Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions | Hacker News Reader

Twitter, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back World-Swallowing Ambitions

nytimes.com

171 pointshvo157 comments

Mr. Jones used to be the chief executive of Myspace, the once-giant social network, but he rejected any comparison between Twitter and that now vastly diminished network.

“For me and for lots of people, Twitter has actual utility to it, and for those people, that’s what will keep it around,” he said.

So instead of figuring an unorthodox way to take it private or set up a donation scheme ala Wikipedia, why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service?

I also take issue with the author's opening assessment of Twitter:

Twitter is the world’s most important social network.

That might sound like the ravings of an addict, but look at the headlines in every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news broadcast. Just about anything you encounter in the news media these days has some foot in the controversies and conversations occurring on the 140-character network.

We live in a hyperconnected world where every tiny little twitter controversy gets blown massively out of proportion, draining people's time and energy on things that really don't matter in the face of much larger and more important problems. At the end of the day, Twitter is used mainly for entertainment purposes. The author can keep pointing to the Arab Spring, #blacklivesmatter, etc. but the fact remains that revolutions and social movements occurred long before Twitter existed, long before cell phones and computers existed, and that Twitter is not some be-all-end-all enabler that we need to rescue for the betterment of humanity.

If it's really worth $5bn, someone will figure out how to get the service there. If it's really worth $100bn, someone will get it there. Let the market settle things with Twitter.

"If it's really worth $5bn, someone will figure out how to get the service there. If it's really worth $100bn, someone will get it there. Let the market settle things with Twitter."

I don't agree with this kind of market-determinism. If a small-message broadcast-based social media service is "really worth $5bn" or "really worth $100bn" is a different question from if Twitter will be that service. Sometimes in order to discover their true utility, services need to change in fundamental ways. I think Facebook is a good example of that; Facebook in 2016 is a different beast than Facebook in 2006. That takes deliberate innovation. But sometimes, when trying to do that, the transformed version has less utility, and the service dies. That's the risk here.

Perhaps you're saying that Twitter should not change at all, and it should continue on its current path?

> Facebook in 2016 is a different beast than Facebook in 2006

I'm not a big Facebook user. Is Facebook 2016 really that different to Facebook 2006? To my untrained eyes it still looks like:

* blogging for normal people, restricted to friends and family

* free photo photo storage

In 2006, on Facebook, you'd create a profile and list what residence you lived in and what sections of what classes you took. Literally everything on your profile was basically a select query that let you see who else lived there, and who else was in that section. It was awesome. But it also had the potential to have a much larger creep factor, and obviously didn't scale because not everybody was in college.

You're mostly right. There is a lot more sophistication now, but most of the advances facebook has made are in two areas:

-Mobile. Making messaging a central strength of the platform. Figuring this out is a big piece of why the stock is doing so well. -Conversations. Facebook has become the default place for people to discuss (or, more accurately, shout about) media/news. I mean both news from external sources and personal life events.

Everything else is reorganizations of existing features in new ways, like the shift from the wall to the timeline. It was a new feature that better fit an existing goal, not an expansion in the scope of the service.

They effectively destroyed Facebook when they got rid of all of the college class info -- all of the curated content that had to be done on a school-by-school basis. When they got rid of groups (before later re-adding them). The newsfeed.

There was a time somewhere in 2006-2007 where Facebook was an utter shell of its former self, looked weird, and wasn't particularly useful.

And the amazing thing was, they were right. They did what they needed to do to pivot from what it was (a college information source) into a global social network superpower. It sort of reminds me of the Steve Jobs quote where if you don't cannibalize your own products, someone else will.

>> Is Facebook 2016 really that different to Facebook 2006?

My students talk of a much greater "creep factor" in that they now assume everything done via facebook is being examined by men in black suits behind concrete walls, or fat men in basements wearing sweatpants. It's no longer considered an appropriate place for candid conversation.

> It's no longer considered an appropriate place for candid conversation.

So what are they using instead? Whatsapp? Other messaging app? Instagram?

Snapchat.

And don't make the mistake of thinking Snapchat is just about nude pics. It is mostly used for saying things you want to disappear rather than have everyone reread in the morning.

As soon as people like me know, they move on. The day that professors (me) cops (old people) and parents (very old people) start noticing a platform it's time to switch. Some of my students are using services more popular in Asia. But many, particularly females, simply aren't sharing information about themselves as they might have 5-10 years ago. The novelty is gone.

In 2006 Facebook was all about college. I remember you could even list your classes right on your profile and get grouped with people taking your same classes.

But you're right, "blogging for normal people, restricted to friends and family" sounds like it will always be Facebook's core offering.

Sure but Livejournal could do that. What Facebook is good for is event planning, it very quickly becomes part of your "real life". Google screwed up massively by not integrating G+ and their calendar offering from day 1.

Google's attempts to integrate G+ and calendars fared poorly.

http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-scoble-google-events-p...

For much the same reason many of Google's other attempts to integrate^Wintrude on people's personal lives have fared poorly. Social integration isn't a coding problem.

If I remember correctly, 2006 was before the "news feed" switch. That was a huge shift that changed how people interacted with Facebook, and communicated with each other on it.

Yup. You used to actually click on and read peoples' profiles, and they'd post directly on your wall. 2006 is also about when they added photos.

> That takes deliberate innovation. But sometimes, when trying to do that, the transformed version has less utility, and the service dies. That's the risk here.

Without deliberate innovation the service dies.

They're not sitting on their hands here: they spent $800M on R&D last year... and a $500M loss.

I agree. Do you think we're in disagreement?

> why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service?

The big users with lots of followers are the ones who create the large audience for Twitter to reach. Right now those people create content for free, if you start charging them they are likely to leave.

If Twitter could create a model like Youtube where big content creators with lots of followers shared revenue, that would straighten out the incentives. There's a model here, it just may not be as big as Twitter thought it was a few years ago.

I disagree. I do not think Kanye/Reuters/Trump/Chipotle/Intel would bat an eye to pay for the privilege to get a message out to millions of users.

These individuals and companies are not looking for direct ad revenue from their tweets, as most Youtubers are from their content. Twitter power users are looking for indirect returns on their fame/infamy in the form of increased brand awareness and the ability to have highly visible, public conversations. In the case of the large corporations, they are also able to provide better customer feedback and support.

Reuters perhaps is looking to drive traffic to its website, but it will have to spend on Twitter if it wants to compete w/ other news outlets.

Twitter has the ecosystem, and now the ecosystem is as big as it will ever get with no added users over the last quarter. Charge the influencers and brand managers for the privilege of using the communication channel, just as a TV network charges companies for ad slots.

> I do not think Kanye/Reuters/Trump/Chipotle/Intel would bat an eye to pay for the privilege to get a message out to millions of users.

This "privilege" already exists: it's called advertising.

There are many cases where a social site shot itself on the foot and committed suicide by taking one bad move, such as Digg. What you're suggesting sounds like it will set a new record for a bad decision. Let's say Twitter does make that mistake and actually starts charging high end users. It is extremely naive to think most of these people will stick around and pay. Some will start leaving. Some new services will arise that claim to provide the service for free. Some of these "celebrities" will join forces to create a new "free" network (because that's what Web is supposed to be). Overall their userbase will decrease. And just as it grew exponentially after it reached critical mass, the reverse also applies, and at some point it will die at an exponential pace. It will probably end up looking something like MySpace.

Maybe let existing users continue like today and charge only for new users?

Personally I think twitters problem is much simpler: it is just a media/subset of biz/subset of tech thing.

The only thing twitter has over other services is brand recognition and a certain community.

On all other areas they are owned by both Facebook and even Google+

I remember being exited about twitter years ago: I saw lots of possibilities like "event streams" for automated processing, I thought they'd come up with a way to mark certain messages as mostly relevant for certain groups of followers etc.

What they did instead was focusing on painting themselves into the 140 revolutionary characters corner and keeping the paint wet from time to time by messing with the API etc.

> I disagree. I do not think Kanye/Reuters/Trump/Chipotle/Intel would bat an eye to pay for the privilege to get a message out to millions of users.

Maybe, but it's not like substitutes don't exist. All of the big brands you mentioned maintain Facebook and Instagram pages (some have Snapchat as well) in addition to Twitter, and both of those have more users and a bigger audience than Twitter does.

If Kanye or Beyonce or whoever deactivated their Twitter, it wouldn't be long before others followed suit, which could create a snowballing impact of regular users abandoning Twitter to follow people to "where the action is", so to speak.

I'm not a twitter user, but do/could they have a "advanced features for power-users" setup where they charge? Basically, if you have > 10,000 followers, you get a set of features that not everyone has if you pay up? That would incentives them not to leave, while also asking them to pay up

They essentially have that already - verified accounts have special features but Twitter gives those away for free.

http://www.thewire.com/business/2012/01/twitter-verification... says:

> When he asked a Twitter sales rep who had been in contact with him how to go about it, she replied that the only paths to verification are if an account has had impersonation issues or is an advertiser who's spent at least $15,000 over three months.

Seems weird its free, verified/verifying users could be a great service for lots of people. It could be a good way to make money too.

> That might sound like the ravings of an addict, but look at the headlines in every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news broadcast.

The reason for that is simple. Twitter is a tremendous resource for (hate to use this phrase) lazy journalists. It gives them content and material and does their work for them. What's there not to like? It's important for journalists, bloggers, tv newspeople really anyone in the media. Of course they like it and see it as essential.

Twitter Mining.

No matter what subject you writing about, you can quickly find a tweet from someone who said something stupid about that topic.

It's free AAA content. Ask Any Asshole.

Again, directly charging popular users is detrimental to the service and ensures that only commercial users can safely become popular. Charging horse_ebooks for having 200k followers ruins the fun.

I'm still a fan of "payment, but optional and decoupled from account holdership" (like reddit gold that users are encouraged to buy for others) and "payment for the privilege of having abuse complaints investigated by a real human".

Maybe build in some system for followers to sponsor the accounts they like.

>>> why not just charge the superusers with tens of thousands of followers, like Mr. Jones, who really do get some tangible benefit from the service?

I'd go the other way. I don't think the concept of charging people for being successful on a social media platform has legs. I'd instead attach micropayments to all the fish who want to follow various celebs and such. Say 1c/month to follow Lady Gaga. Then we'll see exactly how much use these feeds are to consumers. Or this could be done through a premium concept, such as delaying tweets to/from non-premium subscribers by a few minutes.

look at the headlines in every morning’s newspaper and the obsessions of every evening’s cable news broadcast

That may say a lot more about the media than it does about Twitter...

To be fair, important is not the same as significant.

164 chars to carry complex things you amplify seems like a drama generator by design. For me it generates noise and misunderstanding more than signal.

I'm no neckbeard (well, maybe I am, ha) but I've been wondering really if the new "Safety Council" will be the beginning of the end.

There's already stresses on the system, baroque user name / user discovery, you go to post and you can't condense your point into the space allowed even though you tried a few times, you've been using twitter for a while so the novelty is wearing off, you are in your own place in your own "timeline curation journey" -- maybe you have too few people and you don't get a lot of value out of timeline checking, maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it,,,), maybe your interests have changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's a lot of work, and where to start?!?

,,,anyways, this is your feeling about Twitter, and then, now there is this new layer of the "Safety Council Directorate" and the wild west feel is gone from some of the signal, and maybe it even makes you worried about your own potential implosion from a social media misstep ("So You've Been Publicly Shamed"),,, and then you say to yourself, to hell with it, this Twitter thing is getting too ponderous.

---

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/02/twitters-new-safety-cou...

I haven't hammered this point home because I've lost the graph, but have absolutely seen one breaking down user growth month by month, and there's a clear turning point around about August 2014 — which is of course the month the Gamer Gate frenzy kicked off.

If there's something in that correlation, then actually the Safety Council is unlikely to be the beginning of the end — but it may come too late to reverse the damage done by the abusers who have run rampant on Twitter for years.

>maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...)

One of solutions: add high volume posters to thematic lists and unfollow them. Check lists when you have time for that.

> maybe you've got too many and the high volume posters drown out the good signal from the low volume posters (that's where I am at, and don't know how quite to fix it...)

Unfollow. Seriously, that's the best way to decrease noise. Yeah, perhaps they do occasionally tweet something interesting. But if 50%+ is just noise, it's hardly worth it. I'll look for their content elsewhere.

OMG. I left twitter a while ago and now seeing that it turns into a digital nanny state makes me even happier to be out.

If you're the type of person to say something likely to be censored on Twitter, we don't want you on there anyway.

You envision some perfect censorship filter. What if reality differs from your ideal?

What if, miracle of miracles, you and I disagree on what should or should not be censored? What if Twitter straight up abuses this power? Either way, the result may be fewer users, and this could hurt Twitter as a business.

"We"? Are you the queen?

Which of Twitter's unacceptable content policies do you find objectionable? I agree with all of them, and I think the vast majority of Twitter users do as well.

https://twitter.com/rules

Instead of rules, look at what's being censored and tell us if you agree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Twitter

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/censoring-...

And so on.

I do not have any problems with Twitter's actions in the New Yorker article. I don't find "slippery slope" arguments persuasive when there is real harassment being committed right now. I don't think the wikipedia link is relevant to this conversation; it seems to be about state censorship. The "Controversy" section as it's written now is obviously not NPOV and cites no sources.

Exactly. Give them the tools and they'll censor whatever the fashion of the day calls offensive.

I know! It starts when you can't call a woman a slut, threaten her life, and post her private details and nude pictures on Twitter, and then before you know it you can't print out her picture, ejaculate onto it, and mail the soiled photo to her family[1]. What a crazy world we're headed towards.

[1] Why yes, this does actually happen. Harassment on the Internet is no joke. http://blog.unburntwitch.com/post/139084743809/why-i-just-dr...

Exactly! So let's just pick that one thing, and then invent some "guidelines" that totally won't prevent anything like that ever, but allow you to arbitrarily censor people with the wrong opinions. Awesome! War against "harrassment", mission accomplished!

Entitlement generation.

I don't have a problem with Twitter "arbitrarily censor[ing] people with the wrong opinions." Its their platform and they don't have to give a voice to everyone who has one, they can do whatever they please and promote any agenda they want. That is their choice. If you don't like Twitter's rules you're free to start your own site, or write a book. Nobody is entitled to use someone else's site any way they wish.

People are bringing this up to say that it could annoy many users and chase them away, as well as limit their user growth, not that they don't have the right to do it. Bad business decision, in other words.

That's why basic rights like freedom of speech exist, to protect us from such "well-intended" attacks in favor of an alleged "vast majority". "Harassment" as in that policy or other "codes of conduct" can be pretty much anything, in particular now that it has become standard mode of operation to claim victimhood for just about anything to silence other people.

The constitutional right to freedom of speech applies to public (government) institutions, not to private (non-government) institutions like Twitter. Twitter is exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech to disallow certain kinds of content on their platform. There is no violation of anyone's constitutional freedom of speech.

If you think it's a poor business decision, that's your call, and time will tell. But it has precisely nothing to do with "freedom of speech."

Freedom of speech and the First Amendment are two different things, but I suspect you already know this.

No, that's just how he brushes off inconvenient problems.

> maybe your interests have changed, so when you check your timeline its like listening to those old mp3's from the 90's that you still keep around (not your current tastes, and terrible encoding rates), so now you need to curate a new timeline, and that's a lot of work, and where to start?!?

Lists could be used as forkable alternate universes, but Twitter does not provide the tools.

- keep high and low frequency users in separate or topical lists, keeping in mind that people may change tweet frequency

- create annual (past you, future you) lists and fork each year, removing people or topics that are no longer aligned

Instead of Twitter black box curation that cannot possibly serve the millions of niche threads and communities, Twitter could enable 3rd-party analytics for refactoring lists/streams by metrics that are under the control of users. Even the curation signals could be crowd-sourced on Twitter itself, with appropriate API support.

Twitter could have an API competition to re-engage 3rd parties. Use the raw datasets already available to academia and identify new signals and APIs to enable client side, human "intelligence augmentation" innovation in curation analytics. As a side effect, curation will provide new signals for targeting.

The safety council is not likely to achieve much, but it's a very necessary step in the right direction. Otherwise the threat of driveby harrasment flashmobs is going to start driving people (especially women) off twitter.

Twitter is a niche site, it's not built on appealing to everyone. It's by far my favourite social network, but Facebook provides a more populist service.

Analogy time: I feel like everyone thinks of Facebook and Twitter as Coke vs Pepsi, including Twitter's head honchos. Facebook have this unique combination that is massively successful, Twitter are desperately trying to imitate it.

They should look at it more like Coke and Sprite. Sprite offers a different taste, it's for us guys that like lemonade. Why not crush the lemonade game, rather than gun for Coke? (I know that Sprite is owned by Coca-Cola, the analogy doesn't run forever)

The difference for me is Facebook is how I communicate with people I know, and Twitter with people I don't. To me they are different things. Of course not for everyone.

I like this analogy: Twitter intrinsically isn't Facebook, and it wouldn't make sense for it to try to be. Having that diversity in the marketplace is a good thing, and soft drinks demonstrate that such situations can absolutely be sustainable.

(Aside: if you make it Coke vs. 7-Up, you'll dodge that last complaint.)

I always considered Twitter to be a subset of Facebook, namely the status update.

> I know that Sprite is owned by Coca-Cola, the analogy doesn't run forever

It's a great analogy and I think it runs that far (that Twitter might be best served by becoming a subsidiary of a larger tech or media company).

A better analogy might be those smaller cola brands with higher caffeine levels. I don't know if you have these in the US; in Germany, there are a lot of them (e.g. Fritz Kola, Afri Cola, Club Mate Cola).

On the outside, it looks similar to Coke/Pepsi (still cola), but it has a vastly different and smaller audience (people who need caffeine, but despise the sugariness of energy drinks). But they stay in their niche, because any attempt to replicate Coke/Pepsi would get them crushed between those two.

maybe the analogy runs further than you think.. there's a lot of natural complements between these products, one is a runaway moneymaking success while the other product is more niche, but they can be sold/advertised together for bigger impact...why shouldn't they be owned by the same company?

I think Twitter's issue is a vision problem, they don't have a good idea of what they're trying to do.

Facebook's is trying to connect the world - this leads to FB messenger, Oculus, Instagram, trying to buy Snapchat, internet.org - basically acquiring or creating what they can to drive human interaction and communication online.

Twitter has one thing they built that they've made awkward changes to which most people seem not to care about. Closing their open APIs which built on Twitters core value was a mistake and their attempts to monetize in weird ways at the cost of their own usefulness has also not worked out.

I would say the mission of Twitter seems to be "help people promote their personal brand". Unfortunately for them, not everyone is interested in either doing that or reading about other people doing it.

The sad thing is, one of Twitter's core values is to reach every person on the planet.

Who was the early employee that argued that Twitter should federate? When they ignored that they went down this inevitable road of world domination or bust. There's no turning back now.

(side note: the fact that I couldn't find the name of the person who argued for this just shows how broken web search is today. When people argue that DuckDuckGo has poor search results I always scratch my head because unless your query is a one syllable common query you will not be able to find it on Google either.)

Alex Payne: https://al3x.net/2010/09/15/last-thing-about-twitter.html

"Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. "

Yes! Thank you! Was starting to think I was crazy.

Is this it? It was the first hit on HN Search.

http://venomousporridge.com/post/30043951343/is-a-federated-...

That's an article about federation, but is that the Twitter employee who had internally pushed for them to become federated during their early days? I don't see any info about that in that post.

No idea....I just figured there might be some info on HN about it and decided to search there. Thought it at least might be a start on finding info on the subject :)

I don't know about Twitter itself, but I think there have been a few attempts at federate competitors or protocols. The most recent I can recall is Tent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol)

It seems like Tent has morphed now into this: https://cupcake.io/

GNU Social is probably the most famous open twitter competitor and it uses ostatus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus

Personal experience: While I have DuckDuckGo as the default search engine on my notebook, I end up taking multiple-word queries to Google most of the time because the results are much better there.

In fact, DuckDuckGo is only better for one-word queries for me because of its promoted results (e.g. when I'm searching for the name of an OSS project and it highlights the official website at the top of the results page).

I am a very light twitter user. I've been on for ages; but I really dont post or read tweets; I however have a use for twitter.

Find smart people, and hear what they think. Smart people follow smart or smarter people. Or reply to smart people. The actual intellectual goods is usually not on twitter, but in a forum or a blog post. I usually dont event follow these though leaders on twitter, because I dont want to spend time in this constant partial attention state, I want to be here and now at 100%, in this piece of code, project or post/book. You see noise is my enemy. The size of a community is ironically then a curse. That's why I loved HN so much in the beginning. Smart guys like PG. The thing is, the smarts are distributed as a bell curve...

This is definitely right. Creation on Twitter isn't for everyone. It's confusing, convoluted and hard to use. Consuming Twitter is something almost everyone does unwittingly. New stories are generated there, celebrities post directly. It tears down walls between PR and the masses. It's a great service, but truly Twitter must give up on the idea that it's going to be able to get everyone or even a larger chunk of the population to actively send messages there -- it can't and won't.

Not sure if this formula allows twitter to be highly profitable but allows it to be a great tool:

- Don't tweet (I never did it): Twitter is for broadcasting and most people have nothing important to broadcast.

- Follow a maximum of 20 accounts. Be very picky and choose wisely. I don't follow friends (this is not FB). Spam and noise will almost disappear.

"Twitter is the world’s most important social network."

Not it's not. It's a great tool for news journalists and announcements (Tesla). I don't like Twitter, I don't know how to use it and it doesn't provide enough value for me to care to learn. I like some funny stuff like Borat Dev Ops or WeWantPlates. But short of that I don't need extra cognitive overhead. Newspapers, HN etc. are my frontends for Twitter.

> "Twitter is the world’s most important social network."

> "Not it's not." ... "I don't like Twitter"

What does you liking it or disliking it have anything to do with Twitter being the 'world's most important social network'? You only have to look at it's traffic and influence to know its position on the web. Whilst Facebook and Instagram are larger than Twitter terms of users, it could be argued that Twitter fills a more important niche in terms of the diversity of its content and its role as a fast moving news source.

   fast moving news source.

There is a hard trade-off in news between speed and accuracy.

Twitter helped moved news away from accuracy. This is a negative development as truth is more important than speed in most cases for most people most of the time. For all its flaws, the old media had professional journalist that at least occasionally engaged in fact-checking, however perfunctory. This has completely gone out of the window, for many reasons, the most important of which is probably the collapse of ad-revenue and print sales, which isn't Twitter's fault. But Twitter has made things worse.

Twitter is a peer-to-peer tabloid.

Rant mode on:

If the last few years of really paying attention has taught me one thing, it's that honest-to-god journalism, as in checking facts, vetting sources, and reporting stories as objectively as possible is dead. Completely and totally dead. Most people taking up that title flatly do not deserve it.

Finding out what actual people are doing and what's happening in situations like Ferguson and the Arab Spring is a lot more important than some self-important agenda pusher's view on it. Journalism has failed the people it's supposed to serve, so now it's on the people to sort the information and come to their own conclusions.

It's not like the vox populi could do much worse than the mainstream media...

Twitter may be "the most important social network for X" where X is "for reporters getting quotes" or "for fast moving news sources" or some other niche, but calling it "the most important social network" without any sort of qualification is downright silly.

He's actually pretty much spot on. It's not a coincidence that Twitter has 5x less users than Facebook after so many years.

> It could become a venture like Wikipedia, run by a nonprofit that depends on donations

That would be a very good decision. Could also help persuade them for having everything behind a public API again.

This is less unrealistic than it might seem at first. Twitter is no longer mostly owned by VCs looking for their 10x return - it's exited already. So it's now owned by the public, just by a slice of the public who wants to increase profits to increase the valuation. This is still not exactly straightforward to turn into a charity, but it's more realistic than if it was at the point where it was sitting on $700m of VC investments...

I imagine that your pension fund manager would not be happy to take a 50% writeoff on his Twitter position that would ultimately be reflected in your retirement portfolio.

Everyone who owns a share of Twitter is looking for capital gains.

> This is still not exactly straightforward to turn into a charity, but it's more realistic than if it was at the point where it was sitting on $700m of VC investments...

If you think VCs more likely to accept their investment turning into a non-profit than public market investors, then you've never interacted with stock investors.

Twitter trying to turn into a non-profit would lead to a class action lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty. Guaranteed. (If they even got that far without the board and CEO getting replaced.)

So the public aren't looking for 10x returns either? Man.. Missed the days when mom and pops were all in the stock market and you had a chance to buy in on a company when they were still very small.. Seems all the profits already made when a company IPOs

This will never happen voluntarily. You would need a major event, such as bankruptcy, to allow this to happen.

There are many things in the business world where you are at position A and will end up at position B, but there are too many stakeholders who are going to lose by the transition for it to happen peacefully.

I think the transition would be pretty tough to make. If they did it quickly, they would be hammered by investor lawsuits. If they do it slowly, their stock price will fall enough that somebody would likely buy them.

Even assuming everyone bought in at today's low cost base; who would agree to this? Would you voluntarily lose $15+/share for...for what exactly? Greater good?

As it happens, that's precisely the reason why public corporations exist: the greater good.

That this has been forgotten and replaced with unilateral and antisocial concerns like "increase shareholder value at all costs" is an accident along the way. There is no reason why that can't be corrected.

Public corporations exist for the good of the public and are basically funded by the public - even more so if they are largely owned by pension funds.

My point, that being said, was not that this is straightforward. It is clearly not an easy step from public corporation to charity. However, that is a slightly easier step than from VC owned private company to charity, because VCs are very clear about wanting one thing only: capital gains, and they are not equivalent to "the public".

What? You can't be serious..

Twitter's been around for 10 years—and maybe it's just my perception—but I feel like the tech. media has never done anything but hate on them. It's well-founded criticism at times, sure, but at what point does it become a loop of negative attitudes simply based on pre-existing negative attitudes? That's just my take on the whole thing. I personally have some confidence in Twitter and have nothing poor to say about their product / direction.

And after 10 years they can't add a damn edit feature? Little stuff like that that makes it less than desirable to use really upsets me, because they clearly pay top dollar for talent and they have tons of engineers working there (don't even get me started on their shitty mobile web pages).

Obviously they could add it - it wouldn't be hard. Just because it doesn't have feature X doesn't mean it's bad. At that point it's a conscious decision to exclude that feature. Poor performing mobile sites? That is something they could for sure address, especially with the engineering power they have, I agree.

This all sounds like the downfall of taking massive investments and going public.

They are under pressure to keep growing at a high pace. In reality maybe they have grown about as far as they can go. They have substantial revenues and what should be a very profitable business as is.

But will the pressure to grow due to maintaining a high stock price kill them?

They and Pandora. You could probably make quite list of "companies that could be great and nicely profitable except that investors want it to try and be mega-huge".

Twitter has almost $2 billion a year in revenues and 60%+ gross margins. They should be or could be very profitable.

I argue that Twitter, like many other services, has become public infrastructure. Public infrastructure costs money, needs maintenance and is depended upon by many.

As far as I know capitalism hasn't yet come up with an answer to the question about how to privately finance infrastructure without making it so expensive that a large portion of their users have to be excluded. (See public baths, railroads, sewage-systems etc.)

Maybe not everything that is useful can be turned into money.

I see this argument all the time and it has never made any sense to me. Do you honestly consider Twitter to have the same level of utility, ubiquity, and necessity as things like running water, electricity, sewage, roads, etc?

Let's look specifically at just the US for the sake of simplicity: The idea of the Internet in general as a public utility has only very recently become accepted and is still going through growing pains. Even so, the total percentage of people in the US who use the Internet is "only" around 84%.[1] Of those people who use the Internet, around 24% are Twitter users.[2]

If Twitter were to simply vanish overnight, the large majority of people in the US would be completely unaffected. I'm not sure you could say that about any other public utility.

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/06/26/americans-internet-acc... [2] http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fac...

My main issue with Twitter is it grew out of the weird environment that is San Francisco and has all the baggage of people who live within that. That wouldn't be a problem if the service was a normal startup, but it's a platform for influencing public opinion that delves into journalism and politics. For that reason, I wouldn't want it to be considered a public service, never mind one that serves the world.

I agree wholeheartedly, but I don't think it'll disappear. It's considered too important, even if it really isn't.

I really don't see how it's "public infrastructure."

If Twitter disappeared tomorrow, most of the public wouldn't bat an eye.

Hell, I would be actively happy. I really don't like the impact Twitter has had on journalism and on outrage culture. It's too short to be intellectual and seems to encourage the "2 minutes of hate."

I have to second that. Twitter really does provide negative societal value, given that it's almost perfectly designed to drive outrage storms and incoherent, ingroup-pleasing snark in place of journalism. If Twitter suddenly vanished tomorrow, the quality of public debate in the United States would skyrocket.

Wall Street is where tech companies go to die. They make something good, go public, investors demand to make ALL the money on Earth instead of a modest profit for providing a good service, then the service goes to shit because developers have to sacrifice what makes it good to make it more profitable, users leave, service dies.

I'm perfectly happy to make my living in a small company that does good work. I'll never be a billionaire and that's fine with me.

This is the problem with every company that goes to Wall Street. The QER killed any hopes of companies being able to just try things. Instead, the only thing they can do is look to beat this quarter in the next. That is it.

The problem with this thinking is that Twitter is not a software tool that needs to be improved. It's a TV show that has ran its course and is declining. Hollywood knows how to deal with these problems: they end the show, and replace it with a new one. The problem here is that Twitter is an infotainment studio with one single show. And Wall St will not let it run as a startup anymore, incubating early stage new shows like Periscope.

I reject the metaphor. Just because a tool does not gain new followers (heh) anymore, doesn't mean it should be killed. It would be interesting to know if Twitter would be profitable if it is just put into maintenance mode.

My point is, Twitter has value for me the way it is. I don't personally see any reason for changing it. Of course, that's not a reasoning that Wall Street would agree with.

Are there any more popular twitter-like alternatives? I'm aware of Ello, but from what I'm told, too much of the uhh 'artistic community' for me to truly enjoy (my artist friends have unsuccessfully tried persuading me to join).

There's a thing called GNUSocial, which I think is open source and federated. No idea if it's popular, I've never heard of it before someone mentioned it on HN a few days ago. https://gnu.io/

It always depends on your definition of "popular".

Are there users using it regularly? yes.

Thousand? Yes. Millions? No.

How many people do you want on your social network before you consider it popular enough to use?

Great thing about software like GNUSocial is that organizations can run their own social infrastructure, a bit like how organizations could previously run their own email or any other service infrastructure, rather than rely on a third-party company to dispatch it on your behalf.

By organizations, I'm talking about business, government agencies, educational institutions, et cetera.

> a bit like how organizations could previously run their own email [...] infrastructure

"Previously"?

Don't read too much into that, it was a poor choice of wording.

Why does it have to make money? If service such as twitter that can benefit the world in some way without making any money, why force it into a 'business model'?

You would have a point if Twitter was a non profit, but it's a publically traded company and, thus, has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to make money.

...because it costs money to run it? And it costs money to hire good talent to maintain it?

Yes, but I would imagine that cost is not too much. Why not make it into something like a public resource. Often that approach will generate more wealth for the greater community.

Often the for-profit model and fiduciary responsibility can be constraining in wealth creation in general.

Because in order to be brought into existence, young Twitter needed money, and the people who gave them that money did so in return for the right to vote on the future of the company, and the holders of those rights today vote for profit.

If you'd like to see a different kind of company, you should offer to invest in startups under more altruistic terms.

> Twitter is the world’s most important social network.

I see sentiment like this and it just reminds me of how insular journalism is. Twitter is incredibly popular amongst journalists and a certain kind of person, but does that really make it "the most important" social network?

Facebook has an order of magnitude more daily active users. It might not have the appeal to news and political junkies of Twitter, but it's intimately involved in the lives of a billion people.

Calling Twitter the world's most important social network is like calling The New Yorker the world's most important media outlet. It's a niche product for a certain group of journalistically-influential people.

I understand what you're saying, but it's sort of reductive and begging the question to say it's only journalistically-influential people, because in fact Twitter has minted a new class of influential people. Plus, it has also decreased the distance between celebrities and their followers to an unprecedented level.

Sure, "important" is a loaded term, and if you define it as Wall Street does (money), or in terms of Facebook's own KPI (daily active users), then Facebook is far more important. However if you presented the top 1% of viral Facebook posts against the top 1% of viral Tweets, I think you would be hard-pressed to find many people that thought the Facebook posts were more "important". Twitter's problem is that this is very very difficult to quantify, and therefore they get judged by Facebook's chosen KPI, which is frankly nothing but a race to the bottom, because Facebook is taking an unreasonable amount of people's time right now, and there's a way in which the product drives an addictive loop rather than adding any real value.

I definitely agree with you re: insular journalism, though I think Twitter has been more present during world events than FB ever has. For instance, allowing people to mass communicate during crisis. It's much better at breaking news than FB ever has been, which I would say is more important, and IMO the Twitter team needs to recognize that and quit trying to become FB.

> allowing people to mass communicate during crisis.

I'm not so sure about this. I think Safety Check has vastly more usage than Twitter during crises.

Twitter historically dominated the real-time game, but I'm increasingly seeing Facebook do a good job of it as well.

it's better at public events, sure - you see stuff break on twitter because you can SEE it. But the useful part of FB is largely hidden from you. During world events the vast, vast majority of stuff people say on FB is private, but Twitter is more or less public by default. So I would disagree that FB is less "present" -- maybe to you, yes, but systemically and worldwide, I don't think so.

A majority of my news feed posts on Facebook is made up of headline tweets from twitter. I think twitter definitely is the most influential news feed.

My friends don't use twitter so I don't think I've seen a tweet on Facebook in the last month. It's all who you and your friends are

if your news feed was the most important in the world, maybe...

What if you could curate different timelines for yourself? You could have a news timeline, with the NYT and CNN accounts added for example. Then you could have a tech timeline, or a music timeline, etc. This would make consuming the content a lot easier and less jumbled together, I feel.

This sounds like a good fit for Twitter's lists feature[0], if only the standard clients supported it better.

[0] https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460

Good idea. Actually moments should ask you what you're interested in. Kind of like Google Now. I don't need a feed full of celebrity news

Twitter is another instance where a company destroys the one thing (service, product) they do well by attempting to do all other things at the same time. They end up creating a diluted, mediocre thing that everyone just dislikes equally. Horizontal expansion at the cost of vertical depth.

> They see their favorite band straining to become U2. And they hate U2.

This is a perfect analogy.

I used to really like Twitter. But every change they do to the mobile app (or to the service in general) is just polluting the experience of what was once a pretty well controlled stream.

I can't find the group of people I like to follow (developers) anywhere else, so I haven't given up on the service yet. The content is mostly still there. But the friction, and the amount of noise, is increasing drastically.

can you elaborate? what were the things that you really like that they took out? What have they added that you dislike?

The problem is not really with what they've taken out (although pretty much killing TweetDeck still stings), but instead added to the overall experience.

* I'll click a tweet and immediately below it there will be an unrelated "Promoted Tweet". In the same place replies would normally be, so I always need to do a double take to see whether it's a reply or an ad.

* I'll look at my list and it'll always show a list of tweets out of order, the "While you were away" feature. The weird thing is that you can dismiss it, and then it asks you if you liked it; I always say no, but it keeps reappearing.

* They were recently inserting tweets from people I don't follow in my timeline because they were "popular". I think they changed that feature now, but it was very confusing at first.

* Promoted Tweets show way too often and are too similar to real Tweets.

* "Moments" is a joke. I used to like Twitter for live events (normally with just a search) and was excited to have a feature dedicated to that need, but they completely missed the point by making something that is hard to follow and not even close to real time. It's barely usable. That's what made me realize they have no idea what they're doing.

I like to follow a small group of people. My experience is a bit curated. But nowadays, almost everything I do on the mobile or web app will show me content I don't care about. The fact that none of it is controllable by the user (like the "While you were away" feature) is infuriating. This is not even related to ad revenue, it's just a point of user experience they decided to break completely.

I have moved away from the official clients and the experience is a little bit better. Doesn't change the fact that the platform is clearly moving away from the use case that made it popular in the first place, at least for me.

Ever heard of micro-management of a CEO? All these opinions, op-eds, VC advice won't help Jack to focus on the company.

Their fundamental problem is that a tweet is not a great native ad unit. That's where the story ends and a reason why Twitter cannot meet Wall Street expectations.

I like twitter because I can follow people smarter or more informed than me.

My facebook feed, on the other hand, is utterly inane. My thoughtful/smart friends almost never post, and if I unfollow the idiots, I'm left with only ads.

My experience: Twitter has been very useful to get to know influencial people in my line of work. Also, to practice concise expression of ideas. The problem is, Twitter is not very actionable. Yeah, the CEO of X company now follows you. What now? I found following people and writing posts in LinkedIn is more actionable. I connect with leaders in my industry to whom I can send a CV quickly.

Honestly even the changes twitter has made have been poor. Moments should ask you, like Google Now, what you're interested in. What use is a random burst of stuff if you're interested only in big basketball stories? It should blend what you want with what's going on around you in an artful manner. Google even showed the way with this.

Twitter needs to be Twitter. It's not for everyone and that's perfectly OK. The people criticizing it seem to care more about market cap.

maybe they should do like kickstarter did and convert to a public benefit corp.

I can't see the holders of $10bn in equity in Twitter agreeing to that.

New York Times, to Save Itself, Must Scale Back Pulitzer Ambitions

I find it incredible how well newspapers solve other businesses problems, and how poor they are at diagnosing their own.

How is this possible???

whats twitter?

I might be wrong but it appears that Twitter is mostly useful for reporters who want to write a story on something and find it easy to get quotes.

Whereas before this required traveling to the random place where the story takes place (with potential danger and hassle of travel), now they merely have to open twitter and find some random twat with an opinion on the subject. And presto - a quote is ready.

The problem, of course, is that the importance of the quote is greatly diminished and just 'someone with a twitter account thinks X'. If before the reporter actually had to go out and ask people for their opinions which presented an accurate view 'on the ground', now he's getting a view of the 'twitter-sphere' - which might have little bearing on views of affected population at large.

I think that's the crux of the hysterical coverage around this - the media really, really needs Twitter, and no one else cares anymore.

Snapchat is a better way to interact with your friends _and_ with celebrites/strangers/comedians, but it doesn't make for nice neat embedable quotes.

Before Twitter there was a phase where journalists would monitor discussion forums (think vBulletin). I know this because I would take part in speculative discussions and the next day it turned into front page news stories. No sources but obviously came from the discussion. It spooked me and made me realise that modern journalism was already becoming lazy.

So it turns out the "zeitgeist" is just reporters cribbing from gossip.

I don't think it's zeitgeist only. Or at least, not on such a short scale. The pre-internet equivalent of that is interviewing random people on the street about current events, to fill the 2:30 of your news report with something vaguely related to the subject.

Like in Charlie Brooker's "How to report the news": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

Near as I can tell it's primary purpose for the masses is following celebrities. Their growth model should be around helping celebs tweet more.

Yes. Twitter's 140 characters make for perfect little soundbites for lazy journalists.

I hope twitter collapses. Why? they gave api access to developers and business owners to use their site, used this data as free R&D, and yanked access.

It put many companies out of business over night.

They deserve everything they get.

"Nope, it all went downhill when they made the fonts too small!" - HN

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