Hacker News Reader

Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave.

The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was that he was brought in to sell the company.

Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make. Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent.

I don't want this to seem inflammatory to people as twitter obviously has some serious engineering talent, but does anyone consider them to be a big name in tech anymore? They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitters...

> By way of comparison, the company reported $2.2 billion in revenue for 2015 — meaning that it paid out 31 cents in stock-based compensation for every dollar of sales it collected.

You're going to be fighting several battles that aren't really engineering related,

- how to finally fix harassment that seems to be much more pronounced on your platform than pretty much any other mainstream social media site.

- how to get alot more advertising dollars on your site to an audience that short of reddit, seems to dislike advertising more than most social media sites.

And on top of all of this, you're probably going to have to shrink your engineering head count to make yourself look more appetizing to potential acquirers.

Yikes......

View on HN

> They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume recognition anymore.

PayPal doesn't get you "name recognition" anymore? In fact I would expect Twitter would garner more because of their larger open source initiatives but I still hear lots of chatter about PayPal and the people who have worked there.

Maybe I'm just in a weird bubble but I still consider PayPal one of the big tech names.

Twitter's problem isn't just that they have to fix harassment, it's that they have to do it without touching social justice activism that sure looks similar to it from the outside, right down to the doxing, threats, and smears. Oh, and they'll get no sympathy for getting this wrong as the difference is apparently obvious... except that everyone defines it differently (usually based on who their friends are) and simply assumes the world shares their definition. Good luck.

Isn't the platform just the best medium for harassing and trolling? What else can you do with 140 chars? Have you ever heard about good tweets? It's always negativity.

Twitter's popular with journalists for some reason, most likely because it's an easy way to find potential stories and promote their work. This is probably part of the problem - it means that when ordinary users are nasty to them or their friends it's personal, and the same when they or their friends get their accounts suspended.

And twitter being popular with journalists makes it a fantastic platform for news junkies like myself. But that's mostly a one-way street.

Because only celebrities and journalists benefit from Twitter. It's boring for regular joe's, unless you like to only consume. Or troll :)

Since the election I've been spending time on HN and to a lesser extent Twitter. Every time I visit Twitter I find myself instinctively reaching for the downvote button, but there isn't one.

About the only thing you can do when someone says (or retweets) something totally idiotic on Twitter is either unfollow, or, of course, reply. In other words, there is no way to register disapproval without simultaneously calling attention to the very thing you disapprove of.

One of the absolute best features of HN is the downvote button and the way it is implemented. Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried. A community that lets anyone join has to work hard to maintain a high standard. Downvotes don't kick people out, but they kick bad content off. Twitter has nothing like this, so the worst content gets the most attention. You can choose who you follow but users get no negative feedback on inappropriate tweets. So the norms shift towards whatever creates engagement, which is often outrage, fear, and strongly negative emotional content, with or without any rational foundation.

If Twitter wants engaging and constructive dialog, they need a way to take out the trash.

Unfortunately, Twitter's problem is that their potential for social good and their potential for revenue may never align. Since they are failing at turning a profit, it is unsurprising that they seem to be giving no consideration whatsoever to social responsibility.

+1. I spent a considerable amount of time on Twitter between August and November of this year. I quit cold turkey primarily because of the widespread negativity. Plus, its endless stream of tweets had a certain cheap novelty factor that coaxes you to spend more time on it than is warranted or necessary. HN and Reddit, to some extent, mitigate this in just the way I want.

I'd be interested to hear about what are the reasons and ways people find Twitter useful/interesting.

In contrast with HN, I find the most salient characteristic of Twitter is that negativity. In the days after the election I started referring to it as the national amygdala. It just became an echo chamber for fear. I mostly solved it by ruthlessly unfollowing people who are just venting their emotions and not engaging in critical thought. I made up for it by following people I disagree with and randomly following people that are followed by people I respect.

The thing I like about Twitter is who you can follow. Where else can you engage with Obama, Trump, etc. in a public forum? Without the big name political users, the press, the public intellectuals, Twitter would have nothing. The way the big shots are effectively equal to ordinary users is very democratic. I can @ the POTUS and at least in theory get a reply. There's nothing else out there that enables that kind of communication.

It's a shame that Twitter has done so little with so much. Think of the great newspapers of the past and how seriously many of them took their civic responsibility, and how they crowed about it in their editorial pages. They understood their role in society and the responsibility that came with the power they had. Yet here Twitter finds itself in possession of an unprecendented opportunity and they totally squander it. Completely oblivious to their social responsibility, they chase after ad dollars, and even there they fail.

The problem IMO is the limits. Humans can only read so many tweets and follow so many people. Beyond Dunbar's number (150 - 1500 depending on selectivity) they just blur into a big mess. Twitter's added some tools for curation (likes, user lists) but they aren't really powerful enough to filter tweets in real-time. They need something like Reddit's automod or a machine-learning filter.

The point of Twitter & other social media is empowering the user; they can encourage community members to step up and take civic responsibility, but Twitter's responsibility as such is to provide the platform rather than to run the show. I guess they could openly declare Twitter to be part of the DNC platform, but that would lose a ton of users (although not so much in terms of content). They're better off following a policy similar to Facebook of attempted neutrality.

As a counter argument I present Reddit, which as a downcote button but is even more notorious for its abusive communities. Is it possible that HN is just more heavily represented by mature people who tend to communicate better than average and the Magic isn't really in the downvote algorithm?

Yes. I believe, users are they key. I don't know many online communities, where asking for "original, peer reviewed paper" just to prove your point is common.

I should have mentioned: yes, the community is key. However the technology and the community together create the system. If the technology fails to support the community norms then the makeup of the community itself will shift. Once the elves start leaving middle-earth, it's difficult to recover.

Twitter is a little different because of its scale and the nature of its social graph. HN is a big room where everyone hears everyone else, Twitter is a giant switchboard where you plug in to choose your own mix.

Reddit seems to be something else, but I don't participate there so I don't know much.

Absolutely you are right that HN has a more mature mix of participants, but how does that situation continue? It cannot be solely by the direct efforts of the admins, however heroic, because the site is already too big for that.

The technical Magic has to complement the characteristics of the community.

Downvotes are stronger than upvotes, and the downvoted content gets buried.

I haven't seen this mentioned before, nor does it match with my observations of behavior on the site, though I admit the calculations of how down/up votes contribute to dimming is not transparent. Do you have a reference of where the relative weighting of up vs down votes is discussed?

Sorry, I don't. And I imagine that discussing the details in public would just create more work for the admins and limit their options for tweaking it; probably more trouble than it would be worth to make it transparent.

Totally anecdotal, it's just my perception that a few downvotes are enough to grey something out, a few more and it gets killed and people stop seeing it. The first-order effect is that the worst content just disappears. This is the best possible outcome for things that you just don't want to see. Of course there are community norms about what gets downvoted and so it works as well as it does partly because we have a pretty good crowd here that values rational, constructive discussion.

The second-order effect is that people don't post things that are going to get downvoted, and even delete or edit posts in response to downvoting. This is the dominant effect and the main reason why the system works so well, because really toxic stuff just doesn't get posted very often. The users that don't care about downvotes can still get banned.

The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to. They are inherently democratic. They also scale, which direct moderation obviously does not.

I agree that it would be more trouble than it's worth to make all of the algorithms open. It's minor, but I think the effect you're seeing can work just as well without differential weighting of up and down votes.

The best thing about downvotes is they represent the community policing itself, so they don't generate the resentment that admin activity tends to.

Agreed!

You're probably right about the weighting. Anecdotally, again, I think most posts here get either upvotes or downvotes but not many of both. If so, the weighting doesn't much matter. That's a sign that the community has a consistent idea of what it wants and doesn't want. The guidelines here support that. I suspect these numbers would be very different at Reddit. Where this doesn't hold, the handling of "controversial" posts becomes more important. If Reddit just killed controversial posts, how would Reddit change over time? I guess it would get a bit less noisy. (Disregarding the potential for abuse. Obviously Reddit cannot really disregard this problem given their user base, so I realize I'm oversimplifying.)

A post at (+1,-0) is a very different thing from a post at (+6,-5) and treating these equivalently will tend to favor heat over light.

If you are interested, the Reddit admins discuss this at length and were planning to do this when /r/the_donald took over the entire front page. There are logs of their conversation that goes into the math.

Was the discussion public? Sounds interesting. I wouldn't know where to find that discussion as I don't follow Reddit at all.

The problem with that is that twitter is a single platform with different communities. Implementing downvotes would mean that group A could just downvote posts of group B and vice versa. If downvotes weigh heavier than upvotes then even small groups could bury larger groups into oblivion. Add in sockpuppets and it gets worse.

I don't think users attempting to moderate others is a solution. It would reduce the diversity of opinions. The largest group would just push out unpopular opinions.

Instead you need tools that allows users to give themselves peace without punishing others. Maybe with the help of the followed/followers, i.e. some assistance from the social graph.

Indeed. I didn't go into this level of detail, but this would clearly be a different problem than what we have on HN, where downvoting enforces norms across the whole community. Twitter is exactly as you said, a group of (overlapping) communities sharing a platform. We all see the same comments on HN, but on Twitter everyone has their own feed.

Downvoting on Twitter would need to have very different characteristics for the reasons you mention.

On the other hand, you actually do need users to moderate other users if you want to maintain a civil community. The alternatives are heavy moderation, which doesn't scale and introduces an institutional bias, or a free-for-all, where emotion drowns out thought, which is roughly where Twitter is today.

I absolutely agree the social graph should be leveraged. What if downvotes only by people you follow affect your feed? You already see retweets only from people you follow, so the idea that your followees influence what you see is part of the platform today. This just extends that influence into the negative direction.

Posters absolutely need to see the downvotes they are getting, the point of the feature is to moderate behavior, not just to create a filter bubble.

Obviously it's not a trivial issue and rolling out new features at Twitter's scale isn't easy either. However I'm pretty confident, with all the engineering talent they have, they could make progress if it was actually a priority.

I found "resetting" my timeline to be helpful. Post-election the entire Twitterverse felt like an indignation machine, but then I realized it was a machine I had made.

This Chrome extension worked perfectly for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/twitter-unfollow/m...

I've unfollowed everyone (eight years worth of following!), and have been slowly rebuilding the timeline. Strangely cathartic, and the FOMO fades quickly.

It's also nice to start from zero again, rebuilding your interests and filling your universe with thoughtful people in a deliberate and considered way. I wish more social networks made un-collecting as intuitive and organic as following/collecting.

Unfollow is the right answer! Twitter is somewhere where there is no "forum" or "topic", you have to build your own out of people you find benefit from following. If someone's posting stuff you consider bad, then don't follow them. You control the quality of your twitter feed.

Big trending hashtags are always going to have a large proportion of garbage in. Report the spam and pick out the gems with RT; it's even possible to make friends this way.

I don't think it's actually appropriate to just decide what random people who haven't @-ed you and are talking among themselves is inappropriate. If it's one person harassing another, then sure step in and/or report. The big problem is when a celebrity turns their followers on someone.

Twitter could simply "choose sides".

Yes, they could have the courage to not allow neo-Nazis to use their site as a platform.

They might have the courage, but do they have the judgement to decide who's an actual neo-nazi?

Twitter has a history of political partisanship. They'll ban "racist" conservatives but allow minority "terrorist" organizations.

There's a Pacific Ocean-sized gulf between the current policy and your nightmare scenario.

Slippery slope and all that, but they un-suspended Richard Spencer for "reasons".

After the neo-nazis, who's next? As soon as they "take sides" they are now directly putting a finger on the scale of national and international politics. That's a rathole they absolutely do not want to go down and would very likely be totally unsustainable.

On the other hand, it works pretty well for the Chinese social media.

It's not a nightmare scenario, they literally let terrorists use the platform no problem

> harassment

I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation. Using twitter seems akin to stepping on a soap box on the town square and shouting every single word you say.

Maybe nobody will pay attention to you. Or maybe you'll get a crowd of people who think favorably of you. Maybe someone else will step on his own box and have a conversation with you, but still there for everyone to hear.

And it goes even further, you even have an official scribe who records everything you say and then pins it to the great proclamation board of the city plaza so that everyone who was not there at the time can still follow what you're saying.

This is an incredibly public mode of conversation that people don't realize what they're doing.

And well, if you say something that people disagree with you will get booing, hissing, insults, threats from a whole mob... maybe just because you're too loud. This would be the risk if you stepped on a box of a real place.

You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not as regular citizen discussing things with friends.

> maybe just because you're too loud. This would be the risk if you stepped on a box of a real place.

Or maybe just because you're Jewish.

https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/judgments/sentencing-remarks-of...

> You have to realize that the mob shouting you down probably doesn't really mean to attack a person. It is verbally attacking a public speaker on the city plaza. You get treated akin to an unpopular politician, not as regular citizen discussing things with friends.

The case I linked above put someone in fear of their life.

It's disappointing to see people claim this is not really an attack.

Well, actually illegal behavior is for the legal system to deal with.

But if twitter is a public, open platform with global reach then you will also get people who react to you like a public speaker. Which includes things that do not meet the legal harassment standards. Just the texual equivalent of booing, hissing and throwing insults at people to get them off the stage.

And I think people need to be aware of this when they state political opinions on the global twitter soapbox instead of doing it among their friends.

I'm sure changes can be made to dampen it. But this is the current situation. And I'm not sure harassment is a good way to describe it.

> texual equivalent of booing, hissing and throwing insults at people to get them off the stage

Which in most public speaking venues will get you thrown out, and if you do it in the open air badly enough you can also get arrested. (America is rather unusual in the amount of this it allows, not always to the good)

And if we look at this particular case it's not "booing", but "Over a period of three months .. cruel campaign of vile racist abuse".

Also: "You are currently serving a sentence of 40 months imprisonment, imposed on 17 the December 2015 for stirring up racial hatred against the Jewish comm unity in Golders Green. That offence was committed whilst you were on bail for the present offence, which in turn was committed whilst you were on bail for other offences of sending malicious communications over the internet and harassment." -- I think maybe this guy should not have been allowed Twitter while in prison.

Oh just read the whole thing on aggravating features:

1. This was extreme racial hostility over a prolonged period, 3 months.

2. There was careful planning.

3. The offence was part of a pattern of racist offending.

4. You were acting, in effect, as a member of a group promoting racist activity.

5. The impact on Ms Berger was very considerable.

6. As a Member of Parliament she was providing a service to the public.

7. The offence was committed whilst you were on bail and awaiting sentence for other offences of hate crime committed over the Internet.

I don't know if you got the memo, but HN has a pretty strong voting block of alt-right (neo-nazi) sympathizers. Sorry about your comment getting downed to hell

Everyone is equally "loud" on Twitter. And you're not allowed to hurl racist abuse at speakers in public, either.

(You know, if there was some kind of agreement that tweets containing only the wood "boooo" were definitely not harrasment, that might actually be an improvement on the current situation. It's the "I'm going to find you and murder you" and "incoherent string of racial slurs with frog emoji" that are the problem.

I don't know where you are from but in the US you most certainly are allowed to hurl racist slurs at speakers in public. It's up to the rest of the crowd to then shout back and speak truth back to the racist. As long as the racist is not shouting how to kill said public speaker or speaking libel, he's legally allowed.

Granted, we get into international situations and Twitter is private anyway. Just noting that "allowed" is not as black/white as you paint it and I wouldn't have it any other way. Would rather have minority groups be able to display their true selves to be judged than silenced.

On the "booo" comment though, you may have a helping idea. Maybe instead of a knee-jerk reaction to comment some obscenities, others would just be willing to -1 / boo / disagree in some way. One-click would be used over typing out the comment.

Don't you think services should generally strive for a higher behavior standard than the US penal code? Should anything that doesn't land you in jail be accepted?

In the US, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment "as long as it doesn't promote imminent violence".[1]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States

> I do wonder if this word is even appropriate to the situation.

It's the word appropriate for the actual rampant harassment on Twitter: the threats, threats, verbal abuse etc.; that's literally what harassment means. It may not be appropriate for everything on Twitter. When people talk about harassment on Twitter, they don't mean the hissing and booing, but more the "we're gonna rape you", which is harassment on any other public forum as well, even if directed at someone on a soapbox.

> a big name in tech anymore

Donald Trump is making headlines using Twitter every day. I think that once users/victims become immune to Facebook's dark patterns, Twitter will look pretty good. The only thing it can do to screw that up is continue censoring content and allowing botnets.

What's just bizarre is that they were seriously considering censoring Donald Trump's account at one point and even announced it. From a purely business standpoint, that was a dumb idea even to propose. It makes you wonder about the rationality of management and if they view the company as some sort of hipster San Francisco hobby paid for by VCs and not as a profit making enterprise.

It's amazing from a business perspective, but at a certain point ethical questions arise. Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public? If he had to go through the press, everything he said would be filtered by editors and fact checkers. Incredible business opportunity, but frankly, the fate of the world is in part being determined by Twitter's granting him a platform. I can understand their vacillation around this issue.

> Should Twitter give a world shakingly powerful lier an unfiltered platform to the public?

All Politicians lie. Twitter is not in the business of being a fact checker.

Not all politicians retweet white supremacists, though.

To the downvoters: this is directly relevant, as hate speech violates twitter's rules, and they have indicated that they will apply these rules to Trump's account just like anyone else's:

> Asked whether Twitter would ever consider banning key government officials or even the president himself, a company spokesperson responded via email: “The Twitter Rules prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct, and multiple account abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies.” Pressed on whether that meant that, hypothetically, Trump himself could be suspended were he to violate those policies, a spokesperson confirmed: “The Twitter Rules apply to all accounts, including verified accounts.”

The anti-"hate speech" hysteria is simply reflective of the Silicon Valley political bubble, and its inevitable biases. The MTV video would have been considered hate speech had it been directed at any other ethnicity.

Twitter going out of their way to say that they might ban the US President isn't exactly a sign of the professionalism and maturity people expect from multinational executives.

Rather, I believe the correct interpretation is the opposite. The US President is not demonstrating the level of maturity and professionalism we expect from the leader of the free world. We're not playing small ball here.

> If he had to go through the press, everything he said would be filtered by editors and fact checkers.

Are you joking? The press would say "'...', Donald Trump said on Monday".

Anyone who can't infer the "Donald Trump said" part from the Twitter UI shouldn't be unsupervised near a computer or a newspaper.

You're 100% correct, though some of his sitting on the toilet thoughts might not make it to the public. What the news, when its being done correctly, does is provide surrounding context to interpret the remarks. This is valuable even for normal politicians as, it bears repeating, it is impossible for the population as a whole to be informed on every issue, and most people aren't informed on even a few. Low information constituents will misinterpret remarks without context.

It also encourages him to publicize views that can withstand press scrutiny. The outrageous stuff we see on Twitter might have been self censored if he had to tell it to a skeptical press that will place them in context.

Prior presidents have been very circumspect in what they say, which has reduced the pressure on this point. Extreme situations pressure us to discard gray areas. In order to maintain a healthy civic discourse, we need everyone to cooperate more and be more generous to the other side, but this can't be done unilaterally or you just get steamrolled.

Are you talking about something stronger than they said here?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/11/...

> dumb idea

Most definitely. I think the management logic went something like the following:

- Why aren't twitter's ad impressions worth a fraction of Facebook's?

- Because FB uses an algorithmic feed which allows more precise targeting based on engagement, which has a lot more data points than Retweets or replies.

- OK let's build that.

- Done

- Wait, why is there unsavory content showing up as a trending topic on Twitter?

- Because people engage with it, and due to the shape of Twitter's graph, there's a much greater chance of users encountering content that has not been as thoroughly vetted by the social filter (compared to Facebook).

- We must stop this.

- How, we already offer verified accounts and disallow overt harassment.

- Well, let's just remove unsavory stuff from the trending list.

- Done

- Wait, that didn't really stop it, what else can we do?

- Censorship

- Love it, let's do it. We can help the cause of good by preventing users from seeing content that we deem unsavory.

Donald Trump is making Twitter a key part of a massive tragic farce befalling the USA in the world. Yeah, it's publicity, and likely some money, but it's a toxic horror show.

Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook all have much more impressive technology to show for themselves over the last several years.

"Tech excellence" sounds like such a useless buzzword. There is no such thing, just incrementally better.

Twitter's Github: https://github.com/twitter

Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog, Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.

Can't most of those projects be boiled down to dealing with scaling? Twitter has seemed to have been mostly focused inwards, trying to get themselves more efficient at being Twitter. The other companies I mentioned seem more ambitious in expanding their tech outwards.

That's a No True Scotsman perspective. Scaling isn't easy.

I'm not saying it is easy or disparaging the work of the engineers there. I am saying it seems like they have a different approach to how tech fits in with the goals of the company. To oversimplify, Twitter is focused on efficiency while others are focused on growth. Maybe the actual goals are different, but that is the impression I get looking at their output.

Can't reply to the child comment -- but worth pointing out that open sourcing your growth magic would be considered pretty dumb by most/all of SV. In fact open sourcing your scaling magic is considered dumb by most of SV. Finally, Twitter clearly doesn't have growth magic (or they'd be growing faster) -- but is that an engineer's fault? At the end of the day, any user facing engineering is beholden to the product team. Engineers at Twitter can run experiments, but they can't get those experiments shipped unless a PM is behind it. I'm not saying the PM team at Twitter are blocking awesome ideas -- just that there's a real shortage of awesome ideas that have been proven to work in the Twitter context. It's tough.

[full disclosure, I wrote one of the projects mentioned above.]

Don't forget finagle and scalding.

At the company I work at, various of the above projects are integral to one system or another (though to be fair, there are quite a number of ex-Twitter folks floating around). I'm not a Scala expert, but as far as I can tell Twitter also has a large footprint in that community.

Don't forget Bootstrap CSS.

Your post implies they made the libraries you listed, but they certainly didn't make Mesos or most of those things.

I think Mesos is the only one from that list they didn't make, they were just an early adopter on that one

You're right, they didn't make it and open source it. But they did work closely on it's creation, as far as I know.

(edited above post to remove Mesos mention).

You're actually right Benjamin Hindman now CEO of Mesosphere Inc. started what became the Apache Mesos project while a PHD student at Berkeley, He later left Berkeley, interned at Google, then took a full time role at Twitter where he built out Mesos at scale.

His linkedIn bio: Member of the Technical Staff Twitter March 2010 – May 2013 (3 years 3 months) Built out Apache Mesos (http://mesos.apache.org).

Storm shouldn't really be on the list fwiw. They bought it and then replaced it with Heron after a couple years but barely worked on Storm in the interim. That was all Nathan.

I think they played a big part in shaping Mesos early on if any of the interviews/talks I've listened to are any indicator. They were one of the early adopters and hired one of the people that created the project at Berkley.

In fact they did purely make most of those things. Also they took Mesos from a barely working prototype to a system that scales to 100K+ nodes running many thousands of different workloads in production. They did that not only by hiring Benjamin and paying him to work on it but also by surrounding him with two of the strongest engineers I've ever worked with (John Sirois and Bill Farner) as well as 3 or 4 more I didn't work with as much so I can't say how much they added but it was clearly a large investment. Effectively they seed funded it for almost 4 years. Other people worked on it too, but they were the lion's share of the commits and did almost all of Aurora too.

Tired of hearing devs reel off these projects like they actually matter. None of that is user facing, none of that is worth the thousands of employees.

Stop looking at everything with dev eyes.

Everyone I've met who was a techie there has been one of the best I've encountered. I know everyone here thinks Twitter is a fancy rails site with some Kafka in the back, or whatever, but they actually do have some tough problems to solve. Or did, once upon a time.

My impression is they have an excess of technical talent. They have a huge engineering staff, and from n outside perspective, I'm not convinced their product demands it.

Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., all have much more interesting products, which in turn gives their technical staff many more interesting problems to solve.

The common advice here is "let Twitter be Twitter," i.e., they don't need to expand into new products, let alone crack VR, or self-driving cars, or drone deliveries. That path will need to accompanied by major restructuring.

The moment Dick left was when I felt a disturbance in the twitterverse (but I also have a disdain for Dorsey).

It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment".

I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...

Since the US election, Twitter has been headline newsworthy nearly every day. Whether you think that's a bad thing or not, it's still a potent force in the world, surprisingly to me.

twitter itself is newsworthy, or are you saying what people write on it.

do you consider the email protocol or telephone newsworthy daily?

My local ISP doesn't implement Twitter

I signed up specifically so I could follow Trumps tweets post election. It seems this is where government policy is going to be formed for a while.

> Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock options just to get and retain talent.

Lay off then no need to pay it.

There are 4000 employees, which is about one order of magnitude too much.

You suggest they lay off 90% of their employees?

No, just a hair over three quarters. Anyone can see that's perfectly reasonable.

(...he said, not realizing it was on the close order of what someone else here is advocating. Whence comes the idea that Twitter is overpopulated? Do we hear it from current or ex-Twitter-ers?)

Not going to argue with you. 4000 employees is going to lead to a lot of inertia when doing development (even if only 10% of them were devs). However, the culture and process changes you need to institute in order to make such a change work is not trivial. Probably necessary for the future growth of the company, but could quite easily end up killing it in the process.

Not asking you to argue with me. I'd just be interested to see some substantiation for the claim that Twitter is overstaffed. It seems like that claim turns up a lot, and I'm sort of surprised that no one seems to have taken the time to explain why he thinks so.

The claims come from current and ex employees.

Basically, in the least offense terms, doing nothing all day and got nothing to do.

In my case, it's merely a matter of having worked in large organisations before. The communication overhead is too large. If you have 400 programmers, that's at least 40 teams. If they are all working on the same product, then you have a significant problem with communication.

I once worked on a product with 5000 programmers. Average production was 1 line of code per day per programmer. While LOC may be a poor measure of productivity, at the 250 lines per year level, you've got a serious problem no matter how you look at it.

With those numbers, we were churning 1.25 million lines of code a year, which obviously could not be done without a very large team. But the cost is crippling. Not only that, but there is just no way in hell you are going to hire 5000 good programmers. Deadwood is going to be a massive problem.

What's the solution? Simplification, prioritisation and diversification. If you have to churn a million lines of code a year to say competitive, then it may be too late. Before it gets to that point you need to simplify your code base and throw away the things you don't need. You need to think very clearly about what makes money and what doesn't and you need to have clear priorities for how to downsize your engineering work to a point where the costs don't eat the profit. Finally, once you've got a handle on that, you can build your business by diversifying into separate business areas -- there is no problem churning a million lines of code if it is not all in one product. 10 products, churning 100K LOC each will be much more manageable. But probably you will be much more profitable than that if you manage 10 products each churning 20K LOC per year (on the assumption that a simpler product will be easier to monetise).

Again, LOC is not a reasonable metric, I'm only using it to indicate approximate scope in terms that most programmers can understand.

I don't know how many programmers Twitter has. Like I said, even if it is only 10% and the rest are ops, sales, etc I think they have got problems. TBH, I have trouble imagining Twitter utilising 3000+ sales people effectively as well, but that's not my area of expertise so I will keep my mouth shut.

Jesus Christ. Yes, perfectly reasonable.

I think the product is solid, for a specific purpose, for a specific audience. However, they've failed to figure out the broad appeal that can lead to advertising dollars. I think their usage demographic is too narrow for a public company level of earnings. To me this is a product leadership issue. I agree that perhaps Jack Dorsey would be the next to leave. The biggest fear I, as a Twitter fan, would have is a private equity fire sale.

Anecdotally speaking, in the last 2 years, I've seen 3 ex-Twitter (as their most recent position) people apply, and none of them made it passed the second phone interview, which was the first real technical one.

I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants.

I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com