Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit
reuters.com
reuters.com
Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.
a handler is somebody who makes the blue check feel comfortable on the platform, e.g. banning people who disagree with them
http://www.businessinsider.com/realdonaldtrump-data-suggests...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/10...
But Twitter derives business value from recommending people follow Trump on their platform, so they'll keep doing that. Strikes me as selling out - would've preferred they not recommend any political leaders.
A user compiled an absolute SUPER LIST of the best people to follow, and now my feed is full of really interesting information, diverse viewpoints, and stuff I wouldn't find anywhere else.
This one account was kind of the tipping point for me, finding GOOD TWITTER
Another great one from that list is @FermatsLibrary
If I hit 60 it's one in one out and I have to think about which one to drop, that way I keep a feed that updates relatively slowly, is useful and full of content I actually am interested in.
If you follow too many you loose far too much wheat in the chaff.
He's run both companies for awhile now, Twitter has basically been stagnant. Doesn't he supposedly work like 80 hours a week anyway? It's already a full time job. Examples from 2011 and 2016:
http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/13/technology/dorsey_techonomy/...
http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-explains-his-18-h...
Here is he 5 years apart, marketing himself. So if he's actually working 80 hours a week, where are the results? What has Twitter done over the last seven years? He wants to have his cake and eat it, too, yeah?
And here I am, trying to find just one job in tech that's only 40 hours a week.
That's the issue for SM sites like Twitter et al: going from early adopters to mass appeal. As much as some people hate Trump, his tweets likely got a lot of the 300 million non-SF, LA, NYC users involved.
I might be off on user uptake, but the mainstreaming of Twitter is vital for their ad-based model, so anything that appeals beyond the liberal elites is going to be solid for their bottom line.
Exactly. So it has mass appeal :)
That's the sad reality. The Kardasians aren't popular because of people with a brain. Mass appeal matters.
They probably suspend a lot of people every single day, but we don’t notice it.
It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.
I'm not bothered about big Silicon Valley companies, but it can't be easy to satisfy both sides and keep making more money.
Twitter suspends or shadowbans quite a few people, at least if what a fair few people online are saying is true. Not sure their logic behind who exactly they suspend though. Conservatives say they get accounts suspended more, liberals say it's them etc.
Edit:
- For the uninformed: https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
- Archives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tay_Tweets/top/?sort=top&t=all
Seb Gorka
>Mr Gorka denied any anti-Semitism in his family.
>He said his father had protected Jewish boys wearing yellow stars on the way to school as a child. When Communists took power, he supplied information to MI6 before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned (possibly betrayed by Kim Philby). He arrived in the UK after escaping during the 1956 uprising.
How exactly is that "self-proclaimed" when he is denying it.
Or he wore it to reflect his family history and as an anti-communist symbol....
Since nowaday, nazi ideology has several sides, xenophobic, antisemitic, racist ant anti-feminist (i might forgot some), he might agree on at least one, and if you're dead set on defending him you can say he is only xenophobic or something, and the other part of neonazism, he doesn't support, but are you really believing that he wore this to say "i'm anti-communist"? If he did, he must have been seriously misinformed (and anyone this out of touch, honestly, deserve to be kicked of of any job that require you to understand history).
Please do not go tribal on Hn.
Genocidal doesn't necessarily mean he's committed genocide; it means that he's prone to (and to some extent, fascinated by) mass acts of killing. The tweets about promising fire and fury on an entire nation of people (North Korea), telling Fox that we need to kill the terrorist families as well, etc. He gets off feeling like he's the most powerful man in the world.
He's a strongman, whose solutions often involve labeling entire categories of people as bad/evil (Muslims, Mexicans, the media). If you haven't noticed this you're either not paying attention or willfully ignorant.
Generally, threatening war (and generally even going to war) is not considered genocide.
>and to some extent, fascinated by
We don't call people murderers just because they like watching CSI Miami.
In fact, the person Trump was threatening with his "fire and fury" remarks legitimately IS genocidal and has ACTIVE CONCENTRATION CAMPS in his country. Yet you think it's more important to criticize Trump for entering into a war of words, rather than the dictator himself?
Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent North Koreans, since North Korean artillery is spread widely throughout the southern part of the country. That is tragic, and no small part of why we've allowed this madness to go on for so long. But at some point a people must protect their security, and do what must be done.
Too bad there is not a true democracy in the US.
> Taking out North Korea's nuclear capability while preventing a counter attack on South Korea will probably involve the deaths of many innocent North Koreans,
How about we concentrate on their leadership, instead of 'spraying and praying'?
If you're curious, I am on the left.
And yet, if I had to choose between a million North Koreans, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, and tens of thousands of American soldiers, dying in a pre-emptive war - versus all that plus a few million more Americans and North Koreans dying in a nuclear exchange... Well, it's an obvious choice.
North Korea is approaching the point of being able to achieve mutually assured destruction. They could build a cobalt bomb, or spend a decade building ICBMS, but relatively soon the problem will be intractable and we will play nuclear chicken with an unstable murderous dictatorial regime.
Similarly we say someone is "suicidal" but that doesn't mean they have committed suicide.
Having or displaying an attitude or a policy that could kill lots of people(presumably the OP is referring to North Korea" can be correctly labeled genocidal.
What?
It is no surprise that Trump won when his name can't be mentioned without an absolutely asinine, incorrect comment following it. Addressing dishonesty with hyperbole is not helping anyone.
Again, trying to justify your strong feelings about Trump by fabricating these insane narratives does nothing but hurt you and your political causes.
This is the first time we've ever interacted and you're projecting my feelings? Great, we're off to a good start here.
From there, I'm "fabricating a narrative" because I implied that casually threatening to kill millions of people on twitter might be what someone else was referring to as "genocidal"?
You know what is WAY more disingenuous than calling killing millions of people "genocide"? Implying that a first strike which would kill millions of people has nothing to do with killing millions of people. Now THAT would be disingenuous.
And, just to throw a cherry on the top of those other weird behaviors, you tell me I'm doing nothing but hurting my political causes, when you don't know what they are.
Couldn't you at least have the self awareness to realize that just because you get cranky when someone calls threatening to kill millions of people "genocide" does not actually mean that all points that person makes somehow lose credibility with all other human beings on earth...because you said so...?
You responded to my questioning by trying to qualify the argument with his Twitter antics. Since you're supporting the argument (or at least trying to justify the sentiment of labeling something that wouldn't be a genocide a genocide), I think we can reasonably assume that you're not a fan of Trump's idea of a first strike. The tone of your writing heavily implies that, so if you're actually in support of (or not directly opposed to) a first strike, but simultaneously argue that people could reasonably mistake a first strike for a deliberate, focused genocide, a small disclaimer that you're arguing in support of two dissonant ideas really helps people understand what you're trying to say. Similarly, unless your political alignment and actual viewpoints on the subject are highly dissonant, your politics are pretty easy to extrapolate.
To my knowledge (and I could be wrong), there is no indication that Trump has any intention to eradicate the North Korean people. To argue that Trump's intention with a first strike would be to eradicate the North Korean people would require you to fabricate reasoning behind such an action. To argue that someone is justified in the genocide argument is to admit that they're fabricating that reasoning or narrative.
Not even once did I try to minimize the casualties a first strike would have.
I never said that the original argument was necessarily wrong. I did say that the general populace will make arguments to logic, and making individual points that are blatantly wrong except in the most liberal interpretation of the wording just enables the general populace to do so.
a) Not do that.
b) Ask them what their views are if you're actually curious.
Cheers.
> Trump's interest in a first strike has nothing to do with eradicating the North Korean people.
How was it again?
> Addressing dishonesty with hyperbole is not helping anyone.
Oh. Right.
I think both of you are failing to convince anyone.
So just like every other news outlet out there? If it bleeds it leads and all that.
You realize that even if he was Hitler himself, we have multiple branches of government to counteract his power.
https://www.rt.com/news/407919-twitter-multi-million-offer-r...
They claim that in return for $1.5m upfront spend during the elections, Twitter would promote Russia Today's tweets and provide them with an inhouse team to curate content and provide strategy. For $500K extra, Twitter would promote RT's moments to 60 Million users. There was an offer for a $3.3m total ad spend.
But it should be pointed out that would not feed into this quarter's revenues, as it was for late 2016. And the story all depends on whether you believe the slide deck from RT is genuine or not.
(There's a separate HN discussion about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15566663 )
What are you talking about? Before Trump was a thing, Twitter was routinely mentioned in the news. It was the lazy source of react quotes: "Today, X tragedy happened in town Y. 'UnrelatedPerson' on twitter said 'what a tragedy'".
The name is more prominent now, sure, but it already was routinely reported in the news.
It's now "Today, Trump said X about Y on Twitter".
Cool, so any indication on who is buying all my data?
Private data would spark my interest as well. They can't be selling DMs, can't they?
https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data
"Interests from partners
Twitter's partners build audiences around shopping decisions, lifestyle, and other online and offline behaviors.
Tailored audiences
Tailored audiences are often built from email lists or browsing behaviors. They help advertisers reach prospective customers or people who have already expressed interest in their business."
Their biggest competitor is Datasift, which has similar exclusive deals with Facebook and Linkedin.
There’s an incredibly big market here, with customers ranging from social media analytics companies to investment firms.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/15/16148250/microsoft-linked...
How is this possible? They can't just do like fetch_all_users, filtered by "not banned?"
But the user database should already have backups, importing those backups into an analysis server should be easy, and running queries like that on an analysis server should be easy.
Counting messages, or users with X messages, etc. is also largely a function of whether your backup/restore system works. But this time you do it in chunks.
There isn't an "analysis server" and analyzing user activity is not done on a "user database backup" at Twitter's scale, though indeed that's a common way that would be done for smaller businesses.
By the way, if by user db you literally mean the db with user accounts, that's not the right data source -- you want the user _activity_ db to count active users, and for high-scale applications, those are different things. Presumably user activity updates are orders of magnitude more frequent than user object updates. You don't want to thrash your user db by constantly updating some "last seen at" field. Put that stuff somewhere else.
That said, it's true that counting is simple, it's just a Hadoop / Spark / distributed computing platform of choice job. Filter, distinct, count. It's not even hard in real-time if you have enough ram or are ok with approximate counts with bounded error, thanks to Storm, Heron, Flink, etc.
Defining what exactly constitutes an active user and catching edge cases such as this Digits thing is where things get tricky; the number of weird scenarios that cause under/overcount for what seem like reasonable and straightforward definitions would surprise you.
@baddox nailed it.
"These third-party applications used Digits, a software development kit of our now-divested Fabric platform, that allowed third-party applications to send authentication messages via SMS through our systems, which did not relate to activity on the Twitter platform," the company explained in its earnings report.
Really seems like something they should have caught earlier.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/22/twitter-launches-digits-a-...
And remember, your proposal can't be a greater danger to society than the problem you're trying to fix, or that would defeat the purpose.
With a million users, it's feasible to support the site with donations... no funding or IPO's needed...
In addition, there are numberous open-source frameworks ( like gnu-social etc. ) that enable a single person to deploy the code onto the servers.
They've released a lot of good open source software - their Scala stuff is great, and it seems like the company allows and even encourages their engineers to not only open up their code, but also gives them the time to document and help the community.
Which companies are buying this data? Considering its estimated that a third (1/3) of twitter activity is from bots retweeting, liking, and following. Not sure how much real value there actually is in this data. Twitter may turn a profit, but there are bigger issues with their model
2.Twitter says could turn first-ever profit, shares jump (reuters.com)
3.Twitter Says It Overstated Monthly-User Figures for 3 Years (nytimes.com)
Get out while you can enjoy a profit.
The monetization aspect is supposedly solved. If I suspect you can garner audience, I posit that said audience can be translated into ad dollars at some point in the future. Only the first part is speculative. And speculation is what venture funding is all about.
The expectation isn’t perpetual. Evert company must become profitable, be acquired by someone who believes it will make them (more) profitable (or attractive to another party with that belief), or go bust.
> More and more these social media platforms feel like scheme's. Round after round of funding without ever reaching profitablity
Nowhere did I say we're looking at perpetual return on investment. Like any investment, you're looking to go in at a certain point and get out at a certain point. This is no more a "scheme" than buying a house and hoping it increases in value or buying a lottery ticket. The underlying value is audience. Some companies get that, others don't.
You order a shoebox appartment, create a home-maker NN that can fake basic human occupancy, register it online as a new citizen and put it on basic income, and set it up to order stuff from company A. Now those NN trade among one another, sending the stuff in a circle until its scrap or they are broke and its impounded.
Finally, the limiting part for eternal growth can be removed.
It's not always about a company's profitability either. Startups focus on exponentially growing their assets rather than cash flow then selling it all to someone else. Like Facebook can make more wealth from WhatsApp than they could do by themselves.
Of course, profitability is often close to the actual value something creates. Twitter is a really odd case in that it's a big part of many people's lives, but they won't pay for it.
This one here was a token gesture, a rounding error.
Given that, if you're selling something like Github or container management services, you can imagine that the person who's selling in the Pacific West Coast region might be having an easier time of things than the guy who has the mid-west. This isn't universally true for all products, but sales people will complain about leads being bad in any industry (see: Glengarry Glen Ross).
All of that is to say is that empirically, usually there are a few outperformers on any sales team that are crushing quota, and a bunch of others who are skating by at fractions of quota until they get canned. As some evidence, there's a lot of churn in sales teams and for the average sales person, which is partially because of the above, and also because good sales people will kill it as a company is getting a lot of adoption, and then jump ship when a better opportunity arises.
So maybe there's been a study on this stuff, but you could talk to any number of people who work in sales orgs and hear similar stories without the study.
Oh, and yes, when companies get 'serious' about sales, you'll see sales quickly expand to encompass a third or half the total company size. I won't make any guesses as to whether that actually makes sense and how many people are being productive, but large sales orgs are common in my understanding.
Likely this is true for engineering as well. 25% of the team pulling the weight of the department.
They could have probably done both, given what Facebook managed to accomplish financially. FB was profitable at $500-$600 million in sales and around 200 million monthly active users. At that same size Twitter was losing an immense amount of money. At the $2.5 billion sales level that Twitter hit in fiscal 2016, Facebook had around $750-$900 million in net income.
Good sales people bring in enough revenue for a company to be profitable. But I have no idea how many sales people Twitter has, I think even if they had 100 it'd be plenty.
Remember that Twitter works in multiple countries and in different languages. Then there is a lot of face to face meetings required, so add offices and service staff as well.
1-1,5K would sound reasonable for global sales and customer services.
I would assume that it is the lack of products/top commitment that causes poor sales.
I've often wondered how Twitter ended up with so many people as well. I'd love to see a breakdown of what they are all doing.
In 2016, they spent $957M on marketing (which is the area I often hear people saying they should reduce), most of which was personnel expense, according to their 10K filing. I suppose it's easy to look at it and just say "cut it in half" (which would nearly make up the $457M profit deficit from 2016), but is that truly realistic? What affect would that have on top line revenue?
Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and expenses are extraordinary. It's not rocket science even for someone with sheer arrogance and zero experience running a large corporation.
According to my Wikipedia research, they had ~2.5 billion in revenue last year and ~450 million in net losses
If they shaved the bottom 25%, to reach ramen profitability they'd need a savings of $450,000 per employee cut, and do that without having any negative impact on the productivity of the org as a whole (be it through hours worked or employee morale or additional churn)
Corporations are giant container ships moving in one direction, you can't just snap your fingers and turn 90 degrees
Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you alive.
Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.
Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.
I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook. And they had 55 employees.
So obviously you don't need 4,000 employees for the technology at this scale. I'm not sure what in the world the other 3,945 employees are doing though.
I don't know anything about Twitter's business, but just in general, I agree with your parent commenter that this entire thread of conversation (which happens every single time) is embarrassingly arrogant.
Let me put it this way: I think it's arrogant that management consulting companies think they can send in a couple recent ivy league grads to learn about a company for a few weeks and then suggest a bunch of changes. This is like that, but without even bothering to go in and learn about the company at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://stackoverflow.com/company/team
I'm guessing you would have called people arrogant for questioning Equifax's security practices. After all, it's an enormous company with thousands of skilled employees (interestingly, only about 2x as many employees as Twitter and an arguably much more complex tech stack) and security experts checking and consulting. How could they possibly be wrong!?!
I recommend you search around HN before you make sweeping generalizations, there are numerous threads that explain how or why WhatsApp were capable of doing what they were. From a technical perspective, as a "core product", Twitter's business has more abstractions
To get you started[0]
Anybody who has done better than that should feel free to give tips, in my view.
Idea: redirect Twitter.com to a Geocities page with ads for fidget spinners and fire everyone. I predict record profits.
Twitter is bloated.
Their headcount has expanded quite a lot over the last few years - and for what? Their service has remained the same and 'scale' beyond a certain point does not matter.
What is 'labour intensive' - sales? Sure. Maybe some support staff? I doubt they're full time, more likely in Phillipenes off the books.
I don't doubt for a second that they didn't need all those staff members - I've worked enough 'fast growth' places to see how 'hiring for the sake of hiring' happens, it's a political orientation, not really an economic one.
Suppose they cut back to just keeping the lights on in engineering, along with obviously-profitable sales staff to sell advertisements and make business deals. Twitter is instantly profitable, but the net present value of those cash flows is something like a third to a tenth of their current valuation.
This is what happens when you over-fund a business at too high of a valuation. They do what they can to try to "grow into" the valuation, because otherwise management's junior equity positions and stock options are worthless.
"Twitter is in funding crisis now making revenue as a remedy"
"The tables have turned, Twitter now making money, what's next?"
"Twitter demonstrated first profit, VC-s are in shock"
"Twitter in decline, first profit is below expected after 11 years"
"A profitable Twitter is considered harmful"