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.
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.