize. But it has another big problem that doesn't manifest as strongly in those platforms: the pressure of virality.
Twitter has managed to attract quite a number of VIPs, 'influencers' who draw followers to them and generate traffic and interest and engagement. These are your celebrities, your media personalities, industry and academia people who are very important in their fields -- people who either have a Wikipedia article, or a blog, or a Youtube channel. These are the people who buoy Twitter, so these are the people who were most likely to get a Verified mark. Being on Twitter allows you to feel close to them, like their posts, reblog them on your feed, so you can project to your friends that you like this person and feel an affinity to what they do. These influencers also provide a natural place for promoted content, which has so far been under-utilized.
But somehow, Twitter has been saddled with the misconception that anyone can be famous with just a single tweet -- it's true that this can happen because it happened multiple times before, but when people join with the expectation that this may be the case, everyone loses. Maybe it's in analogue with Instagram, where if you post a Really Attractive selfie or take an incredible photograph, you may indeed accumulate a bunch of likes; but this aspiration doesn't translate nearly as well to quick-reply threads branching off of some influencer's post, which is the only way for an average person to attain enough eyeballs to have a shot at their post going viral.
This creates an incentive structure where no one truly wins:
- Influencers have attract a lot of traffic, but a lot of it is people trying to be clever
- Low-activity people -- the long tail of Twitter -- are either unaware of what's going on, or are caught up in the post flurry
- The leftover group is people aggressively looking for their 15 minutes of fame
This also explains the myriad articles about people who "don't get Twitter" -- they join and expect to accumulate followers naturally, despite not being notable on their own right or offering exceptional content. Sorry, you've been misled. Twitter will amplify your social reach, but it won't create one for you.
I don't get why the board OKed having a part-time CEO. It just seems like a bizarre thing to do. Was there really no credible candidate who was willing to run Twitter full time?
Twitter at its most basic has a product problem and not a revenue or sales problem. I think for product problems founders have a unique perspective and legitimacy to make tough decisions. My guess is that the need for this founder perspective coupled with the fact that Jack was the only founder who was even partially available led to the decision of having him on as part time CEO.
Yeah it's a pretty bad sign for your company when even the founder is like "this kinda sucks, I'm going to a better company that actually makes money."
As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too. Twitter itself would probably be a good candidate for such a public company.
Twitter was Great. Yes, with a captial G. In 2008/9 up until, let's say, 2012 (or even 14)?
It got a lot of early adopters, it got groups together on it (real groups, people that meet in real life), it was a medium of conversation.
It still has some important aspects, some discussions work great there.
But I think people moved onto other platforms and most (of the cool people) left.
Twitter (company) needs to go beyond Twitter (the product). Fb knows this better (while moving the product forward, but it's visible they're reaching a limit there as well)
Both Twitter products, Vine and Periscope offer an inferior experience to Instagram videos and Fb live. (Especially Vine. It seems as bad as a Java plugin)
Not people moving from Twitter because Twitter is bad and Snapchat is good, but because Twitter is old and Snapchat is new?
Same drive to try newer programming languages and frameworks, same drive to join new startup companies, same drive to throw out and start afresh in lots of domains, same drive to leave this bar and try another.
I see this presented along with "online communities die when they can't block trolls", and "eternal September", and "small communities are more close-knit".
But maybe once it gets old, large, established, you have habits of interaction, same people you talk to, an established persona to keep up, a post history, it gets stale and it feels like work.
If you're a service, you can keep customers long term by offering good service. If you're a brand, you can keep customers long term by staying out of their way and not messing up and giving them reason to reconsider.
But if you're a meeting place, if you're a look and a feeling, if you're a venue for nothing in particular - well, fashions change and online, anywhere else is just as convenient to go to.
Some of it is fashion, some of it is 'eternal september' -- but not all. Frankly, for a lot of Twitter's usecases, other services came along that met that usecase better.
First, Facebook introduced statuses. Most people's Facebook friends were people they knew from real life, so for announcing stuff to people you know from real life, Facebook was where the network was. Later, Facebook allowed each post to be toggled as fully-public, friends-of-friends, or friends-only (with 'custom' afterwards), allowing you to tailor each post to a particular audience. Twitter posts are still always-public or always-private, depending on how you have your profile set. When Facebook introduced IM, the real-life friends circle was forever lost to Facebook, leaving only weaker, or strong-but-online-only, or professional connections to Twitter.
Then Tumblr surfaced, being a snazzier LiveJournal with reblogs. The reblogs serve as both social signalling and icebreaking, to show people things you like or find interesting, to fill out the parts where your page would be otherwise empty or too heavy (full of personal posts) -- it's basically amusing smalltalk. Tumblr was much better at this than Twitter and provided better discoverability.
Then Instagram arrived with the emphasis on a picture, with the social expectation that it's self-made, somewhat curated, something you won't regret later. When Snapchat showed up, it provided an 'unfiltered' alternative to Instagram.
So between Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat, there isn't much room for Twitter anymore. For those using these four other services, Twitter is probably the place with That One Friend Who Uses Twitter, or a place where you go to try to be witty and clever, but no one reads your tweets anyway. All your friends are elsewhere because the others are objectively better at a particular aspect of what Twitter was once used for, and so are VIPs and celebrities at this point, who've built up presences on every single platform, so no one is missing too much. The only people on Twitter I could possibly care about are tech bloggers, journalists, actual news outlets, or similar, and I don't need to be logged in to consume that content.
They moved the conversation with their closest connections to Instagram/Snapchat. (Which also allow you to follow celebrities and other popular people) Also a lot of group conversations went to Whatsapp and similar software
Ok, points for the Economist's title 'Twitter in retweet.' That's some fine pun-crafting right there.
No comment on the service itself. I love it. It's one of the only methods of public one-to-many distributed communication that actually works well and stays relatively balanced (mainly due to the limitation on message length and size). I hope another service with a similar dynamic pops up in its place should it collapse.
Twitter's huge value is the ability to follow without needing a follow back (friend relationship).
However they need to find a way to offer both short and long form content while doing this. It's crazy they haven't tried anything else yet. Perhaps there is an opportunity for communities to form naturally as well but again they haven't given this any thought.
So many things they should be trying, its too bad. The concept is amazing but they are butchering it.
Same for Apple two decades ago. Yeah they never went anywhere.
Which spontaneously makes me think, maybe this CI stuff is the wrong way to go. Maybe a big-bang release every year where you can make a marketing statement "imagine if" "now you can" sort of thing.
In fact, as part of the minority 40+ contingent on HN, I'd love if all services I used released updates only annually and I could know precisely what they are.
Twitter is a great service for broadcasting information. Celebrities connecting with their fans bypassing press and other middlemen, that's huge value for them and they love it. Public officials making emergency and other announcements, custom tags for large events.
The average celeb promotion, public dept or event budget can easily afford to pay twitter for engagement and value adds like analytics or any other value adds they can come up with for these profiles. They just need an excuse to pay. Forget ads, focus on this.
I've still never encountered a single person who posts to twitter except as part of their job or to promote themselves or one of their projects. Supposedly these people exist in their millions but I've no idea where they're hiding. Are they mostly schoolchildren?
I do (I won't post a link because this isn't self advertising, but my username is the same as it is here) – I work for a software company, I have my own company too (but I'm a procrastinator) – Twitter for me is to opine on political news or news I'm otherwise interested in (chemistry, psychedelics, etc) – none of which have anything to do with my job (and my employer would likely frown upon it too.)
I think they are mostly young adults (age groups 13-35 seems most common) and it's mostly loose networks based around geography and education. So, they sort of lie on top of existing real world networks. If you don't have an "in" to Twitter from a friend in real life, you'll find it hard to locate a Twitter network.
But once you're in, you can pretty easily seek out new people to interact with, and you can grow your little network and make friends and share cultural capital or whatever.
The Economist has a knack for getting on the case of sectors / companies whenever their price is at an extreme - and being wrong. It's actually a good contra-indicator, as we've seen with oil, shale, gold, more recently Deutsche bank, and now Twitter.
My all time favorite wrong call of theirs came in 1999. Oil had dropped to $11 and they were predicting that it could hit $5:
a “normal” market price might now be in
the $5-10 range. Factor in the current
slow growth of the world economy and the
normal price drops to the bottom of that range.
Of course, oil did just the opposite, climbing to about $140 per barrel over the next decade.
totally agree. They're infamous for this front page call. Remember when they also were lauding Gordon Brown for selling half of Britain's gold for an average price of 270?
Twitter lost me when they dumped on their ecosystem. The changes made to the platform in recent years are obvious grasp at straws rather than anything revolutionary. It's clear that investors have become Twitter's main concern – to a point where even something like a paywall or subscription wouldn't surprise me.
Twitter does not need to have as many employees as it does, and has them solely to rise to some zero sum pissing match.
This reminds of something Aswath Damodaran pointed out a while back, that software companies that rely on advertising are collectively overvalued, in that they would need to altogether capture more than 100% of the market in order to justify each individual valuation. So any failure to "exceed expectations" results in a seemingly unreasonable drop in market value. [1]
I would have liked to see Twitter become the product that Slack is now for many people: great direct message and group message capabilities, fun interface, great API for enabling bot integration, etc.
The one thing that surprises me is that twitter isn't doing better given how unrelevant the facebook adverts are compared to the twitter adverts.
I find twitter adverts to be on a similar level to Google ads. I might not be interested in the adverts right now, but often the promoted tweets are at least relevant.
Facebook on the other hand gives me adverts about adopting a pony to celebrate my dead father.
Twitter is important, useful, and will never be as big a business as Facebook.
The problem is that they can't admit this and are pushing to be something they cannot be. Thats why they have so many product managers showing each other powerpoints, each of whose responsibilities are so small that no forward progress can be made.
It is interesting to me to hear how many say it doesnt have value to them. For me one aspect alone is worth it and that is real time news. It makes everything else look archiac.You can also scan a wide range of peoples opinions and find varied sources and angles fast.
I wonder if their deplatforming of several well known but controversial public figures played any role in the fall of twitter. If you say something unpopular or un-pc we'll ban you. Note how reddit almost went into a similar death spiral around the time they upped their standards of what is deemed "acceptable" speech. Note I'm not expressing my opinion here that hate speech is a good (or bad) thing, merely noting a correlation. May not be causation, but an interesting data point nontheless.
It's a pity this article didn't but I assume it'll be interesting to compare Twitter with its copy cat Weibo in China, who went public Q2 2014, 6 months after Twitter, and started to see profit quarters since Q4 of the same year.
Twitter should do what Odeo did. Odeo was failing, they started working on other ideas. One of those sideprojects was... Twitter. In the same spirit of experimentation and discovery, Twitter should work on tiny sideprojects and make more small bets.
Twitter is being told to be Facebook, when in-fact it needs to follow an entirely different paradigm, because it's intrinsically a different product. If Twitter is judge by what Facebook judges Facebook for success, it'll always fall short.
What is Twitter doing wrong? This is an interesting question.
Answers posted so far:
- it's polarizing... this may be true, but would simply mean a smaller market, not an existential risk.
- they demolished the dev ecosystem. I totally agree with this, and think it was dumb. They thought they were Facebook. But I don't think this fully explains why their core product isn't a big success.
- they don't have a strong enough business model. This is a bit of a tautology - we wouldn't be discussing it otherwise - but not having a strong business model does not explain why the core product doesn't _feel right_.
And that's the thing, you look at Facebook or Instagram and everyone "gets it". They may not _like_ it, but they understand what it's about.
But Twitter doesn't feel like that. It doesn't feel intuitive. It feels like a mess, like a lot of different use cases rolled into one big disorganised poorly designed app.
I read a bit about Twitter's history and my theory is that the problem stems right back to the beginning, when there was an argument amongst the founders about whether Twitter was for "micro-blogging" or for "news" (for some definition of what is newsworthy).
Both these seem like good ideas. We're all interested in our friends' opinions on various things, and what they're up to right now, and add to that the opinions and activities of people we choose to follow because we respect them and find what they say interesting, that sounds like a compelling product.
Likewise, keeping track of all the news on a variety of topics from many sources, hearing the news unfiltered from the actors involved, that is another very compelling product. Put me in direct contact with Elon Musk about what's happening at SpaceX, let me tweet Sam Altman to ask him something about YC. Cool.
It's interesting to consider that clearly selecting one of these use cases would solve many of Twitter's biggest problems. If you're following your friends and some famous people's microblogs, why not enforce real-world ID? If you're after the latest news, do you really need to be able to spam or message everyone? Both situations allow for a reduction in trolling and the negative behaviours that have made Twitter (as one unforgiving observer put it) "the cesspool of the internet".
Problem is Twitter doesn't set out to do either of these things, because it can't decide what it wants to be. So it has compromised and floundered with no clear vision. How can the employees work effectively if they don't know which way to row?
The solution for Twitter _would_ have been to split into multiple services/views/subsystems, or abandon the least interesting one to a sibling startup or a competitor. As Sam A puts it so brilliantly: "focus + intensity". Still time. Not much time.
Apparently the typo has been fixed now, but I still find it confusing to parse --- I parsed it as "It is too late[something unclear], "(giant people) expected" and wondered what exactly giant people had to do with Twitter.
Perhaps "It is too late for it to become the giant which/that people expected" can break the natural inclination to parse "giant people" as one noun.
First, the article is dumb, twitter is already a giant. Twitter is bigger in social media than facebook because it is open to the public, while facebook is a gated community.
Second, "the problem with twitter" as commentors have been saying, is that Twitter is a glorified instant messenger, and they have done everything wrong.
They're a giant corporation with too many employees. They have a huge overhead cost for servers and offices and electricity and so on. And their only product is social media, for free.
This is the era of ad-filtering. Substaining a company on advertising is a dead model, it will never work again. It's dying slower in some areas than in others, but rest assured it is dead. Furthermore, nobody using twitter wants to see ads. Users will aggressively persue means to eliminate ads from the "social" experience.
Twitter is the digital equivalent of opening a number of sports arenas and inviting everyone to come in to mingle, without ever charging admission fees. Eventually, the power bill and lease is going to shut them down.
This is a reality check. You cannot make money by giving things away for free. You can make money from free products, but you have to do things to monetize it, for example selling expert support for free software.
Commentors keep comparing Twitter to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are exactly the same in one way, neither one makes any money from social media. Facebook is profitable because Facebook is not a social media product, it is a portal product that offers social media. Facebook makes money from selling "microtransaction" games, which are a huge ripoff, and using their enormous size to convince business owners that investing in advertising is somehow worthwhile. Again, nobody wants to see ads during their "social" time.
Social Media is not a business. Social media is a chat room with a slightly re-defined UX. You cannot make a profit from social media without charging admission. It is impossible.
In the post-advertising era the only way businesses will be successful is if they produce products or services of actual real-world value to their customers. Parasitic businesses, middle-men, advertisers, they are all going to die. And good riddance. Money should be earned by the creation of value, and nothing else.
"Substaining a company on advertising is a dead model"
A Deloitte report explained FB has created $40bn of economic value across the world. Let me explain to you how:
- People are selling shit on social all day everyday
- Every organisation markets themselves using social
- social media is where most attention on mobile is
- All social media platforms make ads
- Ads are charged on CPM (Cost per 1000)
- Trillions of impressions are served, therefore billions of ad dollars flow to the platform, billions with a b
- All these businesses have 100s of millions if not billions in cash on their balance sheets
For the record these ad products have kept 1000s of people in advertising jobs around the world and helped around 3 million advertisers spending billions collectively sell shit online.
Computers and the internet are relatively new, compared to advertising. The ad-blocking era is only about 5 years old.
Give it time, you will see that I am right.
Again, facebook is not a social product. Facebook is a portal product with a social feature. They're not competing with Twitter, they're competing with Google and Microsoft. It is apples and oranges.
Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs. Nevermind that the average high profile tweet is much more culturally significant than the averge high profile Facebook post. Heck most of Facebook isn't even original content, it's just really slick distribution for content from elsewhere.
Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will. But, Twitter has cracked public discourse in a way that no other company has period. Think about it, all previous internet fora have imploded as they've grown large, or collapsed into micro-communities like sub-reddits. Twitter has definitely faced challenges with trolling and witch-hunts, etc, but by and large they've put together a super interesting product. The only problem is that it's not going to displace Facebook because it's a different thing that's not quite as big. This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. It's just a really sad statement on modern business culture that Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers.