Jack Dorsey Is Losing Control of Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Jack Dorsey Is Losing Control of Twitter

bloomberg.com

283 pointsmiraj196 comments

Well, one would hope so. Fortunately, Twitter doesn't have one of those "president for life" two-class stock setups like Google and Facebook. The stockholders can fire Dorsey when necessary.

The post-growth phase of a social network doesn't have to mean its collapse. Look at IAC, InterActive Corp (iac.com, ticker IAC). They run a lot of sites - Vimeo, Ask, About, Investopedia, Tinder, OKCupid, etc. - have a market cap of about $5 billion, and keep plugging along. They were started by Barry Diller, the creator of the Home Shopping Channel, something else that keeps plugging along. Diller is still CEO. IAC is boring but useful.

Twitter doesn't have to "exit"; they're already publicly held. They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-growth.

This! A thousand times this. Investors know that infinite growth in a finite environment is impossible. But, they always seem to expect that their project should be an exception, or at least, it should push everything else aside and take the world for itself. Can't we all just get along?

I propose that we call this the Scarface effect: "The world is not enough."

I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding about growth, one that is generally carried by post-growth and deep ecology people. The growth we're talking about here is growth of economic value, not growth of resource consumption. Yes, resources are finite (oil, total attention time of people), but economic value is not.

Entrepreneurs are in this game to create more and more economic value from the same finite resources. Take time: people have roughly the same time now than they had 40 years ago. Yet, we create way more economic value out of this time than 40 years ago, because our productivity has gone up.

Resources are finite, economic value is potentially infinite. Therefore, yes, you can have virtually infinite growth of economic value.

> economic value is potentially infinite

Do you mind explaining how? I'm not sure I understand.

There is a theory in economics that while resources may be limited, through substitution economic growth is limitless. If growth in an economy is limitless, the economic value of a company is potentially infinite.

http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/can-economic-growth-conti...

I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just trying to explain the thought.

It's wrong.

The concept of infinite substitutability was presented as a "principle" in a 1976 paper, itself trying to argue out of the all too obvious implications of Limits to Growth (1972).

"The Age of Substitutability", H. E. Goeller and Alvin M. Weinberg, The American Economic Rrview, Vol. 68, No. 6 (Dec., 1978), pp 1-11 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2951003?seq=1

Somehow this hypothesis has been raised to the level of a scientific law of economics, trumping thermodynamics, physics, chemistry, and 216 years of actual experience of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent industrial periods, as well as economics' own law of diminishing returns.

There's nothing here but wishful thinking.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=infinite+subst...

Yey, I wasn't talking about "infinite substitutability" here. Although it's part of the equation. I'm talking about productivity. How you can derive way more value now from the same quantity of resources than you could 2 centuries ago.

So yes, there is a ceiling in available resources (although there's a whole lot of resources that we can tap in the solar system alone), but as long as you don't see a ceiling in productivity improvement, you don't see a limit to growth.

You may not think you are, but you are.

For productivity, virtually all of the Solow residual disappears if you add energy as a factor. R. U. Ayres and Charles A. S. Hall are two (and independent) authors among many who've demonstrated this. Ping back if you'd like me to dig for specific references.

Orthodox economics of course ignores this.

Economic value is a measure of preferences. If I'd pay a dollar to own a widget instead of the status quo, then the economic value of all the processes that got me that widget is $1.

With that model, saying that economic value is "potentially infinite" is equivalent to saying that there will always be a way to improve someone's life.

In the short term, economic (that is, market exchange) value is determined by psychology. In the long term, economic value is deteŕmined by thermodynamics.

Georgescu-Rogen, Daly, Soddy, Bohm-Bawerk, Marshall, Smith.

Sure.

Imagine if moores law continues going strong, until we have computer's powerful enough to simulate realities. Now anyone can have whatever they want, only limited by computer processing power.

Also, just becuase resources are "finite" doesn't mean we are anywhere close to the limit.

You could just as easily respond by paying "Sure, the universe is finite. Let solve inequality by limiting the amount of resources a person can use to 1 galaxy per person. Nobody needs more resources than an entire galaxy!".

Until we get to that point, we aren't anywhere close to "finite" growth.

You realise "Only limited by computer power" still means "Only limited by available resources"?

A computer isn't a perpetual motion machine. It runs under the laws of physics just as everything else does.

How much energy do you think you would need to truly simulate a galaxy at quantum levels of resolution?

But what if you don't need quantum levels? Then you're into a more subtle argument - confusing an economy of resources with an economy of experiences that can be created using those resources.

It might seem "obvious" how that makes it possible to use less of everything, but if you think it through in detail it really isn't. You still need practical infrastructure, power, and even if everyone is in VR 24/7, you still need nutrients and waste disposal.

You can't start by assuming infinity because Moore's Law, and then pretending it makes all the hard problems go away. It doesn't.

You're right, but it's a moot point for all practical purposes. Of course there is a limit, but if the limit is so high that we'll never reach it, it's as if there's no limit.

The point is, if you can be millions of times more productive with the same quantity of resources, your reserve of economic growth is gigantic. Not truly limitless, of course, but limitless for all intents and purposes.

I wasn't suggesting that we simulate a galaxy. I was suggesting that we capture the entire energy output of a galaxy and give it to one person. And then do that for every person in the world.

There is a lot of energy out there and a lot of technological growth to go before we hit a "finite" limit.

> Therefore, yes, you can have virtually infinite growth of economic value.

I prefer to phrase it as "potentially asymptotically endless growth of economic value". Lording over all of this are the (as far as we currently know) iron laws of thermodynamics. Until the economy is majority fad/fashion-driven and ascribes value literally upon human whimsy, it must derive ground truth value out of those laws, and as far as we know there does not exist an infinite supply of energy. We are a long ways from reaching the asymptote, but even "virtually infinite" will literally cook the planet with an economy using ideal Carnot efficiency-based engines.

> asymptotes

This is brilliantly clarifying, thank you.

That's a good point and I accept your suggestion. But if we are never likely to even see the beginning of the asymptote, we can just treat it as infinite. And people understand "virtually infinite" more than "potentially asymptotically endless" even though you're correct.

> Until the economy is majority fad/fashion-driven and ascribes value literally upon human whimsy, it must derive ground truth value out of those laws.

I would disagree with that, but I'm happy to reconsider if you care to explain more. Economy is based on our preferences, as economic agents. The rationality of our preferences is irrelevant to the economic system. In this way, there is no "ground truth". That's supply and demand, not a cost-driven economy. There is no economy outside of interacting economic agents performing transactions, this is what an economy is.

Whether or not growth in economic value is infinite, no company can grow faster than the overall economy indefinitely, which is what, in theory, determines where investors put their money.

The challenge for twitter is that they were always compared to Facebook and the two, while competing for the same marketing dollars, are delivering different products for different use cases which ultimately means different levels of user numbers and engagement.

Stock markets are speculative, so investors trade on the story and the fundamentals on a sliding scale, in the case of twitter it's fundamentals aren't strong without a road to profit, one that they are also quite far away from, and in terms of story being compared to FB which now has 4x more users and continues to grow doesn't allow it to create a story that investors can rally behind or support it.

Ultimately the main issue with Twitter was lack of leadership and decision making and the failure to acquire Instagram.

If Instagram was a part of Twitter then they would have a secondary social network, that today (although with FB integration) has already outpaced them in terms of user numbers and continues to grow.

That failure is why they are where they are currently. They haven't been able to do a large strategic acquisition that really pushed their company forward and the ones that they have done were mainly add-ons and smaller in comparison that were never able to stand on their own.

Kudos to Mark and Facebook for being decisive and pulling Instagram from out under Twitter, but if Twitter want to get the deal done they should have led with a Billion not $500MM and the deal would have been theirs.

I'll see your Scarface and raise you Johnnie Rocco from Key Largo:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITs-YX1yQ7o

This is a great comment. For most companies, grinding along and sometimes taking a hit, firing people, slow things down and then pick it up again and grow, is the norm. If every company that stops getting massive growth would stop, we wouldn't have factories mass producing our day to day products, the post office wouldn't be delivering us goods anymore, etc. twitter is a mature organisation. There are jobs. There is cashflow. We should stop letting journalists make a big deal of companies that don't have infinite growth and applaud the entrepreneurs that build the monster.

There is another angle that we often don't consider: who the media writes for. In general, the financial press writes for investors (this is the same for the tech media), and so their alarm bells and dire predictions are for investors, not necessarily about underlying fundamentals or facts of a business for everyone else.

- Are these jounalists working for media companies that are competing for time?

- If they are shareholders, they don't seem to be declaring their conflicts of interest.

- For Twitter to respond would require that Twitter be taking editorial positions regarding the activities of competing media conglomerates. ("You're down, you should all just cash out now" [while you have far more daily active customers and revenue per user than a number of TV channels combined].

- Are there competing international interests and biases? Is the market for noiseless citizen media saturated? How much time is there, really?

I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly, but I think you're considering Twitter to be a media company, like a newspaper company? If so, I don't think that comparison is accurate so there'd be no conflict of interest really.

The conflict of interest is if the journalists owned shares of Twitter.

The conflict of interest is that one media company is publishing negative articles about another media company amidst acquisition talks.

What is their interest here? How do they intend to affect the perceived value of Twitter? Are there sources cited? Data? Figures?

I'm still a bit confused. Are you implying that Bloomberg and Twitter are in competition? I'm not so sure they are, really, in any sense.

Bloomberg is a private corporation which sells ads and exercises editorial discretion in publishing market-moving information and/or editorials.

Twitter is a public corporation which hosts Tweets, sells ads, and selects trending Twitter Moments.

Both companies are media services. Both companies compete for ad revenue. Both companies compete for readers' time.

(Medium allows journalists to publish information and/or editorials for free (or, now, for subscription revenue from membership programs)).

>We should stop letting journalists make a big deal of companies that don't have infinite growth

Im not sure if thats the main audience pushing the narrative of growth. There is an industry that created the "growth hacker" position, and I dont think it was journalism.

But then the media could at least question those assertions along with the narrative.

> There is an industry that created the "growth hacker" position, and I dont think it was journalism

True but it seems that most journalists were keen to embrace that credo. At the end of the day, "hockey-stick growth" has become the predominant narrative; does it matter much where it came from initially?

> They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-growth.

A phrase that sends shudders through stockholders!

It is amazing that companies seem to think that there is infinite growth potential if there ever was any growth -- sometimes you are just at your max level!

I don't think twitter is at max level, I just think that what they think is innovative is not innovative to users.

If you're at your max level then you need to have been profitable quite awhile ago. They aren't and have never really been close.

And if they were to go for profit now they'd be worth of a market cap of a couple billion - many times lower than what they are now.

And that's fine, right?

Market cap is more of a measurement of hype around a tech stock rather than its actual value.

Market cap is a measurement of what investors think the company's value will be after taking into account future prospects (as opposed to what its value is today without considering the future). This can occasionally lead to weird situations like companies whose market cap is less than the value of the company's assets.

Yes, and what investors think of future prospects are influenced by hype.

...unless your revenue is fine, but you've hired a couple thousand more people than you should.

> A phrase that sends shudders through stockholders!

Growth is good because it causes the share price to increase.

However, a company with low (or zero) growth and solid profits can still be a good investment if it pays good dividends.

Unfortunately, Twitter does not have growth or profit.

The challenge is that their market cap (>10mm) demands growth.

People demand growth. Market capitalizations do not demand growth.

It's probable that you're speaking metaphorically here, but your metaphor is abstract enough as to not communicate any meaning. It's clear that you think someone is demanding growth. Who is demanding growth? When you figure that out it will be much clearer to you what's going on here.

To justify the market cap, investors are expecting growth. Unprofitable companies only trade at 7 times revenue when buyers (investors) expect them to grow and eventually become profitable. Otherwise you'd be waiting a long time to get your investment back.

So investors demand growth. But not only that, they demand sevenfold growth. That's much less abstract.

And it's also hilarious and a perfect example of why Twitter is a perfect example of the tech bubble. Twitter is not going to grow in value sevenfold: in ten years they have not even broken even yet.

I think portraying it as a fight to the death is more interesting. This is why any new phone is "an iPhone killer" rather than a phone attempting to get some market share.

Think this is more accurate. Maybe they can't exist post growth because in the social media space we have obvious reference to companies like MySpace and Friendster. Where the slow down of growth happened due to competitors that will chip away users/market share until the product becomes largely irrelevant compared to what it once was. In this situation investors are looking to get out for as good as price as possible.

> Twitter doesn't have to "exit"

Some or much of the noise for that is brought on by major shareholders people who bought in and or have large positions which developed when the stock was much higher.

Exactly, it's a game of hot potato which they hope ends being held by a tech giant.

If you're not growing, you're in slow-motion liquidation.

Slow motion liquidation usually gets better prices than a fire sale.

> They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level

Assuming such a thing exists. Which it might not; sure, Twitter could stop trying to generate growth and cut a bunch of costs, but there's no guarantee that that wouldn't result in a gradual (or rapid) exit of user time and attention (in general, or just in the advertiser-valued demographics) to other services, as Twitter stopped moving forward while the market kept moving forward.

The problem here is that it isn't Twitter that needs to accept this but Twitter's shareholders.

Other than that I am totally in agreement with you, Twitter is a success, just not as big a success as some people hoped but that doesn't mean it needs to sell to the highest bidder either. It's just another large company making a modest profit, and there is nothing wrong with that.

I could understand your logic if Twitter was a private company, but it's not. Wall Street demands strong quarterly growth and anything else is failure. So Twitter trimming down to a profitable level only means that its stock is going to gradually decline as more and more investors pull out and reinvest their money into other companies that are growing.

The best thing for Twitter is to go back to being a private company and charting their own future and be free of what Wall Street wants them to be.

Not sure if I can agree with this. Let's pick a random well known public company. Nintendo. They've had their ups and downs and hurricanes of bad news etc. but never is 'selling the company' an idea that gets talked about. Instead, the story is 'what should Nintendo do to grow again. Invest more in mobile games?'. Resulting in feedback which the company now is pursuing. Twitter is a well known brand. Less glorious times need to be dealt with professionally. I understand there are people who'd rather make a quick buck. But the ones that should get the credits and praise in the media are those trying to put things back on track again.

Are you sure "fortunately" is the correct word when comparing unfavorably to Facebook and Google?

Fortunately, Twitter doesn't have one of those "president for life" two-class stock setups like Google and Facebook.

Or News Corp / 21st Century Fox.

I didnt even know all those were owned by one company. That's a trip. I agree Twitter should follow suit to profitably maintain its existing users.

Twitter has huge room for growth, at least 10X from where it is. I just don't think they have done enough to figure out what is preventing so many other people to become its frequent user. In my own experience, I find Twitter's newsfeed algorithm pretty bad and completely lacking stickiness. I can easily find stories that would have kept my attention which should have ranked much above. The presentation of content is fairly complex (too many # and @ to parse). Ranking of re-tweets is especially bad. Lot of essential tools are still missing, for example, I can't even search my own tweets effectively. Lot of essential integration is left to 3rd parties (for example, no official Chrome plugin). If you think about it, we communicate a lot like Twitter by using medium of text messages. However text messages lack lot of desirable features (non searchable, history gets purged, hard to create one-off groups etc). Twitter, if done right, can replace text messages and even emails at large extent in addition to social aspects.

I've recently started using Twitter more to stay in touch with deep learning community and I can absolutely see why less tech-savvy non-fan user would turn away after few attempts. I can also see if they can turn this around and grow 10X in terms of DAW/MAU with good product planning.

The inability to search my own tweets is a huge annoyance because I use retweets and likes as a log of content that I like and admire.

Agree. One more thing they should do better : List

Do you mean Lists? It's a great feature, but Twitter hasn't leveraged it yet. Only power users seem to do anything with it.

So you mean make it more Slack-y ?

It's dying because they didn't manage the tweet-storm dynamic. Journalists love it -- it means they don't need to leave the office and find actual news stories to report -- but to the ordinary public it's a platform for expression that might as well have "DANGER: LANDMINES" signs posted all around it.

Come and hear angry people ranting at the internet!

Rants and tweet-storms get lots of views, lots of clicks. But they are not necessarily what most people want to see. Most people are not on Twitter most of the time. And for most people, their primary exposure to Twitter is "oh look, there's yet another news story about a "public backlash", with a selection of angry tweets embedded in the article".

This is certainly a big turn-off for me. Why should I care about a platform apparently tailored for self-promoting celebrity gossip and low-content, high-drama flamewars?

Beyond that, I've never been able to make any sense out of their threading system; the only way I can figure out what is happening is if someone inside the mess writes an article explaining it and quoting the relevant comments. The actual feeds all seem to be incomprehensible mishmashes of quotes and references to people who aren't present. (I assume there's a view which makes it all hang together if you have an account and actually log in rather than simply browsing, but the fact that I can't really see what's inside the box means I have no motivation to get involved.)

Furthermore, getting too comfortable with a communications medium solely owned and controlled by a single company seems like a recipe for long-term disappointment.

They mess with the chronological order of my timeline and I'm grabbing a hatchet.

The problem is that there are like 10 different types of people with different use cases.

I prefer Twitter when getting information for industries and technology . User exp is better than fb in my opinion. . But somehow they stop making it better . . For simple searching function ...they made it stateless and your search result got refreshed every time u return back to the search page... you have to re-search it again

Out of curiosity, do you think that FB & GOOG would be doing better or worse currently if they didn't have a DFL?

> The company has been rolling out products faster than ever, she noted, and has boosted engagement through enhancements to the timeline, such as showing people the most relevant tweets first.

The endeavor that drove me, a passionate user for several years, off the site for good. It's sad that they watered themselves down to become a second-place Facebook.

Maybe it's not even their fault, and it's just a side effect of being a public company and being measured by growth instead of by the uniqueness and quality of the product. It's still sad.

When the dust settles, there will be lesson in the danger of engagement-metric based product design. Twitter has a "while you were away" feature that shows you their idea of the tweets they'd like you to see first. (Even if you return to the site 5 minutes after your last session.) (This is different from the non-chronological timeline, and doesn't get turned off when you disable that.)

When you dismiss it, it asks you if you'd like to see less of that. It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline. A lot of users have been vocal about hating the feature. By dismissing it are they actually burying certain friends down further on their timeline? Who knows? Some people are guessing correctly what the meaning is, but others aren't. They're feeding a certain amount of garbage input into their algorithms.

I hate that feature so much, I keep telling it to go away and it just keeps coming back.

You can disable it in your settings, if you hated it so much you would have spent the 30 seconds it takes to get rid of it :)

Read my post, that isn't true.

Read my reply, I'm talking about settings, not dismisses.

There's no way to disable that feature.

There are two aspects to the feature. There's not a setting to disable that one. I've disabled the setting that does exist but the while-you-were-away version of the feature persists.

It's disabled in settings. They periodically re-enable it, it's a very user-hostile behavior.

I'm going to expand on this. There are two distinct annoying features.

1. The one you're talking about, messes up the chronological order of the timeline completely. That one is called "Show me the best Tweets first", in settings, and I have disabled it. Some people report Twitter flips the switch whenever they see fit, but that has never happened to me.

2. The second one is a small widget that appears at the top of your timeline that says "while you were away" and shows three tweets. There is no way to disable this. This is what it looks like on a desktop: http://i.imgur.com/R6rPRGo.jpg There are similar ones for mobile. I don't personally care too much about it (I close it... just one of hundreds of annoyances I have to put up with when I use a computer) but there's a huge problem: those three tweets are removed from your timeline, wherever they were. So they mess my timeline up (someone might have tweeted two things in rapid succession, and one of the tweets goes missing because they move it up to that widget). And there is no way to disable this, at all.

I believe that even when you dismiss the recent tweets box, the tweets still don't return to your timeline.

It's baffling bad.

Yes exactly. It's embarrasing. Those tweets are just removed from your timeline and there's no way you can make them return. For someone like me who follows just a few people and intends to read the entire timeline, it is very very bad.

That's their core product there and it's broken. And they don't care. I miss the twicca days... That's the Twitter I liked, a chronological stream of text. I mourn for it.

It's also one of very few changes I've seen (one of which was changing the icon and word for the favorite/like action [which was a breaking change as far as I'm concerned; it changed the semantics of past discussions and eliminated the personal bookmarking aspect]).

I cannot imagine what Twitter is spending its time doing.

Twidere for Android is a great client that respects chronological ordering, saves your previous position, and doesn't show ads. I don't know of a desktop solution. I just put up with their shitty website and avoid it whenever possible.

Add this filter to your uBlock Origin "My Filters" tab:

  twitter.com##has-recap

Edit: To be clear, this hides the dumb "while you were away" box, which is useless for people who read everything anyway like myself.

That feature drove me, a technologist and casual social media user, to use twitter regularly for the first time.

I simply don't have the time or the interest to keep up with a long stream of tweets. It allows me to catch some highlights, and then move on to the never ending live stream.

I don't doubt that there are people who are willing to let Twitter decide for them what content is worthwhile, just that it's sad that that's what the platform is now. A bland community for casual users promoting the same viral content you can get anywhere, rather than a unique community for power users. Those people are only going to see what Twitter decides what is (or what should be) popular which creates a watered-down experience at best, a disturbing and manipulative one at worst.

I follow too many people to read all the tweets and I expect many people do. I created a list of people I don't want to miss tweets from and that helped, but I love the new feature that basically does that for me

> a unique community for power users.

This hasn't been twitter's objective for a long time now. The idea that twitter caters or cares about power users (in my opinion) was put to rest when they decided to severely limit apis and third party tooling years ago.

As a company, they want to be as big as possible which means power users are not their target audience.

This argument works in general, and as much as it annoyed me as a user, I accepted for Google and Facebook changes in the past.

The problem with Applying it to Twitter is that they have never been as big or universal as people assume they are. The median number of tweets from an account is one, active in-stream users lagged freaking Google+ for years, etc. Their shoddy, unintuitive product is practically designed to be power-user heavy, and the network has been so since the beginning. Having a user base thick with big influencers like journalists, celebs, and politicians is a blessing, but Twitter couldn't understand that and blindly followed Facebook's playbook, despite being a hugely different company.

I don't understand why we can't have both. A traditional, unfiltered feed AND a curated one, with users in control what version they want, at any time. Want to see the filtered or curated Twitter? No problem. Want to see the traditional list of tweets? Just switch to that one by clicking a tab. Now powerusers and casual users can enjoy Twitter the way they want.

> I don't understand why we can't have both

Perhaps a non-curated Twitter is bad for business? Twitter and the 'Brands' benefit when the ads show up first, and not below the fold, win-win, right?. I suspect curated Twitter has higher engagement as well, so why keep the other option?

Except that's not remotely true. I have been a big twitter user for years and I am impressed at how unintrusive the change has been. Popular posts are at the very top but the timeline remains mostly unchanged. You're going out of your way to dislike a very small design change.

> I have been a big twitter user for years and I am impressed at how unintrusive the change has been. You're going out of your way to dislike a very small design change.

It might seem unintrusive to you because it doesn't interupt your Twitter workflow, it is definitely intrusive to me and is not a "small design change".

I carefully curate the people I follow, roughly for any given day, I can read the tweets in my timeline written on that day - all of them. When twitter's algorithm "surfaces" certain tweets, it removes them from the regular timeline, so if I dismiss their seemingly randomly selected "While you were away", I wont ever see them again! How brain-damaged is this?

The change works fine for people who have more tweets in their timeline than they can read - which is fine if you trust Twitters algorithm to select the ones you find interesting, and I do not. This is the same bullshit that Facebook does with the very stubborn "Top Posts" ordering

> I carefully curate the people I follow, roughly for any given day, I can read the tweets in my timeline written on that day - all of them. When twitter's algorithm "surfaces" certain tweets, it removes them from the regular timeline, so if I dismiss their seemingly randomly selected "While you were away", I wont ever see them again! How brain-damaged is this?

I have the exact same issue; I follow less than thirty accounts, and I want to read everything from all of them. When I tried dismissing the "While you were away...", I was missing many tweets, so I was forced to turn it back on.

Shameless plug : Try this [1] chrome extension to find popular tweets in your timeline or in search results.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackybird/ddlhmpom...

> It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline.

I'm baffled by this, too. Which is it?

Clicking the dislike button returns a "Okay, we'll show you less like this in the future", which leads one to believe that it's tweet content, not the timeline shenanigans.

As a passionate user since 2008, that feature made Twitter much better. Once you follow 1,000+ people keeping up is impossible. The new tweet-bumping (self-reply) and algorithmic features make Twitter a much more pleasant place.

It now feels much less overrun by marketers. Real interesting discussion is once more possible. Just like the old days.

Discussions? With the Twitter character limit? You can't be serious..

Ironically, your response would fit in a tweet.

Because it's not a typical contribution to a discussion, it's just a very simple truth..

Wow. They really are Yahoo. Founders take a back-seat in the midst of hyper-growth. Outside management team sourced from other industries (CFO of the NFL, for a tech company?). Product pivot into believing they're a media company. Eclipsed by newer technologies. Founder CEO returns amidst flat stock performance and boardroom turmoil. Exploring a sale to other big companies, who can't afford it because the market cap is too inflated. Talk of needing a turnaround CEO.

Maybe they should hire Marissa Mayer. I hear she'll be looking for a job in the near future, and she's got plenty of relevant experience.

Yes, MM can redesign Twitter bird in an all night Hackathon and that can put twitter again in hyper growth mode.

More purple.

Yahoo is even now more profitable and successful than Twitter ever was. I guess Yahoo is only perceived as such a failure because they could have been Google, but the numbers themselves do not look bad. They are making money for almost 2 decades now.

It is much easier to write comments like these than to do 1/10th of what these people have accomplished.

Very true, but that applies to basically everything written on this site.

I'm actually semi-serious with my comment (Mayer would probably make the perfect CEO for Twitter), but nobody in a decision-making position will ever see it.

Marissa Mayer is one of those women who believes their shit is rock solid, when in fact it's very runny which can be compared to the runniness of Yahoos market cap since she became CEO. She is also an elitist who believes you need to have a college degree in order to get things done that she needs done. Now, Yahoo is virtually worthless. Good job Marissa.

I actually don't get much of the Marissa-hate around here. I've worked with her - she was the executive sponsor of a couple projects I worked on when I first got to Google. She has her flaws, but in general she's both smart and very hardworking. CEO of Yahoo is a tough job for anyone - as evidenced by the 5 (!) CEOs in the 5 years before her - but the real mistakes made in Yahoo's history were made in the late 90s and early 2000s.

It's pretty likely Twitter will follow the same path, but the real mistakes made in Twitter's lifetime were made between 2010-2016.

Maybe this is what Twitter is. It Generates a couple billion in revenue. Instead of trying to grow how about shrinking the costs. If a company can consistently generate a billion dollar in cash flow that is pretty good. They don't need to have 4000 employees. Maybe they need to go down to 2000,1000 or 500. Maybe you won't be able to get the best talent, but I am sure you can find some people to run it.

I agree, people have wildly different perceptions from me, and I think their perceptions are tied to stock performance, instead of the fundamentals of whats going on here.

They have created a money printing machine in the middle of San Francisco.

They have 4,000 employees creating continual dilution in the stock and dumping it onto your mom's 401k every single day, and the market still retains a 17 billion market cap. That is printing money pretty freaking well!

Twitter is a success story, in this light, and will have even rosier fundamentals when if it has 1/10th the market cap and 1/3rd the employees.

> Twitter is a success story, in this light, and will have even rosier fundamentals when if it has 1/10th the market cap and 1/3rd the employees.

And what would a 90% loss in Twitter stock do to tech stocks in general?

Would that be enough to cause another bubble to burst?

It would be no different from the story of one venture capital firm marking down the valuation of some other portfolio company.

Also King and Zynga have had performance like that. At the end of the day we are just talking about several billion dollars in valuation.

The S&P500 returns 1 trillion to shareholders annually. If capital interest in the tech sector is really that fickle, then there's no need to kick the can.

San Francisco is begging to return to the "good ole' days" where there was no industry

Sounds like a net positive

Twitter seems like a particularly high profile stock, one of the few known to people who don't play with the latest apps and sites.

Who ever mentioned King or Zynga on a TV show or newspaper?

> Twitter seems like a particularly high profile stock, one of the few known to people who don't play with the latest apps and sites.

> Who ever mentioned King or Zynga on a TV show or newspaper?

Judging from Google News (and just picking 2009 for this exercise), lots of people wrote about Zynga in newspapers (especially the NY Times and USA Today.)

If it turns out that a 17 billion dollar company is the pinnacle of irrational exuberance, when it remains a successful company at 3 billion dollars - for example - then the capital enthusiasm for "tech 2.0" was never really there.

A reality though is that 17 billion is a drop in the bucket in US equities and you are overestimating the relevance of Twitter's market cap problems.

I don't mean "irrational exuberance", I mean irrational pricing.

If Twitter is overvalued by 10x, some models for valuing established tech companies are way off.

well if they had figured it out, the road to 100 million market cap would be a quick one. Just competing views on speculation getting the existing market premium.

Isn't it possible that when you hire 1000 bright engineers to build something like Twitter to scale, they build a bunch of crap and unneeded complexity that makes it difficult to get lean?

It's also worth noting that a huge percentage of those employees are ad people who are sorta necessary for their current revenue model.

That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter. Existing ad sales mechanism and super strong infrastructure seems like it would offer up a lot of opportunities to trim down.

> That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter

Someone else in a different thread mentioned that Twitter isn't exactly in great books with various world governments who are friendly, or at least neutral with Google currently. Is Twitter's revenue worth the additional risk of regulatory scrutiny/antagonism to Google?

Counterpoint: it's a toxic brand which would afford Google diminishing opportunities to get ads in front of a relative savvy, niche audience -- the kind who don't click on, or pay attention to, ads.

Twitter keeps ignoring what its users want, and pushing ridiculous features nobody asked for.

Keep the timeline chronological! Instead of injecting 12 hour old tweets into my timeline randomly, give me a tab of popular tweets by people I follow.

Give me more options to discover interesting discussions. Let me subscribe to or follow hashtags.

Give me more options for filtering out the noise. Let me provide hashtags or keywords I don't care about.

Back before Twitter made the decision to transition from a service to a platform, there were Twitter apps and clients that provided all kinds of great ways to interact with Twitter. But Twitter shut them down, and never bothered to integrate the things that made them great into the official Twitter platform or apps.

Twitter's greatest potential is as a firehose of live data. Give users the tools to use and personalize that data and Twitter will become an indispensable part of people's daily lives.

It does rather boggle the mind how staunchly they refuse to get the basics down. Recent initiatives are misplaced. It's like they're building a bicycle that has heated hand-grips, an espresso machine and a stereo system, but no seat. And then mr. visionary there, instead of noticing the failures in delivery of the core experience, instead starts asking "are we limiting our users' transportation options by making them be on a 2-wheeled self-propelled device?" In other words, hey let's reconsider the ONE THING WE'RE ACTUALLY ABOUT... the Tweet. I mean if you want to kill off the company there are easier ways.

I found a tweet from 2015 via google and wanted to see the surrounding discussion. I couldn't find a way, so I tried just holding page down on the feed, trying to infinitely scroll my way to it. After around 5 minutes it stopped loading tweets.

Oh well.

edit: I meant this to be a reply to the "failure to handle the basics" post.

There's no way to refresh a tweet in the Android app to load new replies, either. Even if I leave that tweet and come back to it, it often only pulls up locally cached replies.

And the replies are often neither chronological nor threaded in any meaningful way. I know the 140 character limit strongly discourages meaningful discussion, but I'm starting to think they believe that every single tweet should stand alone. That replies, likes, and retweets are nothing more than a metric to judge the quality or interestingness of an individual tweet.

In my opinion this isn't about Dorsey but about Twitter.

In 1984, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus unveiled a unicorn. Later investigation revealed it to be a goat with its horns fused together.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/10/2f/e1/102fe1905...

That's hilarious.

Do not click http://www.villagevoice.com/news/heres-the-hideous-goat-crea...

Great metaphor for Twitter, actually. Nice.

This is the reason Jack Dorsey's return was doomed to failure. He was half-time and didn't take control like a general commanding troops must.

He was the Executive Officer but he was not a Chief Executive Officer.

For someone in this position, the natural human incentive is to build consensus and avoid ruffling feathers. An employee revolt could have gotten him fired. He had to worry what people thought.

Steve Job's return to Apple was dominating. He absolutely worked more than anyone else and ran circles around anyone trying to get in his way. And he fired people and replaced the board with friends. Things people would have faulted him for had he not had time to see his plans through.

But..even if he had gone full-time and led a successful coup, he probably would have still failed. Twitter was truly an accident and so no one really knows what it is.

There is only a finite amount of energy a person has and a finite amount of hours awake, you know? I can't imagine trying to re-steer Twitter while also being an effective CEO at a place like Square.

Elon Musk.

Elon has some awesome lieutenants; Shotwell at SpaceX being the best example, who is essentially Tim Cook or Sheryl Sandberg level. That clearly has never existed at Twitter (does/did exist at Square when Keith Rabois was there; not sure about Square now but probably.)

Right but Elon put them there. Part of being a leader is recognizing when you have too much shit to do and finding people you trust, are qualified and delegating tasks to them.

Absolutely. If we were to start cataloguing the ways Jack Dorsey is not Elon Musk we'd be here for a long time.

JB Straubel at Tesla too

Who else thinks Musk has turned into self spreading machine with a broken PID ?

Square and Twitter are both public as opposed to Musk's endeavors, but I still think Musk is a fairly solid example that it might be possible to do.

Turnarounds are super hard. A year isn't long enough and Dorsey would have been wise to both set expectations clearly that this is a 3+ year trek as well as lock in some protective provisions around that timeline.

Given the actual state of affairs though, the Board has a clear fiduciary duty to consider all options.

Since Dorsey didn't give himself enough time to actually effect a true fundamental product/vision turnaround, he would've been far wiser to simply focus on driving revenue as a first step. Then circle back to product later.

It seems the strategy here was either unclear or unrealistic.

On another note, I don't know why the Bay Area is so obsessed with cheesy. I mean, they do the most cliche, cheesy, predictable things in this regard, then try to poorly hype it as "profound and visionary thinking." They keep trying to recreate the magic that happened with Steve Jobs in 1997, for example. And they keep failing.

They probably aren't even really trying to recreate the magic, just trying to associate themselves with it and use that to take credit for what happened in that case. This is the kind of twisted backward stupid logic that was prevalent in the area while I was there (2008 - 2011). It was just more BS every time.

I mean, if you are trying to recreate the magic or emulate what's been done in the past, then do that, rather than do the dumbest things, then try to poorly and illogically spin it (in the most tired, played out, and "has never been successful" way) to look like something else.

Add to that the overrepresented judger (MBTI) population, and you have a recipe for the shht of everything past constantly repeating in the worst way, as arrogant egotistical self-centered know-nothing idiots use it to try to credit themselves with being something other than the dumbest shht.

For the same reason Hollywood promotes "Glamour", "Celebrities" and fawns over them on the red carpet. Gotta feed the machine with the bright-eyed and the impressionable.

TWTR has such much potential, there is not single day goes by that I won't hear Twitter's name been mentioned in some news or on TV. With Donald Trump as your Chief Marketing Officer for free, working day and night diligently, how could you not grow your user number?

The only reason you are not growing user number is you have an inferior user experience comparing with Facebook/Snapchat. That is something really easy to fix by just copying what other guys are doing better, but Dorsey did nothing. He lost interest long ago. TWTR does not need to sell, just need someone who is passionate, maybe a good engineer who knows the product.

I would love to have more privacy-focused features and more distance from the whole "everything's public" mantra -- following a user without anyone else knowing, following a user for only a specific hashtag, private-only hashtags.

The whole "everything's public or everything's private" shtick just doesn't work for me.

You can create a private list and add people to that instead of following them publicly. The UX isn't the best, but it works.

A bad UX for privacy-critical features is worse than nothing. I don't want to be privately talking with someone and worry that it might be public to the world because I checked something wrong.

Oh ya, I hear you. All kinds of problems! Was just trying to be helpful for ihsw if they wanted to muddle through.

How I wish hashtags were actually useful. One of the things I hoped to get out of Twitter when I started using it was the ability to follow my favorite authors and hear more about their public appearances (e.g. book signing), progress on new books, release dates and such. Instead, I got "Facebook grade" stuff: look at this funny video, my spouse/child/buddy said something witty, here's some politics/activism in 140 characters, etc. Eventually, I lost interest in Twitter.

This is a pervasive problem in social media: signal-to-noise ratio is awful.

Serious question, I'm genuinely not trolling here. How can Twitter (or any other social site) be expected to maintain a high rate of new users, forever? After the first few hundred million users, wouldn't one expect new registrations to slow down a bit?

There just aren't enough eggs shouting into the void at random celebrities.

Why are all the photos shaded blue? I thought I had highlighted it by accident.

Artistic license.

This is a reference to the Twitter blue bird logo. But yeah, it also caught me by surprise at first.

me too. i was clicking off to the side to try to unselect it

Here is the legacy of Jack and Twitter, ex 1: Dilbert creator:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator-sco...

How much traffic is that?

Ex: 2 Milo. Etc. So... what business is he in?

It's fair to say you've lost control, when the Saudi royal family owns more of the company than you do.

Twitter needs to do the following:

- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing

- Reduce the number of employees to 1,555

- Hire an additional 259-585 quality people (engineers and designers, mainly) to fix user experience and engineering issues

- Start paying attention to the user base and deliver what's actually needed

- Innovate and push things forward, rather than settling into stagnation and decline

There's really not much to it. Twitter is only having problems because they keep messing up, stagnating, or doing the dumbest things.

What the hell is with those numbers? Is it a joke I don't get?

What numbers?

1,555 employees, for example, why that and not 1,500

It's based on some arbitrary thing I did some time ago to determine how large a company should be (6-8 reports per manager and N layers of management; 1 layer = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 = 43, 2 layers = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 = 259, 3 layers = 1 + 6 + 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 + 6 * 6 * 6 * 6 = 1555, 4 layers = 9331, etc).

As Twitter seems to be twice as large as it needs to be (3898 vs. 1949) and as it's obvious more people will need to be hired after any cuts, I arbitrarily chose 1555 and 259/585 (same number of layers, but 8 reports, rather than 6) as the numbers since they add up to about 2000.

Was the arbitrary thing you did somewhat scientific (ie,from reading papers, etc about ideal company size)?

Asking just out of curiosity, I don't think your comment is going to be too popular. I care about this a little bit because of recent cuts I saw at Yahoo.

Twitter being twice as large as it needs to be isn't arbitrary. That's easily seen from all information available. It may not be necessary to have a round of layoffs, but it's at least clear that they've hired too many people. Rather than going the route of layoffs, they could stop hiring more people, clear out the idiot management team that's driving them into the ground, then wait until they've caught up before hiring again.

The number of employees being set to 1555 is what's arbitrary. The actual employee counts (1, 7, 43, 259, 1555, 9331, etc) aren't as arbitrary, as that's what results when one assumes 6-8 reports per manager, then calculates backward to determine the overall company size per added layer of management. That is, if you want 2 layers of management, and you want each manager to have 8 reports, then you'll have an overall size of (1 CEO + 8 executives + 8 * 8 managers + 8 * 8 * 8 individual contributors) 585.

The idea of having no more than 6-8 reports per manager is somewhat based on science (number of things one can hold in short-term memory lining up with the number of people one can effectively manage at a time), but meh.

Also, the less management layers that exist, the better. And as each manager is really only able to handle 6-8 people, once you increase employee counts past a certain amount, another layer of management becomes necessary. This could become more relaxed with better software and increased efficiency (a manager could have 21 reports, for example, if they don't have to heavily/directly manage them all), but I kept going with the 6-8 number, as it gave me a good sense of things.

Another (arbitrary?) reason those numbers seemed good to me was from assessing insertion sort vs. quicksort. That is, if you compare the two, then they are equal when there are 9 items, but insertion sort is a better choice when there's less than 9 items. It was somewhat random, but as I noticed insertion sort is how the mind naturally sorts (when it learns to be more efficient), it cast another vote for using 6-8. When there's more than 8 or 9 things in mind, one's natural tendency is to then try to break things up into chunks (like quicksort), then run the equivalent of insertion sort on each chunk, then merge everything back together.

Thanks for replying! Good analogy!

Twitter where free speech isn't. There will be replacements and Twitter knows it.

It would be interesting to see how much twitters war against feelings and words is effecting their bottom line.

Indeed it would. It seems that after every purge they've fallen a bit farther. It seems very odd, on a platform dedicated to short witted public screeds, that they would get offended by...short witted screeds. Oh well.

The biggest problem I think is that they constantly add features that don't improve the core functionality. For example, Moments really don't help with hashtag filtering, conversation searching, and the like. All they need to do is make it easier to filter conversations, basically. It's not that hard to see why that would get more people on board since they could make sense of their time line. But it seems Dorsey and company would rather just pile on stuff that's not related to that. I don't get their motivation for this. Can someone can explain it?

This along with the recent bidding could explain why Twitter is "suddenly" not censoring anti-Hillary/pro-Trump trending topics anymore. They didn't want anymore negative press about it when the negotiations started.

With the internet split halfway in the current culture war you cannot make money from only half of the audience.

That isnt stopping them from trying.

Maybe he needs to stop managing both Square and Twitter at the same time.

Twitter and Snapchat need to merge. But their stock prices are hyperinflated.

The businesses are very similar. The products are similar. The trends are similar. Even the demographics are similar. It is a shame that Twitter can't be more, when it totally needs to be more. And snapchat can do so much better too.

But the problem might be they are tripping over the problems in front of them, not pursuing solutions to problems that lie ahead.

The sooner Twitter dies the better...

“Jack is a good entrepreneur,” Slingerlend said. “But Twitter needs a turnaround CEO, and that’s a completely different job.”

I am not sure if I agree with the above conclusion that Twitter needs a turnaround CEO. I think Twitter needs to fully execute the live streaming strategy and see where they go from there and Jack needs to become a full time CEO and handoff Square to somebody else. Bring Mark Zuckerburg on to the board so they start learning how to execute on social. These are some small changes they can make to win back investors and win back some credibility.

The USGOV spends roughly $90 billion a year hoping to influence or read the policy intentions of other states and non-state actors. Having shattered the wall between public and private institutions with its $11 billion dollar bailout of General Motors, why not partner with Blackstone Group and take Twitter private? The company's value in advancing US interests is immense and that value will die a swift death in Disney's hands.

Doesn't Disney also export American values, similar to say CNN's contribution to the "soft power" mantra?

I hope you're all happy when the product gets fingerbanged to death by legions of mediocre corporate managers at whichever soulless quarterly-earnings addicted too-lobbied-to-fail corporate institution acquires them, just so the financiers can get their fucking Twitter check.

If Twitter didn't change a fucking thing for the rest of my life I'd still use it and love it. Forever.

It loses money and stopped growing a long time ago. The product you love is unsustainable unfortunately.

It's only unsustainable because they refuse to cut back and do what the top comment on this page talks about: run Twitter like a post-growth company. There's nothing wrong with the product that cannot be fixed. The problem is that investors are demanding unrealistic growth and dividends.

What if they charged you a fee, say a monthly or annual subscription?

Worth it.

Serious question, can you tell me how you use it in a way that you love it? Maybe I'm using it wrong, but I find it to be one more thing on the list of shit I gotta do today. I receive so little value in my day to day life that its barely worth it.

Noto is just dominating hacker news lately.

As a side note, I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too. Twitter itself would probably be a good candidate for such a public company.

>I have been thinking of Yishan-style CEOs for a while now, with board of directors tweeting often too.

What does this mean?

I am thinking of Yishan Wong, formerly of Reddit.

It does speak volumes of Twitter that even Google and Facebook want to keep distance. Is it because there is nothing to see here? no product that works meaningfully?

ouch

Slightly off topic, does anyone know if the portrayal of Jack Dorsey in Hatching Twitter is accurate?

I'm something like twitter user 1019, and joined on day 2 or 3 after it was launch. Before twitter was Odeo, a podcasting company. Their blog post announcing twitter back in the day went something like this:

1. Odeo isn't doing well. 2. We broke into small teams to brainstorm ideas. 3. Jack, one of our devs, had this idea for SMS messaging. 4. Oh, and it also had a web interface. 5. It was quick to build, so here you go (link to twitter). 6. Tell us what you think.

It was, IMHO, incredibly boring at that point, and I didn't use it again for years.

That's my personal recollection of how it was announced. I think history was rewritten a few times maybe?

Edit: Oops, it was NOT doing well. Big difference, sorry.

Slightly off topic again, but what was Odeo like?

I see it referenced everywhere, but what exactly where they trying to do, and what worked/didn't work?

> I see it referenced everywhere, but what exactly where they trying to do, and what worked/didn't work?

It was discovery for podcasts and was destroyed when iTunes included podcasts.

They also had Odeo messages, which was a replacement for the Seattle free Voice Mail numbers that Podcasts often used for audio feedback. For those who had a mic, but didn't want to fiddle with recording software and encoding and emailing an mp3.

It was an awful flash app that rarely worked. Mostly a good way to freeze your browser.

As mentioned, it was a discovery tool for podcasts that. I don't recall the timing with podcasting support in iTunes, but I recall them having problems before iTunes started supporting it: it didn't seem to ever have a business model.

That said, it was the wild west of podcasting back then, so any discovery was helpful. I remember one of the first podcasts I listened to was just Adam Curry driving around Amsterdam smoking and swearing at people.

It was pretty awesome.

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Noah-Glass-get-forced-out-of-T...

I don't see anything in the article about the hatching of twitter but you should read more about the accounts from noah glass.

Its not off-topic at all. the portrayal of Ev Williams in this article looked to me as very disingenuous & deceitful. Ev is not just another board member + co-founder. He has as much stake in seeing Twitter succeed as anyone else.

Without his whole-hearted support at Odeo dont think Twitter would have gotten off the ground. We gotta remember Ev founded Blogger, before Twitter, and Medium after. So he certainly has perspectives on how communications + media evolving in the digital era.

Edit: Typos + Syntax!

But at least he's still got some sweet Rick Owens jackets.

i don't use twitter because i have no idea what my user/pass is. They should just allow authentication via FB

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