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Comment by discardorama | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is the Yahoo of this generation.

indeed, it's incredible how twitter is in such disarray

and from the outside, the parallels to yahoo's strategy of the early 2000s are so striking - is it a product company or a media company?

* twitter (the product) has been so slow to improve and fix its issues (minor bugs, spam, harassment/bullying, etc)

* it seems to be going for media deals with the upcoming sports streaming

* vine and periscope started out nice but flamed out after snapchat's stories took over the world

I'm curious to know what's causing all this: are they paralyzed by bureaucracy? did internal politics fighting take over? Any throwaways want to comment?

Single anecdote, but someone who started there a few years ago reported huge chunks of people basically just playing ping pong waiting for IPO+lockout period. They expressed a lot of frustration about it to me.

Don't know if a failure in entry level management like that tells you much more, but it didn't sound like a good sign for a company still on the wrong side of the profit equation.

I think that there investors wanted $10bn from the IPO, they wanted it because they could (and did) get it, but this meant that Twitter needed to heavily monitize and therefore hire and army of folks to sell adverts and so on.

I think that in 2009 Twitter had ~300 employees. Now it's ~4000, I think it actually needs ~500 (based on the products and a realistic need to create revenue). At that scale it will be worth ~$2bn, which would not inspire the current shareholders, so this cannot happen. But at that scale it would be a profitable and sustainable company, and it would last for the next 50 years.

This is one of the essential problems of financialization: companies are able to grow extremely fast, but they can not stay viable if they ever stop growing.

Twitter could be a perfectly fine company where a few hundred employees serve a few hundred million users, but there is not enough profit to be made in that, so it won't happen.

> but they can not stay viable if they ever stop growing

Lots of fine low-growth companies regularly paying their dividends. You can't promise lots of growth, pump up your valuation, fail to deliver and then expect to keep that valuation.

Not really. There is something bigger going on here.

When is the last time you saw an article on the front page of HN/Reddit with blogging advice, or making the case for developing a personal brand? Who are the top ten most up-and-coming bloggers of the last year? It's not just Twitter that's underperforming, the whole social media space right now is super fragmented and lacking in direction.

Back when "the social media space" was people's blogs, a blogroll and pingbacks (or before that, when it was basic HTML and webrings) it was super fragmented, yet somehow the quality was a lot better, the protocols were open and you didn't have to give anyone your private information to participate. Maybe we can go back to that.

Hear, hear! Add the rss protocol and feed readers, and who needs Facebook either. Short tweets or long form, you can write either or both on your own blog.

Indeed - I'd almost say that "fragmentation" was good. What's the opposite of fragmentation? Homogenisation? Centralisation?

Fragmentation allows "scenes" to develop without instantly being overwhelmed by tourists. It allows experimental weird subcultures.

Concentration?

Building a personal brand in 2016 is much less about blogs than it ever has been.

Most of the people I know building big-ish personal media properties in 2016 are doing it on a siloed platform: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Medium.

Building an independent blog from scratch is probably the hardest it's ever been. It can still be done if you're talking to a tight-knit community and you know where they hang out, but "viral" / "social" brands are much more dominant right now.

Twitter was never a business, at least Yahoo was at one point but which was frittered away. Twitter was a clever and powerful idea that could never make money, or at least no one ever saw a way to do it. Of course a lot of folks made money on Twitter by selling it to investors and the public market but otherwise it's not a real business. Twitter should have been (and may become) one of those things like youtube that makes sense as part of another business.

I think so too. I remember the day when it become less relevant to me as a developer - when they locked their api down.

Facebook has locked down their API as well, but they haven't been hurt by it. Even when users give permission to access their friends list, apps can only access their list of friends that are already users of the app. Since in most cases the number of friends already using the app will be 0, the Facebook API is arguably even less useful than Twitter's.

wow that's interesting! I haven't used the FB api in a few years now (using it was how I bought my house). That totally sucks.

Yeah, they really messed things up. I guess Facebook has decided they don't need outside developers anymore.

It's always like that. A company that wants adoption will make things all "open" and "free", and let the developers do the hard work. Once the users are there, turn off the API (or severely restrict it) to keep the users in.

And replicate the most promising business models discovered.

Facebook is doing it right now with messenger chatbots and Amazon is doing it with Alexa.

Developers also abused the API to fill everyone’s feeds with game spam, so I can see why Facebook locked it down.

Ironically, because Facebook requires in-game payments to be processed through their payments platform (for which they take 30%), much of the feed spamming specifically for games is allowed. Take the case of Slotomania - a mobile app that just sold for $4.4 billion last week [1]. Unless you manually uncheck a box in the UI each and every time it is presented - and I'm not exaggerating here - this game will wind up publishing something to your news feed approximately once per minute while you are playing the game. They printed $4.4 billion out of thin air using nothing more than aggressive spamming techniques.

News feed spam that makes Facebook money is allowed. Spam that doesn't is not.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-30/shanghai-g...

Maybe they decided to stop selling out their users to outside developers. I can't think of any good use for friends lists apart from spamming the users' friends.

Ok, I'll bite... :) How did you use the FB api to buy your house?

He probably built a viral thing during the initial land-grab and then sold it.

There were tons of people selling sheep-throwing apps and whatnot back then, and it wasn't uncommon to hear of deals in the hundred-thousand dollar range. Then FB killed the virality.

Pretty much every time Facebook releases a new feature, some lucky sod gets rich. See also: Socialcam, which failed to gain any real traction, but got early access to the feed API, and leveraged that into a pump-and-dump.

Socialcam's "success" came from Facebook's actions publishing API (which is also now locked down). Every time someone watched a video, they would publish that fact on the user's news feed with a link to the video. It's hard to not go viral when you are carpet bombing users' news feeds. They were smart and sold out for $60M before Facebook outlawed the only thing that they had going for them. Unsurprisingly, they are now closed [1].

[1] https://socialcam.com

Twitter never appealed to ordinary users. It always appealed to celebrities and journalists however. Wall St mispriced its future based on the disproportionate media buzz that it received.

This might be a bit of an exaggeration. It has potential, but it's still just too messy and complicated for most users. If that doesn't change, they're going to die a long, slow death. If they do get their act together though, with such an enormous user base, they could come back to life in dramatic fashion very quickly.

Their userbase has always been quite small - just vocal, and getting outsize press attention.

And Snapchat might be the next Twitter.

Yahoo actually made some big profits back in the day and still does. Twitter is around for ten years and was never able to, so it's unlikely that they ever will.

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