Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down
profgalloway.com
profgalloway.com
Well, that's your problem.
It looks like an activist position. The shares were acquired with the view of making them more valuable through direct action. This is a validated hedge fund strategy.
It's an activist position, not a takeover. The shares are acquired for (a) shareholder rights, which can be accomplished with a single share and (b) economic upside.
When a hedge fund pursues this strategy, it typically purchases advertising to make its case. (The case isn't just made to current shareholders. Shares owned by a sympathizer who bought on your activism vote the same as shares held by longtime holders.) That puts a lower bound on the deal size.
Galloway has his own channels. That reduces his costs and thus minimum transaction size.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly...
Twitter could add features until it reaches feature parity with Facebook. But then it's no longer Twitter.
What defines a platform is its feature set. And by changing that you risk changing the platform.
And here is a fine example of how to dribble (via twitter): https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/120241814211214540...
Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.
But your point about Twitter's uniqueness is also valid, and something I hadn't seriously thought of before. Around the time of their IPO, I think the general analyst consensus was that Twitter would not make money and their stock was not a buy. It makes sense because their product is wholly different from the suites offered by Facebook or Google, the companies this article and the commenter compare it to. Perhaps the other stakeholders understood this aspect of Twitter and didn't expect large returns from day 1.
Have you ever used other twitter clients? Why shouldn't the official client have at least some of the features they offer?
Let me ask the HN community! Can anybody here suggest a feature that they would like added to Twitter?
Its like a car, you don't keep pressing the accelerator further and further to travel down the road. You find the optimum location to maintain a safe speed. If something changes, like the road turns, you adjust the accelerator until you are once again safe. If you stayed static, you'd probably fly into a ditch. If you are unnecessarily pumping the pedal, your speed would oscillate unpredictably, and any number of consequences would occur.
Devs like new features a lot more than users do. Users feel disrupted by new features. Users don't open up their favorite app and say "gee whiz,I wonder what new feature there is today". Users don't even think about twitter, they think about tweets,replies,likes and other users. You focus on what matters to users, not what matters to devs and everyone else who does not get the user base.
Imagine feature-creep at their scale! Twitter is the most tolerable mainstream social media network I know of for many reasons -- all centered around their resistance to change and refusal to follow the trends at fb,instagram,snapchat,linkedin,etc...
Repeat with me: you don't need more growth if everyone is happy and you already have a steady and growing profit. You want more growth of course but you don't need it. You focus on what you have and need first then you consider your wants and features...very slowly.
I use them frequently, but Lists are not well-designed at the moment. I can't see if I've already added a user to a list, the "update" is weirdly different from that of the main timeline, there are no aggregations/stats/summaries and AFAIK, there is no interaction with push notifications. They do nothing on the platform to draw anyone's attention to the feature.
But Lists are great! I can pare down my feed to a curated set of users who are all talking about the same thing -- I have an NLP list, and ML list, a "politics" list, etc. I can follow other people's curated lists too. Twitter is huge, it's awesome to have some path to a smaller cohesive community.
It's really weird to me that they would have a feature "above the fold" on the main menu of the platform that seems so dusty and under-utilized. What's the deal? Do they not have enough engineers over there or something?
Twitter would be incredibly hard to supplant at this point.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether Dorsey should be CEO. But I think the author's concerns are more varied and more cogent than your rebuttal would make them seem.
What are your thoughts on Dorsey leading two tech companies at the same time, Twitter's share performance over the past several years, and the political waters Twitter has to navigate?
Jack spends half days at two companies and as such isn’t able to meaningfully administer either. And from that platform he’s going on vacation to Africa for 6 months. The line about the real issue being not that he’s going away but rather that he’s coming back is devastating but not far from the mark.
This happened to Yahoo too. They were quite happily tooling along, making profits, building cool stuff, and employing people with remote-work policies, small-biz tools for folks, and what-not. Then along came an activist investor who turned it into a royal shit-show.
He finally convince Verizon to buy it, but man it was a wild ride. I don't know if it made the investors money, but it made a lot of people sad.
Even if I was an inventor that wanted to build one of these things for no personal benefit, until it was profitable (under some business model), it could not sustain without the goodwill of grant-givers or the greed of investors that knew their money would be returned to them under some sort of risk-adjusted time-based return calculation.
In other words - who can afford to do something like this for free? (Now - I am not a fan of Twitter, so if the answer was "no one", it wouldn't hurt my feelings, but I guess some people think that it is important somehow?)
Couldn't/shouldn't Twitter's mission be to distribute 140 characters from one person to many others...what do they need huge revenue and profits for?
What Galloway is ultimately looking for here is for some views to be allowed and others disallowed. I do not think that is okay on a platform that is as big and pervasive as Twitter (or Facebook). They are, for all intents and purposes, a public digital square. And figuring out what is a "conspiracy" or "junk science" should ultimately be left to the reader, with algorithms otherwise ranking content as neutrally/objectively as possible. After all, we trust Twitter users with the ability to vote.
I think the vast majority of the users would prefer this as well. Just give me a chronological timeline and gtfo.
There's a small extremely vocal minority of users that want to censor any and all thoughts they don't approve of. This group has tons of journalists in it and for one reason or another, Twitter has paid outsized attention to it and let it shape the product and company policy, to nearly everyone's loss, including Twitter.
In fact one of the very best things about Twitter is it gives regular people a way to refute journalists, bad journalism and media agenda. It gave the audience a voice and they use it. "Protect journalists" seems like code for "protect the narrative".
It also gives those same journalists easy to use tools to dunk on people who criticize them, to a huge audience. So you know, swings and roundabouts.
It's a simple competitive issue. Every click that goes to Twitter is one that doesn't go to newyorktimes.com, washingtonpost.com, or (yes) foxnews.com... and it's one that isn't likely to lead to any of those sites, for that matter.
Regardless of their political alignment, journalists have no reason to support disintermediation between news makers and news consumers. It threatens their livelihoods. Say what you will about Trump (just not here, please), but he does understand that much. Twitter is worth a lot to people like him, which I'd think would make it worth a lot to investors as well. Arguably it would have been a better investment for Jeff Bezos than WaPo was.
Heck, just the ability to front-run Tweets by five seconds might be worth a lot on Wall Street.
Facebook is dying down and being replaced with Instagram. Instagram is littered with ads and doesn't feel irreplaceable.
Google's core product (search engine) is nearly unusable these days thanks to all the ads and the push for e-commerce related results.
Sure, they're profitable. But the products are garbage.
Twitter feels like something that's harder to replace. It feels more like an utility. The core product has changed little over the years and that's why it's good and people keep coming back to it. If someone doesn't ruin it, I wouldn't be surprised if it outlives both Facebook and Google.
I already find the ads annoying. If they add even more, plus a bunch of useless features, and try to censor the discourse on the platform to top it off, it will be the death of twitter.
Twitter's operations threw off about a billion in cash for the first nine months of 2019 and 2018 [1].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001...
There are several web properties that I use and cheerfully pay about $5/month to support.
I get value from Twitter because I follow some awesome people whose tweets helps me efficiently keep up with interesting new papers, tech, github repos, etc.
It baffles me that there is not an option to pay $5/month for an ad-free premium account.
incidentally these:
> Fake accounts, GRU-sponsored trolls, algorithms that promote conspiracies and junk science
i know they exist and i see them in responses to tweets but i dont follow any of those, and havent seen any of them being followed a lot. they seem like typical harmless spam like the stuff i remove from signups all the time. Twitter is pretty great for me at this time, and i m glad they re not trying to become facebook. there's a reason why facebook can't be the fun , witty platform that twitter is.
What a thought bleeder
> Greatness is in the agency of others, and many talented executives have left the firm.
Uh huh. Twitter has always succeeded in spite of itself. There's never been any innovation and execution has been middling at best. I don't think there were ever "great" executives on board, and if there was, they didn't accomplish anything.
The rest of the post is just a stereotypical political rant about Russian bots and Trump. If there's a problem with the culture of Twitter's user base, much of the blame must lie on those with blue checkmarks. It's a toxic community.
Beyond nearly everything else, this sums up my deep concern with Twitter/Trump.
The author has put money behind their estimation. Given Twitter's performance and Galloway's mouthpiece, I wouldn't put organizing its shareholders beyond the realm of plausibility. (Or the Board compromising to take a thorn out of their side.)
The battle is really getting the question of a part-time CEO on the agenda, which requires replacing a few Board members. Given how unusual Twitter's Board dynamics are, there's a good chance proxy advisers would recommend voting for reforms.
That's a separate question. Note, too, that activist victories can take many forms. It could be Jack retreating to a Chairmanship, it could be him committing more hours to Twitter, it could be him hiring a President.
> there's really no meat on the bones there
Weibo has effectively bootstrapped a separate platform on its Twitter clone. And ByteDance outvalues Twitter on what is essentially a re-jiggered Vine.
This is oversimplifying. But Twitter's only options aren't more ads or languishing with distracted leadership.
That's Galloway's position.
Citation needed. Best I can tell the only thing people "enjoy" there is shitting on each other, and this seems to be the platform's raison d'être. It's kind of hard to enjoy being on the receiving end of that though.
I don't think this is an issue at all for the majority of people.
Remember that you (and people visit/comment on articles on this orange site) are the 0.01% of people in the world that care about JavaScript being an issue.
People generally may not understand enough to know JavaScript as a culprit but they do notice bloat and complain about the slowness.
I find difficult to think of metaphors which encapsulate a sense of proportion to the issue but ignoring a root cause as not an issue is a very good way to wind up with one.
Im not sure I am persuaded that "moving to Africa" is a worthy point to lean so hard on. Maybe focus on him being a part-time CEO.
It's poor website design, but JS is turning into the new Flash. People want glitzy websites and don't care about load times.