Measuring how bad Twitter is
brontecapital.blogspot.com
brontecapital.blogspot.com
I want Twitter to be a feed of news and opinions from organisations and people I care about, but it is far too hard to jump in and see how a conversation started or evolved. It is far too hard to filter out the noise.
Honestly, my RSS feeds give me everything I need and they've been going strong for over 10 years. Sprinkle in a bit of Apple News to fill in the blanks and Twitter quickly finds itself in the "too hard" basket.
The financial state of Twitter highlighted by this article is mind-blowing. How on earth have costs crept up so much with no meaningful improvement in product? As a very astute tech-savvy person, I cannot see anything that Twitter has done in years that have made it better. That stands in stark contrast to Facebook.
I'm sad about this because Twitter has been such an integral part of the modern internet, in democratising information. It's role in the Arab Spring alone was world-changing. It's a pity it hasn't been able to harness this.
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If anything, Facebook and Twitter acted as pacifiers. While people could use them, they stayed inside rather than get involved in the streets.
Only when the authorities cut the connection did shit hit the fan, as the masses ventured outside to keep up what was happening.
Thinking about it, i suspect Twitter was an artifact of the US mobile market. It provided a way to do mass texts at a low cost.
But as people moved to smartphones and push IM platforms, twitter's reason to exist kinda evaporated.
On top of that they had basically handed the task of innovating over to third parties via their APIs.
I still recall seeing people use Tweetdeck on desktop Windows with multiple columns set up on different topics, hashtags, and people during large events. This to allow them to track the full breath of what was happening at a glance.
Crazy thing is that Twitter did integrate the "column" concept into their service, via lists. But neither their site nor their apps allow us to access those lists in any way similar to Tweetdeck. In contrast, most third party clients will support a column view these days.
However, it takes far too long to really understand the value of the service—took me several years before I really "got" it and my curated feed was something I actually enjoyed reading and participating in.
Third, I don't believe twitter understands the value I described above. They've made no meaningful progress in line with that value in their product that would indicate they understand it or are interested in increasing the value, or even preserving it.
b) Twitter acquired Tweetdeck, to their credit, and it still works for exactly what you describe. They really should have innovated on lists more in the actual product, though, completely agree.
This for me, as I've mentioned before on HN, is the main reason that Twitter is a terrible service and losing so much money. The users (especially new users) have to invest far too much of their own time curating their feed in order to make the information Twitter provides enjoyable/useful, hell, perhaps even fun.
Contrast this with Reddit, Facebook or any other social media platform. The heavy lifting is done for you. You create an account and a large amount of interesting, neatly categorised and useful information is curated for you according to your tastes. These websites are instantly sticky, and keep their users coming back for more.
If Twitter can't get something as straightforward as a fucking onboarding user experience right, I dread to think what else lives under the hood that is a festering pile of dog shit.
Add to this that a large amount of the Tweets being generated these days are automated and you've basically got a platform of bots talking to one another, with no value for us humans who aren't prepared to spend half a day curating their twitter feed.
Very soon Jack and his shareholders are going to own 100% of nothing unless some drastic changes are made to the Twitter platform.
Huh? Did you read the articles? Can you explain how this jives with the massive increases in revenue?
By that time, big names and whatsnot was on Twitter and you have snowball effect going. And you can observe how the shift goes from sms backed to web and app backed.
But once you mostly interact via web and app, the whole thing about 140 characters goes out the window and you basically turn into a cramped "facebook" (or perhaps and RSS feed).
At the same time the main innovation was not happening at twitter hq, but in third party apps (Tweetdeck etc) that allowed people more control over just what part of the stream they wanted to pay attention to.
Twitter is effectively coasting.
But this isn't a sustainable business, it's basically an unintentional pyramid scam. Businesses need to make a profit in order for people to receive a return on investment, and Twitter has never, not once, ever made a profit.
Investment is not revenue. Their revenue comes from advertising.
Businesses do not need to make a profit in order for people to receive a return on investment. People will always be willing to invest in a company that shows that it may have good growth in the future. Costs can be cut at any time, resulting in an easy profit. The investors care more about growth than profit, as it is a young company.
It's really not ok to accuse people of scams without any evidence just because you don't understand how businesses work.
That said, their product execution has definitely been lacking to say the least. There seems to be some sort of mis-management that is aborting a lot of products and work they're doing internally. For example, the new 'user curated Moments' thing is a good step but they had exactly that feature, called something like custom timelines or collections, many years ago but let it languish. The new algorithmic timeline is exactly similar in some respects to their Discover tab from many years ago. It seems like the product ideas and engineering talent is there, but something's slowing them down...
I would say maybe it's 'too many execs' but then without those execs building relationships maybe we wouldn't see so many Tweets on TV and have governments all over the world using Twitter. It's all very complicated, but yes the gist does seem to be "there are more people at the company than needed."
More importantly, twitter has evolved my thinking on urban design, housing developments, road design, and active travel/transport and am considered a bit of an 'expert' locally. I'm now looking at standing in local elections to become a councillor, with the ambition of becoming Cabinet Member for Transport and
I am aware I am standing in a big echo chamber and have crafted my twitter account to facilitate expanding my thinking in areas that I have a passion for.
Once in a while, I even tweet a picture of cats.
You're right it's an echo chamber, but echo chambers can help you be heard...
Even within IT we have people that many people look to for leadership. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Although I agree that Facebook might have changed more than Twitter I'm wondering myself the same for them. I use Facebook since 2008 or so, and the changes/improvements were very marginally for me. The biggest thing was timeline (already long ago). Since then I only discovered minor stuff ( like "yay, after several years I can finally select emojis in the chat bar", self-playing videos, different like-types, after years finally another search field, ...), but nothing which really answers why Facebook needs that amount and growth of engineers from a pure user perspective.
https://redef.com/channel/media/feed https://redef.com/channel/media/mix
I just don't think a lot of what Twitter is doing is necessary to running a core business. The problem is that they don't have a core business -- they have several factions pushing competing visions of a core business and none of them can gain the upper hand. They need to decide what their core business is and focus on it.
If you look at their list of active users, it's really something a lot of companies would kill for: almost every major politician, journalist, and celebrity in the US, and a similar presence in several other countries. It's just amazing that they can't figure out how to make a profit serving that kind of user base.
I should add that aside from the exceptional success of Steve Jobs at Apple, bringing a founder back to run the company is not a very good sign.
Either they're working on the wrong thing, or they're not working hard enough on the right thing. I don't see too much of a split focus—they know the base they have and they need to extract value while keeping the essence of the experience they have.
I agree that lack of focus is a big problem and wonder what those competing 2-3 visions are.
I think Jack came back because he/the investors thought he was the only person with the political clout, or moral authority, to whip people into line behind him, and get the company moving in one direction
When sustainability is iffy, owners of the company get their vote, and then they get to implement leadership that does care about and pay attention to the numbers. Absent IPOs, a lot of startups are nothing more than glorified boys' clubs, partying on the dime of oblivious investors. It's lousy that the culture of so many companies in startupland hate the bean counters. The little numbers can usually tell a lot.
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Really, what are they doing? This makes no sense
OK, Apple is @ 10Bi per year approximately http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/27/apple-rd-spending-... (but developing hardware and silicon is not cheap
When you look at the billions of R&D dollars which were spent over the past few years, you have to wonder where all the money went. I can't remember the last time Twitter released an innovative product... If ever.
It's not like they were spending their R&D on high-risk ventures like finding a cure for cancer or building a quantum computer. With the kind of R&D they do, you expect to see results at reasonable intervals...
I wouldn't be surprised if there is some kind of fraud going on.
Take for example 2010. R&D was less than $2Bi, but they already had iPhone 4, iPods, maintained two operating systems and bunch of other software, had the desktop line, two laptops lines and launched iPad.
I actually think it's bigger, though. Look at the original ethos of Silicon Valley: two mid-career guys in a garage working off-hours to get something going. There was a culture of cost-consciousness, a scrappy resourcefulness, built into these companies from day 1. Hell, they could've set up shop in San Francisco, but they opted for the suburbs instead, because they wanted to make it work. Quoting Paul Graham, in 2005: "For most startups the model should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive." [2]
Fast forward 10-20 years. Have you been to the Twitter office? It's next to NEMA [1], an apartment complex where a cool $4000/month will get you 1-2 bedrooms. A juice from "The Market" underneath their office will run you $8, to go with your $15 sandwich. Everyone there seems to be OK wearing $100 shirts and expensive shoes. The office itself is impeccably painted and they have art all over the walls.
I don't care about the money per se; the issue is focus. If all the energy dedicated to all this flashiness was dedicated into getting actual business results, Twitter might be in a different place today.
Now, the standard argument against this is, we need to be in SF, and spend all this money, in the name of attracting the best talent. Perhaps, but, you have to wonder, when companies are climbing all over each other to get developers at $150-180K base plus cash bonuses, stock, etc., the case for being in SF gets more difficult.
What I'm really saying is two things: (1) Tech has changed...a lot. Gone are the founding myths of Amazon's door-desks and Bill Gates, whose famous restaurant was a burger place. Now we all eat at two-star Michelin restaurants at $150/plate.
(2) I wonder what this says about SF long-term. Sure, the good people are here, and sure, maybe it'll just be a slight correction. But I really think the case for locating a company elsewhere grows stronger each day given how expensive and difficult it is to run a company from here.
This is probably a terrible idea.
They have a very talented engineering team that will be sought out by every headhunter if that's the case but it all seems baseless.
If they cut their operating costs down, they might actually make money.
Those that leave, by choice or not, will go on to build up other places that don't yet have their product.
Do they? What have they been doing all these years? As a user the product just seems to get worse and worse for me and despite the massive dev team they actually outsourced the mac client...
so the quality of the engineering team doesn't factor in at all. =/
Libya before and Libya now is a perfect example of a complete disaster for the people and another crime against humanity.
Saudi Arabia, the most repressive regime in the region and chief promoter of terrorist ideology and the one place that requires a 'spring' is the western world's best friend in the region and remains 'strangely' but predictably untouched by the 'arab spring'. This is just unadulterated propaganda.
We have far too many of these 'springs' repeated over and over again in the last 100 years to know what's happening and the modus-operandi and yet every story on facebook and twitter naively persist in rehashing this propaganda.
These interventions under the cover of 'human rights' are always to further some agenda and given the massive upheaval and suffering they cause to populations its difficult to see how any believer in humanity can't continue to support these blatantly self serving actions.
I actually think revolution needs to happen by itself. The overlap between the skills needed to organise armed insurrection and to govern are similar.
Issues come up when still-formentig revolutions are prematurely encouraged. They may succeed in toppling the prior regime, but they never forged a shared identity and set of norms fit for rallying, organising and deploying force and order - the bread and butter of nascent governance.
The total cost of R&D and sales is $1.6B per year.
Do the math:
1.6B/4000 = 400K per employee!
^ And that's assuming that all 4000 employees are working on R&D or sales.
That number tells me that there is something REALLY wrong with the company.
What kinds of people get paid $400K per year?
"the plural of anecdote is data"
nice.
According to this blog, the original doesn't include the 'not': http://quotesjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-plural-of-an...
Funny how subverted phrases can supplant the original.
https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-s...
https://about.twitter.com/safety/council
The roster of members is notably liberal-leaning and partisan across the board.
But you are correct, it's clear they make no effort to maintain an impartial and fair platform.
> Twitter is kind of different.
> When Twitter had $450 million of operating losses and $533 million of losses before tax.
For a UK based site, the English here is incredibly poor. The first sentence implies a comparison to when Twitter had a similar level of revenue.
Making sense of it:
> Facebook had $1.974 billion of revenue and $1.008 billion of income before taxes.
> Twitter is kind of different.
> Twitter had $450 million of operating losses and $533 million of losses before tax.
This has been a long time coming and I am positioned to profit from it.
"Twitter revenue is still rising and is running about $2.5 billion per annum. It is a website that once ran extremely well on less than $250 million in costs. (No I am not joking.)
If you can't make this have a 40 percent operating margin then - frankly you are inadequately brutal. Personally I think 50 percent is possible.
At this market cap that works extremely well for a financial buyer. Its a no-brainer even.
So expect it to be bought. By some Wall Street bastard armed with a lot of debt.
And that bastard will fire a lot of people.
If I worked at Twitter I would be preparing my resume and providing a list of really quick things that can be done to improve the user experience - with the code all mapped out. That largely involves getting rid of spam bots and the like. But unless it radically improves the user experience or monetisation and you can convince the new owners you can implement then you are out.
And the fashion-obsessed philosopher king. He is out too whether there is a buyer or not. That is necessary to save the company.
John
PS. Long for the takeout which I see as inevitable."