The head of product is Keith Coleman, who was preceded by Edward Ho (interim, now also (interim?) head of engineering) and preceded by Jeff Siebert (both of whom are still at the company).
Twitter's bylaws (and those of the other companies) are ambiguous. They do not clearly say a VP = officer. They only use them in the sense that they mention them in the same sense.
I am not sure what you are trying to say. The ratios seem quite well aligned.
1) One VP for every 39 employees
2) One VP for every 54 employees
3) One VP for every 51 employees
That's why I said usually. I did just check the bylaws for Alphabet/Google, Twitter, Amazon, and eBay. All have similar language showing vice presidents as officers. It's also been that way at the companies I've worked for, across several industries.
Facebook and Google aren't financially struggling. There's something to be said for "too many chefs" when your main issue is doing something, anything to make some cash. Perhaps some downsizing was truly in order.
On the other hand, losing this many execs in this short of time almost never bodes well, which means their stock price is going to tumble even further without something drastic happening soon.
It took them 6 weeks to change the star button into a heart, which nobody wanted because we don't "like" all the things we save for later. Twitter has been going in the wrong direction all year.
It's a great tool, but I have one request: the slash line of the last tweet should ideally indicate how many total there were in the storm. For example, the friendly howto on your site should end with "6/6 Share and have fun. It's FREE!" This gives the individual tweet context when someone shares/quotes/screenshots it and it's being passed around: you know where the tweetstorm ends (instead of having to scroll down and look for a non-existent 7/ tweet).
Actually, since you're queuing up all the tweets to post them in one go, it should be feasible to add the out-of count to every tweet in the storm! That would be neat. But the last tweet should have it by convention.
Yes, of course it's totally fine for people to post their excitement about something like that. It may be a tangent, but it's a specific, interesting tangent, not the generic kind of off-topic discussion which is predictable. Also, there's a huge difference between a community member sharing excitement with fellow users vs. someone showing up just to promote something.
But note that OoTheNigerian's comment eventually became upvoted (hugely upvoted in fact). That community correction often happens when comments are unfairly downvoted—but it takes a little while.
Hmm, that doesn't sound quite fair. I wonder what we could do better there.
I didn't see the comments that you erased, but based on many things you've posted in the past, I'm sure they were in good faith and driven by concern for the quality of HN, which is something we appreciate even in the rare case of a misfire.
The person spoke about him using a feature he thought Twitter should have. Tweetstorms.
From far away Nigeria (you may know it as Africa;)) we built something that filled the need and the head of product at twitter using it is the biggest endorsement one can get.
Of course, I could have chosen to be more elaborate in my comment and be like minimaxir but sometimes few words are better.
I didn't read it as sarcastic and if people were talking about tweetstorms and I found out my tool was used to build it, I'm sure it is not irrelevant to point it out.
You would get my point if you tried building something and had it used.
It seems you have carried on with your monitoring behaviour from Techcrunch comment days.
You can downvote and go in peace but please quit your lecture.
Personally, I found the comment interesting. I have always sort of wondered how prolific Twitter users actually handle the tedium of this, so it's interesting to see a link to one way they do so.
I know I might sound like a vim user, but tweetstorms are honestly one of my favourite parts of twitter. Maybe there could be a better UI for authoring and displaying them, but there's something I really enjoy about reading a story 140 characters at a time.
I've been saying this for a little while now: Twitter should really try to capitalize on Tweetstorms. What they don't seem to realize is that Tweetstorms enable Twitter to be a kind of inverse annotation platform. Most annotation platforms enable large chunks of text to be dissected by readers, but a Tweetstorm is the opposite: the author specifies the exact segmentation of the text as they release it, and each segment can be individually commented on or shared. It forces authors to present their ideas as a sequence of small interlocking arguments. The medium enforces rhetorical granularity, for better or worse.
I can't be the only person who sees this potential. Come on, Twitter, build this out... I'll even let you hire me to work on it. :)
Wow that's cool! Making it obvious which branch is part of the actual storm rather than someone replying would be nice. Once zoomed in my avatar recognition doesn't work as well.
Or maybe the tweet storm is always the left most branch and I just didn't realise that? :)
That's really cool. I've always found it difficult to follow discussions on Twitter. Maybe the UI is better for logged-in users but I've never bothered.
Twitter users find new ways to use the service, such as tweet storms or customer support, but the company fails to recognize these opportunities to "pave the cow paths" and improve there usability of their service.
What is there to build out? I guess it could be made more obvious for those that don't get it, but it's already being used in exactly the way you describe by Twitter's power users.
You're right that it's already usable, but it could be even better. For example:
1) Making it easier to compose Tweetstorms (third-party services like WriteRack exist, but it would be nice to have official support).
2) Enhancing the display of Tweetstorms to make them easier to follow. Right now, the UI for viewing Tweet replies is the same regardless of who's replying to who. Twitter could make it so that a person's replies to themselves (the building blocks of a Tweetstorm) have a unique look-and-feel compared to replies from followers. This would emphasize the Tweetstorm as a distinct type of posting, rather than something jury-rigged out of self-replies.
3) Not Tweetstorm specific, but make it easier to have and follow branched conversations. Sites like Reddit have this down already, while Facebook and Twitter seem reluctant to let anything go beyond one level down. Let people branch! It would actually make things easier to follow, and it would also allow for something (sort of) novel: branched Tweetstorms! Linear text is so 20th century! :)
What makes tweetstorms better than just letting people write long tweets? Tweetstorms infuriate me because they totally dominate my feed and ensure that the same tweet keeps being shoved back to the top of the timeline. Much better to let people write long tweets and just hide the part >140 characters behind an expand button. So I can safely ignore the whole thing.
The pacing of tweetstorms is what makes them unique. It's something fairly unique - if I wanted "longer tweets" I would go to Medium.
The timeline thing is a real(ish) problem that can be solved with UI, in a similar way how they show conversations inline (automatically collapse them)
Whilst everyone is plugging their own stuff, we’ve been working on a little thing called Stormchaser for aggregating Tweetstorms in your timeline and lists: https://www.stormchaser.io
Because twitter is an insufficient blogging platform and normal blogs don't attract enough views people use tools to turn blogposts into tweets and tweets into blogposts.
This is a bit ridiculous. Not trying to demean your product, but it shouldn't be necessary to have it.
I'm a designer and I agree. The one quick improvement Twitter could make to the tweetstorm is to automatically (or giving the option to) remove the users handle when replaying to themselves when initiating the storm.
Same. My thought for this, and I wanted to build a media industry specific alternative to Twitter using it, was to allow a tweet/story to have depth/paging.
So, imagine your timeline is a regular, vertical stream. But any tweet could have paging on the horizontal axis, and you'd hit next or swipe to continue reading. Anyone browsing could read the opening tweet and ignore the rest if they wanted. Subsequent tweets within the first could have a video, image gallery, etc. Analytics would show the writer how many people delved how far into the content.
So, for a sports story, some people might scroll past, or read the first couple of sentences, but a strong fan would read every detail down through the analysis and stats.
Not sure why they haven't tried this. They could supplant some news that currently exists as links outside of the app.
Which is why I'm surprised that the media lap it up rather than collectively building something they have more control over. Of course, it would take an industry organisation to arrange that and in my experience those bodies aren't really capable of doing something at that scale.
I personally really hate these. There is always one or two good posts that hook me in but then the bias/politics/etc gets revealed when you read the rest. My friends retweet them but in the end I just think the author (and my duped friend) are idiots. Maybe it is just who I follow...
Why? I like the content of some tweetstorms, but the UI for them is just so bad I feel they'd be better off as a blog post if they're written contiguously.
(Exception I suppose is the live tweetstorm, where someone is just getting on their soapbox)
This is the company that leaked they were doing an algorithmic timeline, it was really unpopular and they said they weren't doing it, then it turned out to be a lie when they started rolling it out 2-3 weeks later.
Actually, that makes total sense. There are multiple VPs at engineering firms. People always complain about how big Twitter is, how they can't believe how many employees Twitter has, but people don't realize Twitter has two "users": actual "users," and advertisers. Twitter has to dedicate a huge number of engineers, product managers, marketers, account managers, etc. to dealing with advertisers, setting up the ad auctions, analytics, dashboards, etc.
Yes, but speaking as someone who has used Google's great advertising tools as well as mailed a money order to a niche forum owner to run an ad, the advertisers will put up with anything if you can deliver converting users.
I'd still suggest that, even though twitter obviously needs advertisers, someone with a deep understanding of users and how they use twitter would lead to more user growth / more engaged users. Which is probably the thing twitter needs most.
Maybe. But at the same time, Twitter has a lot of influential and/or affluent users, which a lot of companies would like to reach.
Maybe they shouldn't try to grow absolute user numbers and instead focus on being a publishing platform for influencers (keep in mind that lots of people who aren't Twitter users see popular tweets on other platforms). Then they could focus on providing great advertising and targeting for companies that want to reach influencers.
At the end of the day Twitter's customers are advertisers. It seems like they are trying to sell these customers a way to reach a mass market audience. Maybe they should play to their unique advantage and focus on selling influencers' and/or business decision-makers' attention.
Twitter offers those products already - it offers promoted trends, custom emojis, and custom moments to a small pool of 'Premium' advertisers at $100-250k a pop.
It's a good way to control the quality of output, but it isn't a good way to make mega millions, as these big companies and influencers only have so much advertising budget to go round.
Consider also for someone like Trump or a Kardashian, the ability to reach 17.6M followers (and however many more through retweets + national news) for free with no filtering is a huge draw. It's hard to get them to pay for what they have already. Start to introduce features (as Facebook did) that make it more difficult for people to see tweets, and both the end consumers and the influencers themselves will revolt.
Focus less on absolute user numbers and the quality of the product declines (you have less data to train your targeting algorithms on), and the site as a whole becomes less of a draw for influencers too.
Not saying T shouldn't offer 'Premium' content to media companies, but going all in on large advertisers seems like a route to the poorhouse.
They already have more than enough users. Twitter needs more/better advertizers if they want to break even. Users can be got through sponsorships and celeb endorsements, paying advertizers require competative platforms.
Yeah? And Facebook isn't a social network either, it's an advertising brokerage? And Google isn't a search engine, it's an advertising brokerage? The Financial Times isn't a newspaper, it's an advertising brokerage? Spotify isn't music streaming, it's an advertising brokerage?
Didn't Facebook recently get called a "free content ad network"?
I think that term describes most of those companies well, as it incorporates their business model. They just vary in what kind of content or service they offer with their ads.
I dont think it's unfair to call a business what it is -- just like we do with farms or investment firms, though they greatly differ in how they go about that business model.
I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave.
The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company.
Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent.
I don't want this to seem inflammatory to people as twitter obviously has some serious engineering talent, but does anyone consider them to be a big name in tech anymore? They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore.
> By way of comparison, the company reported $2.2 billion in revenue for 2015 — meaning that it paid out 31 cents in stock-based compensation for every dollar of sales it collected.
You're going to be fighting several battles that aren't really engineering related,
- how to finally fix harassment that seems to be much more pronounced on your platform than pretty much any other mainstream social media site.
- how to get alot more advertising dollars on your site to an audience that short of reddit, seems to dislike advertising more than most social media sites.
And on top of all of this, you're probably going to have to shrink your engineering head count to make yourself look more appetizing to potential acquirers.
> They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore.
PayPal doesn't get you "name recognition" anymore? In fact I would expect Twitter would garner more because of their larger open source initiatives but I still hear lots of chatter about PayPal and the people who have worked there.
Maybe I'm just in a weird bubble but I still consider PayPal one of the big tech names.
Twitter's problem isn't just that they have to fix harassment, it's that they have to do it without touching social justice activism that sure looks similar to it from the outside, right down to the doxing, threats, and smears. Oh, and they'll get no sympathy for getting this wrong as the difference is apparently obvious... except that everyone defines it differently (usually based on who their friends are) and simply assumes the world shares their definition. Good luck.
I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation. Using twitter seems akin to stepping on a soap box on the town square and shouting every single word you say.
Maybe nobody will pay attention to you. Or maybe you'll get a crowd of people who think favorably of you. Maybe someone else will step on his own box and have a conversation with you, but still there for everyone to hear.
And it goes even further, you even have an official scribe who records everything you say and then pins it to the great proclamation board of the city plaza so that everyone who was not there at the time can still follow what you're saying.
This is an incredibly public mode of conversation that people don't realize what they're doing.
And well, if you say something that people disagree with you will get booing, hissing, insults, threats from a whole mob... maybe just because you're too loud. This would be the risk if you stepped on a box of a real place.
You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not as regular citizen discussing things with friends.
> You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not as regular citizen discussing things with friends.
The case I linked above put someone in fear of their life.
It's disappointing to see people claim this is not really an attack.
Well, actually illegal behavior is for the legal system to deal with.
But if twitter is a public, open platform with global reach then you will also get people who react to you like a public speaker. Which includes things that do not meet the legal harassment standards. Just the texual equivalent of booing, hissing and throwing insults at people to get them off the stage.
And I think people need to be aware of this when they state political opinions on the global twitter soapbox instead of doing it among their friends.
I'm sure changes can be made to dampen it. But this is the current situation. And I'm not sure harassment is a good way to describe it.
> texual equivalent of booing, hissing and throwing insults at people to get them off the stage
Which in most public speaking venues will get you thrown out, and if you do it in the open air badly enough you can also get arrested. (America is rather unusual in the amount of this it allows, not always to the good)
And if we look at this particular case it's not "booing", but "Over a period of three months .. cruel campaign of vile racist abuse".
Also: "You are currently serving a
sentence of 40 months imprisonment, imposed on 17
the December 2015 for stirring
up racial hatred against the Jewish comm
unity in Golders Green. That offence was committed whilst you were on bail for the present offence, which in turn was committed whilst you were on bail for other offences of sending malicious
communications over the internet and harassment." -- I think maybe this guy should not have been allowed Twitter while in prison.
Oh just read the whole thing on aggravating features:
1. This was extreme racial hostility
over a prolonged period, 3 months.
2. There was careful planning.
3. The offence was part of a pattern of racist offending.
4. You were acting, in effect, as a
member of a group promoting racist
activity.
5. The impact on Ms Berger was very considerable.
6. As a Member of Parliament she was providing a service to the public.
7. The offence was committed whilst you were on bail and awaiting sentence
for other offences of hate crime committed over the Internet.
I don't know if you got the memo, but HN has a pretty strong voting block of alt-right (neo-nazi) sympathizers. Sorry about your comment getting downed to hell
Everyone is equally "loud" on Twitter. And you're not allowed to hurl racist abuse at speakers in public, either.
(You know, if there was some kind of agreement that tweets containing only the wood "boooo" were definitely not harrasment, that might actually be an improvement on the current situation. It's the "I'm going to find you and murder you" and "incoherent string of racial slurs with frog emoji" that are the problem.
I don't know where you are from but in the US you most certainly are allowed to hurl racist slurs at speakers in public. It's up to the rest of the crowd to then shout back and speak truth back to the racist. As long as the racist is not shouting how to kill said public speaker or speaking libel, he's legally allowed.
Granted, we get into international situations and Twitter is private anyway. Just noting that "allowed" is not as black/white as you paint it and I wouldn't have it any other way. Would rather have minority groups be able to display their true selves to be judged than silenced.
On the "booo" comment though, you may have a helping idea. Maybe instead of a knee-jerk reaction to comment some obscenities, others would just be willing to -1 / boo / disagree in some way. One-click would be used over typing out the comment.
Don't you think services should generally strive for a higher behavior standard than the US penal code? Should anything that doesn't land you in jail be accepted?
> I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation.
It's the word appropriate for the actual rampant harassment on Twitter: the threats, threats, verbal abuse etc.; that's literally what harassment means. It may not be appropriate for everything on Twitter. When people talk about harassment on Twitter, they don't mean the hissing and booing, but more the "we're gonna rape you", which is harassment on any other public forum as well, even if directed at someone on a soapbox.
Isn't the platform just the best medium for harassing and trolling? What else can you do with 140 chars? Have you ever heard about good tweets? It's always negativity.
Since the election I've been spending time on HN and to a lesser extent Twitter. Every time I visit Twitter I find myself instinctively reaching for the downvote button, but there isn't one.
About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling attention to the very thing you disapprove of.
One of the absolute best features of HN is the downvote button and the way it is implemented. Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. A community that lets anyone join has to work hard to maintain a high standard. Downvotes don't kick people out, but they kick bad content off. Twitter has nothing like this, so the worst content gets the most attention. You can choose who you follow but users get no negative feedback on inappropriate tweets. So the norms shift towards whatever creates engagement, which is often outrage, fear, and strongly negative emotional content, with or without any rational foundation.
If Twitter wants engaging and constructive dialog, they need a way to take out the trash.
Unfortunately, Twitter's problem is that their potential for social good and their potential for revenue may never align. Since they are failing at turning a profit, it is unsurprising that they seem to be giving no consideration whatsoever to social responsibility.
As a counter argument I present Reddit, which as a downcote button but is even more notorious for its abusive communities. Is it possible that HN is just more heavily represented by mature people who tend to communicate better than average and the Magic isn't really in the downvote algorithm?
I should have mentioned: yes, the community is key. However the technology and the community together create the system. If the technology fails to support the community norms then the makeup of the community itself will shift. Once the elves start leaving middle-earth, it's difficult to recover.
Twitter is a little different because of its scale and the nature of its social graph. HN is a big room where everyone hears everyone else, Twitter is a giant switchboard where you plug in to choose your own mix.
Reddit seems to be something else, but I don't participate there so I don't know much.
Absolutely you are right that HN has a more mature mix of participants, but how does that situation continue? It cannot be solely by the direct efforts of the admins, however heroic, because the site is already too big for that.
The technical Magic has to complement the characteristics of the community.
Yes. I believe, users are they key. I don't know many online communities, where asking for "original, peer reviewed paper" just to prove your point is common.
+1. I spent a considerable amount of time on Twitter between August and November of this year. I quit cold turkey primarily because of the widespread negativity. Plus, its endless stream of tweets had a certain cheap novelty factor that coaxes you to spend more time on it than is warranted or necessary. HN and Reddit, to some extent, mitigate this in just the way I want.
I'd be interested to hear about what are the reasons and ways people find Twitter useful/interesting.
In contrast with HN, I find the most salient characteristic of Twitter is that negativity. In the days after the election I started referring to it as the national amygdala. It just became an echo chamber for fear. I mostly solved it by ruthlessly unfollowing people who are just venting their emotions and not engaging in critical thought. I made up for it by following people I disagree with and randomly following people that are followed by people I respect.
The thing I like about Twitter is who you can follow. Where else can you engage with Obama, Trump, etc. in a public forum? Without the big name political users, the press, the public intellectuals, Twitter would have nothing. The way the big shots are effectively equal to ordinary users is very democratic. I can @ the POTUS and at least in theory get a reply. There's nothing else out there that enables that kind of communication.
It's a shame that Twitter has done so little with so much. Think of the great newspapers of the past and how seriously many of them took their civic responsibility, and how they crowed about it in their editorial pages. They understood their role in society and the responsibility that came with the power they had. Yet here Twitter finds itself in possession of an unprecendented opportunity and they totally squander it. Completely oblivious to their social responsibility, they chase after ad dollars, and even there they fail.
The problem IMO is the limits. Humans can only read so many tweets and follow so many people. Beyond Dunbar's number (150 - 1500 depending on selectivity) they just blur into a big mess. Twitter's added some tools for curation (likes, user lists) but they aren't really powerful enough to filter tweets in real-time. They need something like Reddit's automod or a machine-learning filter.
The point of Twitter & other social media is empowering the user; they can encourage community members to step up and take civic responsibility, but Twitter's responsibility as such is to provide the platform rather than to run the show. I guess they could openly declare Twitter to be part of the DNC platform, but that would lose a ton of users (although not so much in terms of content). They're better off following a policy similar to Facebook of attempted neutrality.
Unfollow is the right answer! Twitter is somewhere where there is no "forum" or "topic", you have to build your own out of people you find benefit from following. If someone's posting stuff you consider bad, then don't follow them. You control the quality of your twitter feed.
Big trending hashtags are always going to have a large proportion of garbage in. Report the spam and pick out the gems with RT; it's even possible to make friends this way.
I don't think it's actually appropriate to just decide what random people who haven't @-ed you and are talking among themselves is inappropriate. If it's one person harassing another, then sure step in and/or report. The big problem is when a celebrity turns their followers on someone.
I found "resetting" my timeline to be helpful. Post-election the entire Twitterverse felt like an indignation machine, but then I realized it was a machine I had made.
I've unfollowed everyone (eight years worth of following!), and have been slowly rebuilding the timeline. Strangely cathartic, and the FOMO fades quickly.
It's also nice to start from zero again, rebuilding your interests and filling your universe with thoughtful people in a deliberate and considered way. I wish more social networks made un-collecting as intuitive and organic as following/collecting.
The problem with that is that twitter is a single platform with different communities. Implementing downvotes would mean that group A could just downvote posts of group B and vice versa. If downvotes weigh heavier than upvotes then even small groups could bury larger groups into oblivion. Add in sockpuppets and it gets worse.
I don't think users attempting to moderate others is a solution. It would reduce the diversity of opinions. The largest group would just push out unpopular opinions.
Instead you need tools that allows users to give themselves peace without punishing others. Maybe with the help of the followed/followers, i.e. some assistance from the social graph.
Indeed. I didn't go into this level of detail, but this would clearly be a different problem than what we have on HN, where downvoting enforces norms across the whole community. Twitter is exactly as you said, a group of (overlapping) communities sharing a platform. We all see the same comments on HN, but on Twitter everyone has their own feed.
Downvoting on Twitter would need to have very different characteristics for the reasons you mention.
On the other hand, you actually do need users to moderate other users if you want to maintain a civil community. The alternatives are heavy moderation, which doesn't scale and introduces an institutional bias, or a free-for-all, where emotion drowns out thought, which is roughly where Twitter is today.
I absolutely agree the social graph should be leveraged. What if downvotes only by people you follow affect your feed? You already see retweets only from people you follow, so the idea that your followees influence what you see is part of the platform today. This just extends that influence into the negative direction.
Posters absolutely need to see the downvotes they are getting, the point of the feature is to moderate behavior, not just to create a filter bubble.
Obviously it's not a trivial issue and rolling out new features at Twitter's scale isn't easy either. However I'm pretty confident, with all the engineering talent they have, they could make progress if it was actually a priority.
Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried.
I haven't seen this mentioned before, nor does it match with my observations of behavior on the site, though I admit the calculations of how down/up votes contribute to dimming is not transparent. Do you have a reference of where the relative weighting of up vs down votes is discussed?
Sorry, I don't. And I imagine that discussing the details in public would just create more work for the admins and limit their options for tweaking it; probably more trouble than it would be worth to make it transparent.
Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst content just disappears. This is the best possible outcome for things that you just don't want to see. Of course there are community norms about what gets downvoted and so it works as well as it does partly because we have a pretty good crowd here that values rational, constructive discussion.
The second-order effect is that people don't post things that are going to get downvoted, and even delete or edit posts in response to downvoting. This is the dominant effect and the main reason why the system works so well, because really toxic stuff just doesn't get posted very often. The users that don't care about downvotes can still get banned.
The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. They are inherently democratic. They also scale, which direct moderation obviously does not.
I agree that it would be more trouble than it's worth to make all of the algorithms open. It's minor, but I think the effect you're seeing can work just as well without differential weighting of up and down votes.
The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to.
You're probably right about the weighting. Anecdotally, again, I think most posts here get either upvotes or downvotes but not many of both. If so, the weighting doesn't much matter. That's a sign that the community has a consistent idea of what it wants and doesn't want. The guidelines here support that. I suspect these numbers would be very different at Reddit. Where this doesn't hold, the handling of "controversial" posts becomes more important. If Reddit just killed controversial posts, how would Reddit change over time? I guess it would get a bit less noisy. (Disregarding the potential for abuse. Obviously Reddit cannot really disregard this problem given their user base, so I realize I'm oversimplifying.)
A post at (+1,-0) is a very different thing from a post at (+6,-5) and treating these equivalently will tend to favor heat over light.
If you are interested, the Reddit admins discuss this at length and were planning to do this when /r/the_donald took over the entire front page. There are logs of their conversation that goes into the math.
Twitter's popular with journalists for some reason, most likely because it's an easy way to find potential stories and promote their work. This is probably part of the problem - it means that when ordinary users are nasty to them or their friends it's personal, and the same when they or their friends get their accounts suspended.
After the neo-nazis, who's next? As soon as they "take sides" they are now directly putting a finger on the scale of national and international politics. That's a rathole they absolutely do not want to go down and would very likely be totally unsustainable.
On the other hand, it works pretty well for the Chinese social media.
Donald Trump is making headlines using Twitter every day. I think that once users/victims become immune to Facebook's dark patterns, Twitter will look pretty good. The only thing it can do to screw that up is continue censoring content and allowing botnets.
What's just bizarre is that they were seriously considering censoring Donald Trump's account at one point and even announced it. From a purely business standpoint, that was a dumb idea even to propose. It makes you wonder about the rationality of management and if they view the company as some sort of hipster San Francisco hobby paid for by VCs and not as a profit making enterprise.
Most definitely. I think the management logic went something like the following:
- Why aren't twitter's ad impressions worth a fraction of Facebook's?
- Because FB uses an algorithmic feed which allows more precise targeting based on engagement, which has a lot more data points than Retweets or replies.
- OK let's build that.
- Done
- Wait, why is there unsavory content showing up as a trending topic on Twitter?
- Because people engage with it, and due to the shape of Twitter's graph, there's a much greater chance of users encountering content that has not been as thoroughly vetted by the social filter (compared to Facebook).
- We must stop this.
- How, we already offer verified accounts and disallow overt harassment.
- Well, let's just remove unsavory stuff from the trending list.
- Done
- Wait, that didn't really stop it, what else can we do?
- Censorship
- Love it, let's do it. We can help the cause of good by preventing users from seeing content that we deem unsavory.
It's amazing from a business perspective, but at a certain point ethical questions arise. Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? If he had to go through the press, everything he said would be filtered by editors and fact checkers. Incredible business opportunity, but frankly, the fate of the world is in part being determined by Twitter's granting him a platform. I can understand their vacillation around this issue.
To the downvoters: this is directly relevant, as hate speech violates twitter's rules, and they have indicated that they will apply these rules to Trump's account just like anyone else's:
> Asked whether Twitter would ever consider banning key government officials or even the president himself, a company spokesperson responded via email: “The Twitter Rules prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct, and multiple account abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies.” Pressed on whether that meant that, hypothetically, Trump himself could be suspended were he to violate those policies, a spokesperson confirmed: “The Twitter Rules apply to all accounts, including verified accounts.”
The anti-"hate speech" hysteria is simply reflective of the Silicon Valley political bubble, and its inevitable biases. The MTV video would have been considered hate speech had it been directed at any other ethnicity.
Twitter going out of their way to say that they might ban the US President isn't exactly a sign of the professionalism and maturity people expect from multinational executives.
Rather, I believe the correct interpretation is the opposite. The US President is not demonstrating the level of maturity and professionalism we expect from the leader of the free world. We're not playing small ball here.
You're 100% correct, though some of his sitting on the toilet thoughts might not make it to the public. What the news, when its being done correctly, does is provide surrounding context to interpret the remarks. This is valuable even for normal politicians as, it bears repeating, it is impossible for the population as a whole to be informed on every issue, and most people aren't informed on even a few. Low information constituents will misinterpret remarks without context.
It also encourages him to publicize views that can withstand press scrutiny. The outrageous stuff we see on Twitter might have been self censored if he had to tell it to a skeptical press that will place them in context.
Prior presidents have been very circumspect in what they say, which has reduced the pressure on this point. Extreme situations pressure us to discard gray areas. In order to maintain a healthy civic discourse, we need everyone to cooperate more and be more generous to the other side, but this can't be done unilaterally or you just get steamrolled.
Donald Trump is making Twitter a key part of a massive tragic farce befalling the USA in the world. Yeah, it's publicity, and likely some money, but it's a toxic horror show.
Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook all have much more impressive technology to show for themselves over the last several years.
At the company I work at, various of the above projects are integral to one system or another (though to be fair, there are quite a number of ex-Twitter folks floating around). I'm not a Scala expert, but as far as I can tell Twitter also has a large footprint in that community.
In fact they did purely make most of those things. Also they took Mesos from a barely working prototype to a system that scales to 100K+ nodes running many thousands of different workloads in production. They did that not only by hiring Benjamin and paying him to work on it but also by surrounding him with two of the strongest engineers I've ever worked with (John Sirois and Bill Farner) as well as 3 or 4 more I didn't work with as much so I can't say how much they added but it was clearly a large investment. Effectively they seed funded it for almost 4 years. Other people worked on it too, but they were the lion's share of the commits and did almost all of Aurora too.
I think they played a big part in shaping Mesos early on if any of the interviews/talks I've listened to are any indicator. They were one of the early adopters and hired one of the people that created the project at Berkley.
Storm shouldn't really be on the list fwiw. They bought it and then replaced it with Heron after a couple years but barely worked on Storm in the interim. That was all Nathan.
You're actually right Benjamin Hindman now CEO of Mesosphere Inc. started what became the Apache Mesos project while a PHD student at Berkeley, He later left Berkeley, interned at Google, then took a full time role at Twitter where he built out Mesos at scale.
His linkedIn bio:
Member of the Technical Staff
Twitter
March 2010 – May 2013 (3 years 3 months)
Built out Apache Mesos (http://mesos.apache.org).
Tired of hearing devs reel off these projects like they actually matter. None of that is user facing, none of that is worth the thousands of employees.
Can't most of those projects be boiled down to dealing with scaling? Twitter has seemed to have been mostly focused inwards, trying to get themselves more efficient at being Twitter. The other companies I mentioned seem more ambitious in expanding their tech outwards.
Can't reply to the child comment -- but worth pointing out that open sourcing your growth magic would be considered pretty dumb by most/all of SV. In fact open sourcing your scaling magic is considered dumb by most of SV. Finally, Twitter clearly doesn't have growth magic (or they'd be growing faster) -- but is that an engineer's fault? At the end of the day, any user facing engineering is beholden to the product team. Engineers at Twitter can run experiments, but they can't get those experiments shipped unless a PM is behind it. I'm not saying the PM team at Twitter are blocking awesome ideas -- just that there's a real shortage of awesome ideas that have been proven to work in the Twitter context. It's tough.
[full disclosure, I wrote one of the projects mentioned above.]
I'm not saying it is easy or disparaging the work of the engineers there. I am saying it seems like they have a different approach to how tech fits in with the goals of the company. To oversimplify, Twitter is focused on efficiency while others are focused on growth. Maybe the actual goals are different, but that is the impression I get looking at their output.
My impression is they have an excess of technical talent. They have a huge engineering staff, and from n outside perspective, I'm not convinced their product demands it.
Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., all have much more interesting products, which in turn gives their technical staff many more interesting problems to solve.
The common advice here is "let Twitter be Twitter," i.e., they don't need to expand into new products, let alone crack VR, or self-driving cars, or drone deliveries. That path will need to accompanied by major restructuring.
Everyone I've met who was a techie there has been one of the best I've encountered. I know everyone here thinks Twitter is a fancy rails site with some Kafka in the back, or whatever, but they actually do have some tough problems to solve. Or did, once upon a time.
The moment Dick left was when I felt a disturbance in the twitterverse (but I also have a disdain for Dorsey).
It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment".
I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...
Since the US election, Twitter has been headline newsworthy nearly every day. Whether you think that's a bad thing or not, it's still a potent force in the world, surprisingly to me.
No, just a hair over three quarters. Anyone can see that's perfectly reasonable.
(...he said, not realizing it was on the close order of what someone else here is advocating. Whence comes the idea that Twitter is overpopulated? Do we hear it from current or ex-Twitter-ers?)
Not going to argue with you. 4000 employees is going to lead to a lot of inertia when doing development (even if only 10% of them were devs). However, the culture and process changes you need to institute in order to make such a change work is not trivial. Probably necessary for the future growth of the company, but could quite easily end up killing it in the process.
Not asking you to argue with me. I'd just be interested to see some substantiation for the claim that Twitter is overstaffed. It seems like that claim turns up a lot, and I'm sort of surprised that no one seems to have taken the time to explain why he thinks so.
In my case, it's merely a matter of having worked in large organisations before. The communication overhead is too large. If you have 400 programmers, that's at least 40 teams. If they are all working on the same product, then you have a significant problem with communication.
I once worked on a product with 5000 programmers. Average production was 1 line of code per day per programmer. While LOC may be a poor measure of productivity, at the 250 lines per year level, you've got a serious problem no matter how you look at it.
With those numbers, we were churning 1.25 million lines of code a year, which obviously could not be done without a very large team. But the cost is crippling. Not only that, but there is just no way in hell you are going to hire 5000 good programmers. Deadwood is going to be a massive problem.
What's the solution? Simplification, prioritisation and diversification. If you have to churn a million lines of code a year to say competitive, then it may be too late. Before it gets to that point you need to simplify your code base and throw away the things you don't need. You need to think very clearly about what makes money and what doesn't and you need to have clear priorities for how to downsize your engineering work to a point where the costs don't eat the profit. Finally, once you've got a handle on that, you can build your business by diversifying into separate business areas -- there is no problem churning a million lines of code if it is not all in one product. 10 products, churning 100K LOC each will be much more manageable. But probably you will be much more profitable than that if you manage 10 products each churning 20K LOC per year (on the assumption that a simpler product will be easier to monetise).
Again, LOC is not a reasonable metric, I'm only using it to indicate approximate scope in terms that most programmers can understand.
I don't know how many programmers Twitter has. Like I said, even if it is only 10% and the rest are ops, sales, etc I think they have got problems. TBH, I have trouble imagining Twitter utilising 3000+ sales people effectively as well, but that's not my area of expertise so I will keep my mouth shut.
I think the product is solid, for a specific purpose, for a specific audience. However, they've failed to figure out the broad appeal that can lead to advertising dollars. I think their usage demographic is too narrow for a public company level of earnings. To me this is a product leadership issue. I agree that perhaps Jack Dorsey would be the next to leave. The biggest fear I, as a Twitter fan, would have is a private equity fire sale.
Anecdotally speaking, in the last 2 years, I've seen 3 ex-Twitter (as their most recent position) people apply, and none of them made it passed the second phone interview, which was the first real technical one.
I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants.
I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).
Twitter can make money, all it has to do is reduce its operational costs first. Then launch new products to grow. Twitter isn't going to become the new ad-sense or Facebook if it isn't a platform at first place. And you don't become a platform if your product isn't relevant to a lot of people.
People use Google for search. People use Facebook to connect with friends and family. Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-seekers? my grand mother doesn't need a twitter account. Nobody cares about her cooking a chicken or planting cucumbers in the garden BUT her closest relatives. And there is already Facebook for that.
What twitter SHOULD have done, and should probably re-consider, is leave the API open, but charge a fee to utilize it at scale. Let startups come up with creative new uses for your platform, and if they get traction - acquire them. You print money and find an easy target for growth.
Twitter's problem is their continued refusal to recognize themselves as a platform. It's probably too late at this point, but I don't think they have anything to lose.
Similar to aws? micro-pricing, or some free level? paying, say, 1c per 100 tweets for my app(s) would probably be doable. Or perhaps giving more metrics for paid accounts, or prioritized delivery?
> Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-seekers?
Twitter is what you curate it to be. To me, Twitter is kind of the publishing platform Linked In was trying to build. Smart people posting interesting links (to their posts or others) and people discussing.
However since Twitter is what you make Twitter to be, garbage in garbage out. I quit Twitter for about 2 years but then unfollowed every account and started fresh. Now I use it all the time, way more than Facebook, etc.
At the moment, and since just after I quit Facebook, Twitter has worked for me regarding how I communicate and consume over such "live feed" social media.
Honestly, I was going to say that didn't square with their valuation per user, but I hadn't realized that it was less than $50/active user now. At $3.95/mo it appears to make sense at their current valuation / profit margin (admittedly very back of envelope)
edit: before anyone notes it, I'm just thinking about offering it and the relative value of each on a per user basis vs ads. Yes, it would churn their userbase out of existence.
* The social--what users actually use it for.
* The ad platform.
* The realtime gestalt/search platform.
The latter is what is inadequately funded and considered.
Twitter has a latency advantage on the pulse of thought across the user base. The user base is already high-value for this relative to the morass of Facebook users. This is the key differentiator. This is what you base the platform and the value of search upon. You don't bury it by restricting the API, or trying to shift it into the realm of the social platform with "Moments"--you build dependency upon it, and monetize that unique value by those who need to keep the pulse. This creates value for the other two parts. It is also woefully underfunded.
Someone mentioned an AWS-like model. That is thinking along the right track. Make the gestalt a utility that people will pay for.
Yes, you still have all the spam/hate issues on the social platform, and those need to be solved. But those only become a corporate imperative if Twitter is resigned to merely being a social network rather than a platform.
Maybe it's actually 4 parts--I forgot about the live event deals (e.g., NFL games). There's a raw, traditional media part, but I'd align that with the advertising part.
I have no way to verify this is true, but I was told that they bought GNIP because (this sounds too ridiculous to type) they forgot to invoice them for two years for firehose access...when they remembered, GNIP couldn't afford the invoice, so buyout!
Like I say, it's a rumor that may have shades of truth, but that's what I heard.
There's a kernel of logic to the original assertion. It has a "gee whiz" irony, coded as a moral story: the biggest brains in the world forgot to get paid. Twitter's perceived revenue problems are juxtaposed with the obviousness of just taking the money they were owed, as if the answer to Twitter's Big Question were there the whole time. Finally, it explains a really major acquisition in Twitter history; it answers an outstanding question in everybody's minds. That little vignette has all the fixings for a great Silicon Valley tall tale.
The fact that it's totally false, by public refutation, seals the deal. I love it!
I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly.
Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of any of my ideas.
Twitter should:
- Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. Seriously Twitter is way, way, way over staffed. I mean I don't want to see this happen but Twitter is so employee heavy I don't understand how they can sustain themselves without losing a large amount of employees.
- Longer forms of communication. Yeah yeah I know "Twitter is short it makes people be concise" yadda yadda yadda; look a lot of the top Twitter users constantly do tweet storms. Many post photos of long form content. Sure maybe you keep the same limits but allow a way to stitch together multiple tweets should you want to do something long form. Right now the dialog gets ruined because comments get spliced during the user posting their thoughts.
This has to be addressed somehow. They're losing out on too much conversation and context when people post things like photos of text.
- Need some focus around various types of media. Video is especially important. Look at Instagram, they copied Snap's stories and BOOM, big success. Twitter is positioned to be a messaging pipe for the internet. Let's get more types of media flowing through it! Make Live even faster to start (dedicated button). Make image taking native, too. Single button, type text, posted. Done.
- Better ways of handling discussions. Something threaded, not counting usernames in limits (to a degree; can't have someone spamming hundreds at once). In a similar vein create groups so conversations / discussions can rapidly happen inside of groups.
- More tools for filtering, maybe creating separate views for different types of people you follow (like it would be great to see what my friends are saying versus what news sources are saying etc without going through the cumbersome list UX).
- Verification so if someone wants to use their real name they can have it verified and can even filter by verified so they can filter out the noise if they want. Facebook is pretty damn successful at real names but you can also create alternate personalities via Pages. I think Twitter should mimic this functionality to a degree.
It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of companies that were trying to invest on that and build actually innovative software.
As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.
> It might be too late for devs to trust them again,
Stupid mistake from Twitter.
Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on Twitter. That was stupid.
Facebook has developer APIs but they, ultimately, control the ecosystem. They only let developers kinda play in it. I honestly don't think Twitter needs to win any developers back for two reasons.
1. They should be more like Facebook. Never, ever again allow a third party app to control the primary way to view all of their data. It's too important. Grandfather existing apps in but slowly add new capabilities that they cannot access thus smothering them.
2. If Twitter can become more engaging / sticky it can keep users around for longer which should, in theory, help bring more people to their platform and let them display ads longer. This will ultimately force developers to work with them again, regardless of their feelings around trust.
Look at Facebook. They destroyed many games livelihoods with changes and people not only still use them but other than places like HN you rarely hear about issues with developers trusting them.
Thinking about it, Twitter barely evolved since its inception. At least changes are barely noticeable on the website in terms of features or UX. And I agreee with you, it's impossible to follow a discussion on Twitter. It is almost impossible to know who is answering to whom when tweets pile up.
Apart from layoffs, how do you see your other ideas adding business value and/or revenue to the company rather than just making the product better for end users?
Are you thinking about how Twitter could be a better product or a better business?
Good question. So I think my suggestions would make it a better product but I think if you can create better ways to engage others you can make Twitter more sticky. The more sticky the users are the more ads you can show them.
For example Facebook provides a great way to engage in conversations (the quality of said conversations may or may not be dubious). You can keep track of conversations, where you are in the conversations and mute specific people within one. Twitter has almost none of that which, in my opinion, likely contributes to the less than half of the daily usage that Twitter gets when compared to facebook [1].
But that's just one example. Working better with video and other media and lowering friction to using Live video or capturing it right within the app all help to keep users in their ecosystem.
Considering layoffs typically increase stock prices in the short term, help increase profits in the short term, I would imagine short term investors would be happy. Long term investors it's hard to say because trimming the fat allows you to try much, much longer than you could have before.
Overall I would imagine long term investors would have a positive feeling but only if a solid image is communicated to them regarding ways to improve and grow.
Which 60-70%? It seems crazy to think it's that simple unless you can a) articulate which employees contribute to revenue, and b) take into account the compensation/option-based expense.
Make a mistake and you not only affect revenues (by cutting those contributing to revenue) but also cutting the ability to retain those remaining who actually do contribute to revenue.
No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side.
> Which 60-70%? It seems crazy to think it's that simple
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it would be simple at all. Unfortunately I have no way to give you a good answer here. They have a disproportionately large amount of engineers and other staff compared to the product(s) they offer but without internal information regarding groups, compensations, etc there is no way I could ever begin to answer this as an outside.
> No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side.
I disagree. The best I can find Twitter currently has 2,900 - 3,000 employees (they had a high of 3,900 the best I can tell). What products and solutions do they have? Almost none with almost no evolution to show for the past 5+ years.
They are extremely employee heavy. Granted I can't know for sure how their internals work but 900 employees should be able to not only run but to evolve the platform without issue, even including sales and marketing.
Far more company have done much more with much less than that.
better question is whether or not Twitter _should_ be turned around. it seems like at this point it's a second rate advertising platform that encourages abuse and degeneration of public discourse.
I think it should. It's such a useful tool for quick communication of real time events. It's hard to imagine anything replacing it anytime soon and it does have a significant amount of users, even if it isn't growing much if at all.
You have fair points but I think there are redeeming qualities :)
While it's a topic about twitter I'd like to ask a question that always puzzles me. Twitter has 3900+ employees and good portion of those are developers, I just don't understand how can such a basic product that almost never pushes any updates or radical changes/improvements require so many employees. What the hell are they doing except for burning investors cash? Just curious...
Also a surprising fraction goes to data science and advertising infrastructure. Stuff that would go away if they weren't worried about making money. :)
Yeah, but that only really applies to specific engineering teams like backend services and ops right? Web (frontend), iOS, Android, etc. don't really care about scale.
Seriously. The amount of people on the android team can't be more than 5 people devs, right? Maybe allocate 10 so you have some redundancy when people get sick.
I hope the best for Twitter, as it's probably been the most beneficial of the social media network services (unless you count GMail) for me. I wish I could devote more of my programming class curriculum to teaching the Twitter API, as it has so many rich use-cases and students really enjoy it, but I expect that if Twitter survives for the long-haul, its API probably won't. At least, I expect it to be constrained in the same way Facebook has constrained its previously liberal (in the sense of data scope, not political) data endpoints.
Interestingly, Facebook is surprisingly liberal with their public data endpoints, with no apparent rate limiting for API retrieval from public Facebook Pages and Groups (source: I develop a scraper and have not been yelled at by FB, yet: https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper )
Twitter, meanwhile, still has that stupid 3200 most-recent tweet limit on historical data, which is apparently a "technical limitation."
It's been awhile since I've used the FB API, but one thing that's nice about Twitter is that you have a lot of room to crawl networks of users; for example, I always like getting the list of accounts that U.S. congressmembers follow (based on the Twitter account list maintained by the unitedstates project [0]), as a proxy for such things as perceived political bent of media organizations.
There were other changes made before that, that's just one I remember in my latter days of using their API. Granted, I've always been impressed with the analyses you've done with FB data and have put it on my list someday to learn through your examples :).
I tried to use the FB API, expecting a mature API with bindings and libraries all over the place, lots of simplifying modules etc. I was left with the impression that I wasn't really allowed to use it all, because I wasn't writing an "App" (or perhaps because it wasn't running on a "Device"). Totally confusing experience, where – even if I'm not particularly accustomed to walled garden situations – the terminology and workflow just doesn't seem to match expectations at all.
You can query users on Facebook by their userID though, which is enough to uniquely identify users atleast. However, you can't easily scrape public user data even with Graph API.
That is probably for the best as people have messaged me about that functionality, with not-very-ethical intentions.
Twitter is a business model that will be studied for years IMHO. No clear path to revenue, viral adoption, and very little product development away from its core competencies. I use Twitter often, but it has always seemed like a platform most useful if you have something to promote. One big flaw has been trying to find value to ordinary users who want to do something beyond typing into an echo chamber. If Twitter goes away it would be interested to figure out what would take its place.
> it has always seemed like a platform most useful if you have something to promote
Twitter is most used for 2 things:
- to promote your own brand (which includes companies like CNN & Google, as well as authors, writers and celebrities)
- to gossip about what you ate for lunch, or how everything is falling apart and the world has never been so bad, or whine about Mondays
The users that do #1 tend to do very little of #2, and vice versa. Listening to #2 will add very little value to your life except extra anxiety and distraction, but #2 is needed because they're the people to whom brands are promoting themselves.
The problem is people keep coming back to Facebook to keep up with friends, and people keep coming back to Twitter to watch and participate in drama. The former will inevitably be more engaged with the advertising than the latter, and Twitter can't change that.
No you're right. However, aside from having ad revenue I don't see anything they can do to accelerate their revenue growth. But yeah, cut spending, get employee count way down, and they could break even sooner than later.
bull. twitters growth stalled because its way to hard to join and sort through. look how long you can be part of reddit before you make an account. you can even bookmark http://reddit.com/r/tech+askhistorians+bestof+askscience and have a custom mix without having an account. their logged out front page is a pile of shit. imgur.com is better at what twitter is trying to be, twitter should chase digg/medium not lowest common denominator memegrabs.
I think maybe Twitter's growth stalled because it's mostly done growing. Do they need more users? They can already generate billions of dollars every year and maybe that's enough.
A lot of Twitter's management in product/engineering seems to be from a very particular demographic. Graduated Stanford in early 2000s and quickly rose up the ladder in Google -- Alex Roetter, Josh McFarland, Keith Coleman.
Aside from being what I assume to be exceptionally talented individuals, what do you guys think separates these people from their peers to make it to the VP level so quickly?
As someone just getting started in my career, what steps can I take to put myself in a position to grow so quickly?
The first question is what you want out of life, do you want to be manager, and executive, a technical lead or do you want to be purely technical? All four offer promotion paths at large and (increasingly) small companies although staying technical will hit an age issue eventually. They are also very different tracks.
That said, it sounds like you want to be an executive and let's say one at a larger company (ie: not a paper executive but an actual one). The skills you need for that are going to be leadership, management, charisma, politics, and networking. Since you're not going the technical track your technical skills are secondary at best.
You want a nice title on your resume so pick a top company and join there. Find a manager who is not afraid of your ambition (a career middle manager will likely be, find someone with ambition), act like a leader and get promoted. This will give you pedigree while also teaching you about politics and management. You will eventually hit diminishing returns.
Then, like the people you mentioned, jump to a startup as one of the founders or the person running it. This will teach you how to be a standalone leader, build up a network, and give you some executive-ish experience. It's vital you have the skills at this point to impress people at first impressions and maintain a networking relationship with them.
Then either get acquired by a larger company or switch after a while using your network to find the new position.
Twitter's Senior Management rating on Glassdoor is a 3.0/5 (where the goal is 4.0/5 or higher), one of the lowest among Bay Area companies. It's down there with eBay (3.0), HP (2.7), PayPal (3.1), etc. That is, they clearly need to replace their entire management structure.
For reference: Facebook (4.3), Google (3.9), Uber (3.9), Snapchat (3.8), AirBnB (3.7), Quora (3.7), Dropbox (3.6), Abobe (3.6), Apple (3.5), Pinterest (3.5), and Microsoft (3.4).
Twitter's book burning of conservative accounts was horrific. One of the grossest displays from a tech company that I can remember. I have no idea how employees at Twitter aren't up in arms over it.
I don't think this is as big a deal as the Twitter departures earlier this year. Several years ago Adam Messinger was already more or less sidelined from the engineering organization when Chris Fry was made VP of Engineering (CTO does not imply the VP of Engineering reports to the CTO). Later Chris Fry would be replaced by Alex Roetter (thanks commenter below).
After Roetter left, Messinger was put back in charge of the engineering organization. But given he had been removed from it (and passed over) in the past, it's not surprising he would leave, voluntarily or involuntarily.
It's a bigger deal than that because he was put back in charge of the engineering organization for real. That means that from when I started there to now, the engineering leadership has been:
Mike Abbott
Dick Costolo -> (Chris Fry, Adam Messinger, Mazen Rawashdeh)
Chris Fry
Alex Roetter
Adam Messinger
???
Not as bad as product, but illustrative, and there were far more VP/Director changes in there along the way. In general you knew you were in for a re-org that affected you in a material way every 6 months. I had 10 managers in well under 5 years. It's not surprising many people just crawl in a hole and hope they get ignored while they vest and get stuff done.
Depends on your org. Alex had just as much pull as Raffi, arguably more since he got the org he wanted eventually. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Raffi and Alex has the empathy of a gnat, but in terms of sheer influence it was Alex/Raffi and then everyone else).
After Mike Abbott left he was responsible for user-facing engineering reporting to Dick. Eventually Chris Fry moved up to SVP and he moved to CTO. So you're mostly right, but there was that weird period in there where he and Chris were peers. Then they were "peers" again, although he didn't have directs.
I think it's sad that Twitter is facing so many departures. It's unclear what is really happening but I do hope this service doesn't collapse. It's mind boggling to me that something so useful is struggling to stick around.
I acknowledge that CEO is not an easy job, but in light of all the departures and drama, I honestly wonder if @jack really is the right person for the job?
Seems that the problems with product, PR, and investor relations got worse when he came back. How much rope will the board give him before he hangs himself?
Twitter's failure is a failure to embrace an open web. The next CTO at Twitter should take a deep hard look at decentralization, protocols such as OStatus, and how to provide an open platform (like email) not a walled garden.
Say one manages a government agency or any other large organization -- Why the heck would they put all eggs into a provider's basket rather than set up their own GNU social infrastructure? Does anyone not realize the power of controlling their own namespace?
Oh neat. So, in order to avoid having ads filtered at federation boundaries, thus delivering zero value to ad buyers and zero revenue to themselves, they now have a very strong incentive to come up with advertising only imperceptibly different from everything that is not advertising.
see edit, I assumed the question was referring to the status quo. A better model than advertising would be to charge those broadcasting their message to a large number of recipients (your CNNs and Trumps should be the ones paying to play).
So you drive away your biggest draw? In the media-centric view of the world, those people would be asking for a cut of revenues. There's clearly a major disconnect from reality on one side or the other here. Any examples of successful businesses that do it the way you describe?
Billboards work because it's captive traffic. Very few if any sites on the net have captive traffic. Twitter certainly doesn't even in the current model and I think the model you're describing would be even harder to manage in terms of spam and abuse, not to mention coordinating with law enforcement. So likely even less captive.
Frankly, I wouldn't mind if we saw an end to Trump's tweets. Not because of their content, but because of their impulsiveness, which is a behavior that Twitter's design encourages. Which is cool when it comes to celebrities and such in which it's fun to see what they think about sans filter.
But the president of the United States speaks with the executive authority for an entire nation. It's questionable enough when a company's stock falls because Trump lashes out at them, and means it [0]. But what about the times he makes a typo, or just doesn't have all the info he needs at that moment when his emotions arise? Even asking that he types something to be sent through a Wordpress-powered system would give him the same megaphone, but adding a little more friction so that things that deserved to be trashed/called-out in his voice actually deserve so.
For those who say this amounts to making Trump less "real" of a man...sure. But he's no longer just a man, he's the chief executive of the world's greatest power. He gave up the privilege of "just sayin what I think" for the privilege of being able to unilaterally launch a nuclear war. Keep in mind that there are no checks and balances against this power -- it is utterly unilateral: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...
Giving up frictionless communication in 140-character-sized comments seems like a reasonable thing to pass on, given the many extra responsibilities he has, and the extra weight each of his words have.
There's no rational reason why a PotUS should be tweeting random impulsive thoughts to the world at large. Very few potential positives, a lot of potential negatives. It's pretty obvious that Trump should not be doing this, but alas, rationality went out of the window when he was voted into office.
> But the president of the United States speaks with the executive authority for an entire nation. It's questionable enough when a company's stock falls because Trump lashes out at them, and means it [0].
The share prices of the companies Trump has bashed have rebounded within the same day, so this is incredibly misleading to say.
Not that I disagree with the core point of your post.
But that is what people want! They want a president with human impulses (Or at least one who pretends to have them -you can never be too sure with Trump.).
People want someone who says whatever he wants to say whenever he wants to say it. No holding back for anyone. They don't want dignity and restraint.
That's why he won and it's still something a lot of people just don't understand.
That would go against most public accounts of how Trump has been using his phone for tweeting.
For one thing, Obama's personal account (i.e. not @POTUS, but @BarackObama) explicitly says in its profile: "This account is run by Organizing for Action staff. Tweets from the President are signed -bo. [0]
No such disclaimer has been made about Trump's account, which tweets with the same characteristics and tone as it did well before his current presidential campaign [1]. You're right, though, that Trump's team does tweet for him on occasion. Either that, or Trump, who is famously not a computer user, has mastered the art of using two different mobile operating systems [2]
Trump uses Twitter but he didn't invite them to the tech summit reportedly for not creating a special trending tag for him.
Trump enjoys being treated like royalty. I doubt he has loyalty to Twitter and would jump ship to another company that puts him on a pedestal. He would enjoy seeing the millions of customers who follow him.
> Trump uses Twitter but he didn't invite them to the tech summit reportedly for not creating a special trending tag for him.
The word reportedly is really interesting. Was this reported by the same media that was wrong about just about everything this election cycle? Could they somehow be wrong about this too?
PS: Twitter is smaller than the other companies and is perceived as a failing (or at best stagnant) company. While Twitter is an important company online, if you were inviting the biggest companies in tech, there's some logic to not inviting them to that conference.
Yeah that's a fishy reportedly. Better to look at the transcript. Trump: "I won’t tell you the hundreds of calls we’ve had asking to come to this meeting, and I will say, and I will say Peter was sort of saying, ’No, that company’s too small.’ And these are monster companies."
My guess is Peter vetoed Twitter, for sensible reasons.
> he didn't invite them to the tech summit reportedly for not creating a special trending tag for him. Trump enjoys being treated like royalty.
That's unfair to say. Trump's own Director of Digital Advertising explained[0] how Trump's campaign signed deals with Twitter, which Twitter didn't honor, without offering a refund.
Sources connected to Trump[1] say he's considering an anti-trust investigation on them because of their role in this election, which includes censoring pro-Sanders and pro-Trump hashtags, and biased censorship of people like Milo.
Nah, 4chan is the opposite of the kind of forum he craves. Everyone is a nameless faceless anon, so unless Trump starts leaking things about himself, he's just another boring racist troll in a crowd of boring racist trolls (just maybe 5x the average age).
Friday, January 20, 2017
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Donald Trump, as his first act in office, announces plans to nationalize ailing tech giant Twitter so that it may forever remain the communication channel that "helps keep America great."
It is disappointing because I personally still believe Twitter has a lot of potential, and it seems like they can't catch a break.
I don't work at Twitter, so it is hard for me to tell how much this exec drain has had an effect on delivery and execution, but I'd imagine a good amount.
The NFL Thursday Twitter has been super disappointing. I wish there was a way to get the video screen mostly full, and have a live feed of MY timeline on the feed. I definitely am tweeting a ton during sporting events, and feel like I never see targeted ads or well thought out products surrounding that.
Is it just me or do people feel that images/video are the future of digital interaction?
Looking at IG/Snapchat and I feel like I'm viewing the future world of interactive social media being born. It's not that text based media is incorrect, it just feels like the communication form of the past.
I want to be shown experience, not just read about them.
> Is it just me or do people feel that images/video are the future of digital interaction?
I feel images/video are the future of digital interaction in the same way that candy is the future of food. It is nice to have in moderation, but try to replace the basics completely and you'll have cavities and bad health.
I have mixed feelings about twitter. On the one hand I see it as a nice way to make interesting conversations surface and reach a wide audience. On the other hand I see it as a constant stream of ads. I don't know if I'd be happy if it all goes down, or if something better comes along. Which problem is twitter actually trying to solve?
when will we see the same for Facebook? If Twitter falls then it's a shift in investor's attitude towards "should make lots of money at unknown time down the road".
Money today is more valuable than money tomorrow. Tech seems to have been a curious exception as it was in the 2000 bubble.
I don't see it happening any time soon if at all. Companies spend an insane amount of money advertising on Facebook platforms. If you're at all familiar with how companies buy ads in digital marketing, you'll realize how Facebook's targeting is super valuable and companies pay a pretty penny to target specific users.
Not to mention, Facebook is quite the pioneer in tech. React is one of the most used front end libraries and the community around it is super positive.
Then there's VR and their progress in 360 video. The list really goes on with Facebook.
Facebook is massive, at nearly 2 billion users they hold a monopoly that covers most of the connected world, and it's only going to continue to grow. They are not going away.
Twitter on the other hand, it's not that they have failed, but probably that they were aiming a bit too high. Investors were likely expecting another Facebook, but Twitter is never going to become that, because it's not perceived as a fundamental part of people's digital lives. Everyone has a Facebook account, but only some use Twitter.
Before someone comments noting that the 1st amendment only restricts government and is not binding on twitter: please note that free speech is a valuable community principle for the same reasons it is a valuable legal principle. The "marketplace of ideas" is very real and very valuable and ought not be censored. Moreover, it is very hard to consider social networks in this day and age to be acting as anything other than an online proxy for public space, and it is no less wrong to censor speech on twitter than it is for campuses to censor speech.
Replying to myself because parent was flagged: why was it flagged? It didn't say anything outright offensive or disturbing, and even though its tone was bordering on rude, it certainly raised a valid point (just look at the civil discussion below it). It is particularly troubling that a comment against suppressing speech on forums like this would be censored. I understand that HN is not Times Square but it is a public forum, and I do think a reasonable assumption of freedom of expression is warranted.
In my experience, members will down-vote if a comment is uncivil, even if the content contains a valid point. The mods have mentioned numerous times (and rightly in my opinion) that civility is even more important when commenting on divisive topics.
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable to remove some disruptive individual from a lecture (think someone repeatedly shouting the name of a soda in order to disrupt the lecture, not an invited speaker).
This is the same sort of removal of ideas from the marketplace that you are talking about, it's just probably not one you want to use as a test for what you have articulated.
The two are fundamentally different platforms. Twitter is an open space provided as a free service to the public at large, while a lecture is a fundamentally closed platform (only the lecturer speaks) only open to those enrolled in a specific class.
That said, even in the example you give it is not always considered appropriate to remove people causing disruption. Consider, for example, a conservative speaker giving a guest lecture being protested against -- often loud enough the the lecturer needs to shout to be heard by his audience, even though protesters are outside.
What about someone being disruptive at a open presentation? Or someone showing up to your local game meetup and being generally disagreeable?
What about a public park that has gotten ruined because someone keeps on doing donuts with their motorbike on the grass? A library whose books keep on getting ruined by certain people?
Even public services need to have some maintenance to not fall apart. There's a reason we call 4chan moderators "janitors".
The point of my comment is that it's an ideal rather than a principle. If you concede that it is appropriate to control the lecture space, you concede that it isn't a principle.
At that point we are discussing the rules about when it is appropriate to have private controls on speech rather than our outrage at someone having a private control on speech.
There is a clear difference in these two examples. Trump tweeting does directly interfere with other Twitter users use of the platform while someone yelling at a lecture does.
Twitter's attempts to "police" its users has been both a failure and damaged the reputation of the platform.
First off, it's not practical to ban all speech supporting censorship, because then all speech supporting that specific policy (including your own comment) would also have to be banned.
I'm not aware of other countries suppressing speech that is intended to censor others, though I am aware that countries like France criminally censor anti-semitic remarks such as holocaust denial. Is this what you mean? I've never heard of the rationale behind that censorship being that that speech is intended to silence others.
In any case, I do think there should be a near-absolute right to speech for three reasons. The first is a slippery slope argument -- any time you criminalize behavior that is open to human interpretation, the power of that interpretation can and will be abused. The risk of censorship is too great to put in the hands of regulators or politicians, even with n degrees of "oversight".
Speech also cannot cause direct harm, and censoring does cause harm in that it takes away someone's right. For that reason, it seems reasonable to censor speech that actually cause harm to happen, though idle threats or general instructions do not qualify.
Lastly, banning speech does not allow the ideas it represents to be addressed in a serious manner, meaning that proponents of that speech will always (likely somewhat correctly) be able to claim said speech was banned in order to enable attacks son that sort of speech. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea that eventually whatever speech that would be banned would just be defeated in the marketplace of ideas, and banning speech just prevents it from being struck down as irresponsible on even ground. I think this can be evidenced by their being no more serious a problem with holocaust denial in the United States than elsewhere in the west where it is banned.
As you can probably tell, my opinions fall very close to the Supreme Court's interpretatin of the first amendment, so I guess I am a bit biased in my opinion.
Can it not? It can be used to humiliate people to the point of suicide. It can be used to target someone for violence. In the case of people with photosensitive epilepsy, particular visuals could kill them.
Even if the harm in some of these is “indirect”, it's not less problematic.
Sorry about that! I didn't mean to single you out, I've just seen people substitute "but [blank] isn't the gov't" for an actual justifiable reason to ban speech that I wanted to say something.
To be honest, I'm not sure where I stand on this issue, but it does seem like real damage might be done. I'm frankly worried about him starting a nuclear war. Most of our principles presuppose that the world won't end if we do something stupid. I'm not sure that assumption is valid in this case.
EDIT: In nearly every other case, I am very pro-free speech. It 's an indicator of how shocking this is that I'm rethinking it at all.
Why are my fears irrational? Are you saying he can't destroy most of human life on earth with the push of a button? We may disagree on his temperament, but the material fact remains.
Can and will are not the same, that's why your fears are irrational. Unless you have some specific point on why he would as you say "push the button".
Anyhow this was about censoring an opinion on Twitter, if you want to dilute your judgement then by all means go ahead, but this does come at a cost and censoring someone one twitter to prevent an imaginary war is certainly a stretch of the imagination, and I'm being polite.
There is an actual argument that Hillary was going to impose a no fly zone on Russia in Syria. Would that have somehow alleviated tensions? Let's not forget about the red line, the sarin gas smuggled out of Libya (Bengazi), and the murder of Qaddafi in the streets, all very pertinent to the region. But alas I talk about things which can be argued and not "feelings", the hallmark of the emotionally comprised.
https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800
AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of Twitter?