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Comment by beagle3 | Hacker News Reader

Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve. They've tried small changes, and nothing helped their bottom line. Rumors are that part of the reason is that they are not sure what their "secret sauce" is, so they are reluctant to change anything in fear of harming it.

Also, they are dying. They have never turned a profit. Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users - but they have so far given no indication they can survive independently. And they have had a few billion dollars in funding and ten years to give that indication.

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Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is:

You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.

Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.

But if you see Twitter as a social network, you're subject to a different set of pressures than a blogging platform.

Also, Twitter holds no value to FB, Google, MS, or Yahoo. They all have subsumed parts of its core functionality into their offerings. If they ever get acquired, it's by some 'outsider' that wants to enter this space, like Verizon or Yandex.

They have value to anyone who has an interest in selling interest / location / cross-device based advertising, so that's exactly Facebook, Google, Microsoft. Yahoo would buy it for exactly the same reason they bought Tumblr - trying to stumble on a new business model via acquisition.

>> I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.

A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4 years ago)

ex. “The median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account has just 61 followers.”

It is from a few years ago, maybe things have changed but if that's the experience of the average person why invest time in it?

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-your...

Because most people's tweets are read by their friends/relatives/social circle.

Half of Facebook's users have fewer than 200 friends on it.

This is such an important point, lost in the punditry.

Twitter gets a lot of love from journalists and people with a profile, who write the articles about twitter and control public perception. They have an interest in maintaining a personal brand and have enough visibility that Twitter works for them.

If you listened to those people, Twitter's biggest problem would be trolls writing mean (and often abusive) tweets about them.

Most twitterers would be lucky to be threatened with the rape and murder of their families, frankly.

Which is why Twitter is dying-- there are so, so, so many news curation and aggregation sources. Twitter isn't even all that good, frankly. Reddit does the job way better. (Still a lot of folks that want to fuck my mom though.)

As a social network, it's crap, has been crap and likely will remain crap. The time-based feed tends towards livelock from professional content producers. Their curation mostly suggests people I can follow who would generally prefer I do not engage with them beyond promotion of their brands and gentle applause.

Reddit only appeals to a specific demographic though. Twitter seems to have broader appeal somehow. I think because Twitter conversation is less controlled by a majority.

Would love to see stats on how often average reddit account owners comment and contribute vs average Twitter users.

I think warcher has a very good point about vocal people from other platforms (e.g journalists) giving a massive misconception over Twitters actual appeal and reach.

There is a huge difference between a platform where you shout in to the void and people have to choose to listen and a platform where you shout into the void and people can overhear you. One of those systems favours the popular, the other favours the average person.

Twitter is better than Reddit because it is decentralizes the information from single, topic-related feeds people can post to, to one feed per person that you can subscribe to. This makes it much faster and more convenient than Reddit for getting status posts on things you like, i.e. an independent game developer's latest WIP.

Some people have split accounts that you can choose to follow to receive different kind of status updates from them, so an example of this is a person with a 'oh look this interesting thing happened in my life' account, and a separate account for 'oh jeez I'm really angry and need to vent about this to a subset of people I know in relative privacy'. Because of the nature of twitter it feels easier to throw away or make lots of accounts than, say, facebok.

The real connection comes not when you follow celebrities, but when you're a creator (Or a budding creator), and you interact with other people who are creating things for support or advice; or you have an interest in what your friends are posting and doing, and like viewing their traveling posts and their reactions to things. If you have those sorts of relationships twitter helps facilitate them extremely well, and if you don't, or the people you interact with in that way don't use twitter, then it won't have that value for you.

I suppose all I can say to that is, I do not believe this level of gamesmanship to extract Twitter's value proposition is going to work out. I think they're asking too much of their users, and if they can't figure it out, they're gonna fail.

Carefully note he's talking about accounts, and accounts are probably over 90% bots for "pay $50 for 10000 followers" marketing scams. In comparison you're talking about "average person"

If most accounts aren't people, then what most people do on the service is likely to have nothing in common with what most accounts do on the service.

There is also the orphan account situation. My twitter and facebook and linkedin accounts are unused but not deleted. I would theorize that's yet another problem, once you cross off the list of bots, if the majority of remaining accounts are unused, that means what the majority of accounts do has little to no relationship to what actual active users do. For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem.

There is an even deeper reason the analysis is wrong. Inspired by writing this post I logged into facebook for the first time in months. My kids stopped using it years ago and now posting is very power law distribution where virtually all my timeline posts are now from exactly two people who post or repost something roughly every waking hour and nobody else can keep up with their meme-stream which floods everything else out. When a sample is power law skewed like facebook, words like average and median are irrelevant and meaningless. Power law distributions have other ways to analyze them like half life / doubling intervals and talking about the actual exponent of the distribution and stuff like that. The average post "on facebook" comes from precisely two meme-crazy shitposters I feel familial / workplace obligation or peer pressure to friend, but the average user's post is an entirely different phenomena and is a perhaps annual event at most. Oh look its been a year since my last summer vacation, here's my annual summer vacation post.

There is a similar problem with email, yes 99.9% of email sent is spam no one reads. No that does not mean no one uses email or there are no important emails.

> For marketing and PR purposes I'm sure my unused accounts are being monetized and proudly being counted as a "user", which is a whole nother problem.

They usually apply basic criteria such as monthly active users (MAUs) here when promoting such stats. Your account likely wouldn't meet the criteria. In the case of bots, being "active" can be programmatically achieved, however.

> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space

So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees?

Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.

> What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day?

Not the Mac app that's for sure.

Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples:

[1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html

[2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron

[3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/

[4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb

[5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb

[6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven

[7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard

[8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache

[9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy

[10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago

[11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet

I think Fabric does "help" their revenue ID'ing all those phones where Fabric-enabled apps are installed.

Great list! At some point, I think this would have included Bootstrap as well?

Thanks, I wasn't familiar with many of these projects. I'm still not sure whether all this output justifies the staff, or whether they're over-engineering the hell out of a microblogging service.

>Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.

Parent means their secret, money-making sauce. Not just what makes it appealing to some people.

>Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space

And 90% of them are almost dead.

> Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users

Those companies already have those same users.

Maybe Rupert Murdoch is feeling adventurous again. I mean he did buy MySpace once.

Facebook had essentially all of WhatsApp's users, and they still paid $20B for it. I should have said "users and the time the spend on it".

On Device Research said the overlap was only 24% in the USA. 45% only used Facebook and 31% only used WhatsApp.

Also, WhatsApp was strong in some parts of the globe where Facebook was weaker. In particular, WhatsApp was used in mainland China where Facebook was banned.

>> It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can.

> Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve.

My feeling is the secret sauce was "being cool and disruptive". /s

To secure that position they have, IMO, spent the last few years painting themselves into a corner.

The big problem was that they're profitable at the hundreds-of-millions-per-quarter level but have been trying to spend into the billion+ range.

They uses to have tons of ideas and innovation until they locked the API in preparation for the IPO, but the ways they expected that to generate revenue obviously haven't happened at the scale they hoped for.

Their quarterly reports consistently show that the losses are caused by stock-based compensation and simply having staffed for a much larger business.

What I think is interesting is their direction towards streaming. For instance, they struck a deal to stream NFL games and they will being streaming the RNC and DNC conventions.

That may be a good direction for them to pair with their platform.

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