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Comment by a2tech | Hacker News Reader

Because there's no business in Twitter. There's no path to being in the black and there never has been.

Twitter has significant revenue growth, which means they could be in the black next quarter if they didn't spend so much on trying to grow. But since they have a giant pile of cash, there is no downside to trying to grow.

> The company ended its most recently reported quarter with $3.5 billion in cash and investments, says S&P Capital IQ. If the company only burns $8.5 million a year in free cash — as it did the past 12 months — that's enough cash to last 412 years.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/01/25/twitt...

Why would you believe that? They have great revenue. They're just not adding enough new users.

And if they cannot add more users, they need to streamline their operations to fit their costs into their revenues. If they choose not do so, or do not have the capability to do so, then they fail.

No argument there.

Why do they need All The Users In The World? Why can't more services be content with having a significant and active user base that is not the entire population of Earth.

I think because the network effect is a fundamental foundation of social networks. Think of all the SN's that have come and gone. It appears you can't really remain static with a non/slow growing user base. Eventually, something else comes along that has a broader range of people making the content better; you stop opening the older, more static app.

There are lots of dedicated, niche forums all over the Internet that have remained relatively stable for a decade or more. Those are social networks, and they work fine while accepting the users they have.

Q1 net loss of $162 million, it's easy to loose money, much harder to turn a profit.

What is their revenue stream? Most people I know use third party clients that show no ads or similar. Feels like everyone who has used it long enough ditches the Twitter.com apps and websites. If they stopped supporting access through third party clients a huge amount of (power) users would disappear and with them their content.

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