Disney almost bought Twitter in 2016 | Hacker News Reader

Disney almost bought Twitter in 2016

daringfireball.net

87 pointsedavis37 comments

A decision more guaranteed to nuke both brands is hard to think of. As the article says, the hate speech problem is extremely difficult to solve, but Twitter also has all sorts of NSFW, queer, and activist communities that are the exact opposite of Disneyfication.

Yeah there was no way that that union would have worked.

They might as well have contemplated buying Reddit.

Imagine if it became a sanitized family friendly microblogging platform where it was all pure, clean, fun conversation, anything not sparkly clean got knocked off. That would have ensured its death and would have shrunk to maybe 10MM users total.

"Twitter Kids, with content curated by machine learning!" - some ex-YouTube PM

People like to rip on YouTube for the recent child-protections but there was some dark shit going on, stuff like uploading Peppa Pig videos spliced with NSFL footage. The youths love YouTube, you can't take that lightly.

Right, and that content was on YouTube Kids. The current "made for kids" policy goes a length toward improving on the situation GP was decrying.

> They might as well have contemplated buying Reddit

As a regular user of both platforms I see where you're coming from, but Twitter has more of a mainstream presence. There are politicians, brands, famous people, etc.

Maybe someone that might only hear about Twitter from the news (and not actually use it) could think it would be a good fit for Disney.

Disney owns extremely diversified portfolio of companies, including, for example UFC and ESPN. They would manage Twitter just fine.

(To clarify, Disney owns ESPN, which has exclusive distribution deal with UFC.)

Remember when Yahoo! bought Tumblr? I guess Yahoo! was already a fallout zone, but Tumblr?

TIL Jack Dorsey is on the board of directors at Disney.

This on top of being the founder/ceo of both twitter and square.

I wonder what his secret is.

Arrogance.

Jack Dorsey's been pretty active on the podcast scene recently, and I feel it's harder to fake your personality in multiple long form conversations. I never got a hint of arrogance from him.

On a side note, why do people love to paint being the CEO of two companies in such a bad light? How is it different to a CEO of a conglomerate having responsibility for multiple divisions?

The answer to your question is simply “envy”.

That's a pretty thoughtless response.

Very few people have the privilege of being an employee with the perks of the CEO, let alone for multiple companies.

In fact, in the white collar world at least, "moonlighting" is definitely frowned upon, and in many places still outright banned.

And that's just the start.

>Jack Dorsey's been pretty active on the podcast scene recently, and I feel it's harder to fake your personality in multiple long form conversations. I never got a hint of arrogance from him

I do this all day, every day at work. Pretty sure most of us do to some degree. It's really not hard to put on a near perfect professional mask for extended periods of time, though it can be exhausting for some people.

Generally shareholders would prefer a ceo whose incentives are aligned with those of the company. On the one hand maybe it’s good that Dorsey could fuck off from twitter if things went bad and not suffer too much from it: it allows him to take risks and ceos not wanting to take reasonable risks as much as shareholders would like (because they have a undiversified interest in their company doing well but more importantly not doing badly whereas shareholders are typically more diversified and so can accept a bigger loss) is a known issue with many public companies. On the other hand, if he can fuck off and do ok if things go bad, maybe he is less motivated to stop them going bad.

A second issue is that people may feel that he will not be able to do the job properly if he is splitting his time between companies, and twitter have to care about the opinions of their shareholders and their users and their advertisers and their employees. Any of those groups may feel this. A main part of the job of the CEO will be deciding what the companies values are and making sure they are reflected by the firm’s actions. For Twitter at the moment this seems like a harder job than for many companies so possibly it would be even harder than usual to be a part-time CEO.

He’s uniquely qualified to run the company:

1) he founded it;

2) he doesn’t depend on it for his own livelihood;

3) he has enough time and space; physically, mentally, financially, and computationally to have proper distance from the company; and

4) Twitter is essentially feature-complete.

When you say "never a hint of arrogance" you mean aside from him deciding to run a public company/major social media platform in his spare time? That it'd be fine to give something with 300 million users a half-hearted effort?

Unfortunately my Twitter NDA prevents me from giving details. But happily, I didn't sign the non-disparagement clause, so I don't think I can get in trouble for saying that I am very happy I no longer work at Twitter, and that I'd definitely not return while he was CEO.

I will grant, though, that he's excellent at performing reasonableness. He is particularly good at the humble apology for whatever Twitter's latest failure is, as well as the promise to do better next time. I could even believe he means it. In the moment, anyhow.

> That it'd be fine to give something with 300 million users a half-hearted effort?

Is Twitter not free? What does Jack owe anyone? He didn't force you to sign up for anything. He didn't force you to work for him either. I am sympathetic if you were somehow swindled through the hiring process as too many people are, but otherwise, it seems more arrogant to demand that this one man spend his time however you see fit vs. doing whatever he wants. Clearly the way he spends his time is working for him or else he wouldn't be in his position.

Of course it's working for him. That he values that over the impact on others is a sign of arrogance.

Nobody's demanding that he spend his time in a particular way. He is welcome to head off for a year-long silent meditation in Burma for all I care. But plenty of people are saying that Twitter deserves a CEO who's focused on the job. Twitter, as a key social-media platform and a network-effects business, is not something where people can choose among a variety of approximately equivalent providers. He's half-assing it, and the world deserves better.

It might not be clear to you, but your post will come across as the embodiment of arrogance to many.

Started Twitter, leverage that to promote square.

If Disney had bought Twitter it would have gone away just like Tumblr.

what if salesforce bought it?

It's easy how Disney and Twitter would be a bad fit, but don't forget that Hasbro (toy company) owns Death Row Records home to a group N.W.A. where the "N" stands for the "n-word". https://nypost.com/2019/08/25/hasbro-acquires-gangster-rap-l...

One thing though is I don't think Hasbro bought just Death Row Records. They bought the parent company that owned Death Row Records among other record labels.

Hasbro owns Death Row because it bought another entertainment conglomerate with lots of natural-fit-for-Hasbro properties that happened to also own Death Row.

The acronym N.W.A., with its meaning, [1] is self-chosen. It is an old, long defunct rap group from Comptom. Quoting from Discogs: "American group, seminal purveyors of the gangsta rap sub-genre. NWA stands for "Niggaz Wit Attitudes". They were active from 1986 to 1991, and for a short period in 1999/2000."

Their most defining album is probably Straight Outta Comptom from 1988. [2] TL;DR these people are one of the pioneers of west side hip-hop, and gangsta rap in general.

What's in a name? Rap music is filled with controversy. Apple bought Dr Dre's Beats, too. Dr Dre was one of the founders of Death Row records.

As a non-American, I find the name "Death Row records" more intimidating than N.W.A. or what it stands for, btw.

[1] https://www.discogs.com/artist/13726-NWA

[2] https://www.discogs.com/NWA-Straight-Outta-Compton/master/26...

> But: maybe? Presumably a Twitter under Disney would be a very different Twitter today.

We might have had to sign over to Disney copyright of all our tweets for 999 years?

Disney would relentlessly astroturf shill their latest productions on Twitter? Oh wait

I wonder if part of the calculus was that Disney could get a lot of marketing value out of the platform by participating in it as Millions of Totally Real Human Users without actually owning it. Ergo these PR liabilities gain relative weight in the decision. Perhaps owning it would be a liability in itself. Curious that Dorsey is on their board too.

You mean like this?

https://twitter.com/disneyplus/status/1254772307941191686

It's hard to imagine why the board thought that was a good idea. They should've bought Twitch or something Twitch-like that could be more easily molded to be "on brand".

I understand why they saw fit, if you don’t look at their media tab, a lot of influential content creators on Twitter are also Disney fans.

If you do look at their media tab, the story changes completely, but if you don’t, the statistics solo should look beautiful.

Google also almost bought Twitter. I guess the year was 2009.

I expect they planned to shut it down in 2011.

Not quite. More likely they'd rebrand it, make some minor cosmetic changes, then neglect it until only a hardcore group of fans remained. Then they'd forget it exists.

Ahhh hence that bullshit #Hastag based ownership of tweet thing

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