Twitter's Dorsey Rallies Staff Around Independent Strategy in Internal Memo
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The end is just bizarre, as if he's being coached to "show appreciation to your closest associates to avoid more churn" and does so in the most literal, superficial way possible.
Felt so robotic it was almost a mail merge
This doesn't just extend to celebrities and politicians. Twitter can do a good job of holding public entities accountable. One example -- companies often react more quickly to customer service complaints submitted via Twitter than those that are submitted directly to the company, since those complaints are now part of the public domain. A failure to respond properly could mean a company gets bad word of mouth at an unprecedented rate.
I rarely find myself actually using Twitter. But despite the financial shortcomings of the company, I agree with Jack Dorsey. Twitter has inherent societal value -- but it lacks real shareholder value.
This strikes me as serious cognitive dissonance. We know what kinds of public goods our society should promote, but our society isn't really structured to facilitate their promotion. Maybe that's why everyone is so angry about politics these days.
Twitter has an 11 billion market cap. The "share price economic metric" values the company at 11 billion dollars. There is nothing wrong that.
Because it doesn't trend upwards it is hard to see the value? There are 4,000 employees dumping their newly authorized stocks on your mom's 401k every single day in exchange for cash. The market still retains an 11-figure valuation for Twitter because there is enough demand for the shares.
First you got to look at who is making money here.
Second you have to look past Twitter's consumer facing product. They have massive infrastructure and massive data and they offer plenty of products from that.
Think about how many little SaaS startups could be inside Twitter hidden beneath that 11 billion market cap. The projects are there, the clients are there.
And before they closed down their API those products were actually being built...
They spent $1.2B on labor and SGA (marketing, sales, rent). They spent $800m on R&D (your guess is as good as mine where this money went, most likely extremely overvalued acqui-hires). They spent $700 on cost of revenue (running servers, hosting fees, electricity presumably - the actual direct costs of providing the service). For a net loss of $500m.
Twitter needs to lay people off and stop spending so much on "R&D". I imagine the company could easily be viable if it downsized.
As citizens we should feel about as bad as Twitter's possible failure as we would about a mismanaged mattress store failing.
My guess is that a large part of Twitter's R&D costs involve initiatives that don't relate to the main site's user experience at all: ads, live streams and mobile apps. Improvements on the sales/admin side for advertisers and content producers can be vital for revenue, but you don't see that if you're a Twitter user rather than a paying customer.
Same with apps: Twitter has Vine, Periscope, and who knows what else in development... But these don't improve the tweeting/timeline UX.
This won't be taken seriously, but I propose nationalizing it. The world needs a good free speech platform and with the actual requirements of the 1st amendment in place Twitter's banning and censorship practices would have to cease. The world might learn to become more tolerant of diverse opinions and thoughts even if they are "mean."
Renaming Twitter to "United States Department of Truth" would be pretty cool though.
Fact is, Twitter has banned people selectively not only in the US but also across the world when tweets fall outside an ideological boundary or the views of the local government. As a private company, it's their right to do so but the world would be better served by a platform that guaranteed freedom of speech.
How do you value that? Maybe not in the Facebook metric of Monthly Active Users?
[1] Think Nuzzel for tweets https://twitter.com/firasd/status/781602728728469504
Guest Matthew Panzarino also made the observation that Twitter's audience goes beyond active users: Millions of people who will never use Twitter will still see tweets every morning on SportsCenter. How to use that reach across media to make money is, of course, an open question for Twitter or a potential buyer.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2016/10/06/ep-169
Can't take feedback like this seriously coming from someone like Gruber with a disproportionately high follower count from being an early adopter.
Only people Twitter as a company and Twitter the service/apps/concept seems to actually benefit are these early adopters and journalists.
Average person has a completely different experience with the service than these people.
Meh, I'm pretty sure now that Twitter is publicly traded it no longer exists to meet some perceived societal need and is now just a profit engine.
I don't like it when CEO's flavor their koolaid with lofty missions, while simultaneously looking to maximize profits.
Twitter deserves the skepticism it is receiving, and I hope a downgraded evaluation waterfalls to further downgrades in the tech sector. Specifically in the SV messaging app space.
Why not? In a capitalist society, it's the only real hope for linking economic output to "the greater good".
As long as companies think it good PR to even pretend to have a loftier goal, then there is incentive for creating and operating companies that actually do. This can only be good. Shouldn't we want them to have this incentive?
Or, would we prefer a society wherein we give social license to all corporations to behave like blatantly psychotic entities--whose only goal is profit--imbued with corporate personhood, and wielding the bulk of the economic, political, and societal power?
If you have evidence that contradicts what these CEOs have said, then please raise it. But, it's socially counter-productive to issue a blanket condemnation of any CEO at the helm of a for-profit enterprise who expresses a desire to do social good.
So, it's the blanket condemnation that's the problem. If every CEO who claims to have a vision for something "good" is immediately met with skepticism, allegations, and outright anger, I don't think it takes us to a good place.
I confess to taking this a little personally. My business is concerned with social good and we get a good bit of this. Meanwhile, businesses that run rampantly over their customers and everyone else in pursuit of profit get less scrutiny, as it's expected behavior.
It's a perversion of incentives and a self-fulfilling prophecy. In my view, skepticism is healthy, but irredeemable cynicism is hopeless.
Transparent BS like this alienates insiders when it isn't based on substance. I'd say it hurts Twitter as an organization.
However when a company goes public it does in fact become"psychotic entity". It eschews its social cause in pursuit of funding, and supplants it with a single minded focus on profits for shareholders.
That is why PR exist as an industry, to convince consumers that the initial social cause is the primary motivation behind the company's actions. This is a lie.
I would prefer a society where we all accept that this is the only thing corporations are capable of being and then structure the legal systems in which they operate to ensure that their actions don't contradict "the greater good". "Psychotic entities whose only goal is profit" will do fine in any environment, despite lamentations to the contrary.
The PR incentives you're talking about only incentivize companies to look like they're doing nice things. Sometimes the easiest way to achieve that goal is to actually do nice things, but not always.
As you've demonstrated, however, there are two conflicting senses of the word "sustainable". Sustainability for a business means that it accumulates more capital than it expends. Sustainability for human beings is a much fuzzier notion that is tied up in the idea of health: the health of the individual, of our species, and of our environment. We can sacrifice health from these areas to reach different goals, but if our actions continuously deplete it, then they aren't sustainable.
Is it possible to express the human sense of sustainability systematically? I'm not convinced it is, as I think it requires vision and sensitivity to understand health. So I think we need a legal structure which is sensitive in this way in order to create a sustainable society.
Ideally, sure, that sounds great. But it has, thus far, proven to be unworkable. The drive for profit supersedes virtually all else, and much "not good" has been done for that cause. Worse, there has been little to no recompense, even when the public good has been harmed egregiously.
In spite of this, even now, a major ideology says that we need to roll-back what regulations there are.
The political and economic climate don't currently exist to implement what you advocate, but, I do think it's a worthwhile effort. In the meantime, I don't see the downside to encouraging companies to be more socially-oriented, and rewarding those that actually are.
I don't say that lightly either. I've invested in Twitter in more ways that one. I've got shares in Twitter, but that's a tiny part of what I've invested in Twitter: I did a PhD on real-time detection and tracking of breaking news on social media (Twitter), and started a company that uses Twitter to detect breaking news [1] before it it hits mainstream media.
Why would anyone want this when Twitter has already been shown to influence news spread on their network to silence news that goes against their own white west coast american ideology.
- Twitter's user experience is a disaster. It changed very little for years, but there are many frustrations if you use it daily (small image popups, inconsistent behavior, scroll problems ...).
- Twitter do not kick trolls out or give you tools to do it yourself. It does not make any difference if you report them or not.
- News are plenty, but Twitter do nothing to ease the consumption. You can only unfollow to control the firehose, no other tools.
- Recommendations are graph based, not content based, although they have the data.
- Hashtags are not enough to access filtered content, either too much noise or too little signal.
... and many others.
Obviously the Twitter I use didn't change for the last 5 years. So clearly they don't have sense of urgency.
I propose the following steps:
1. Fire Jack. 2. Put it up for sale 3. Bring the costs down to be able to have at least a 200 million dollar profit in year 2. 4. Don't tell anyone :)
I would contend Dorsey was doing this to making it difficult to make a bid.