Farewell, Periscope | Hacker News Reader

Farewell, Periscope

periscope.medium.com

147 pointsminimaxir72 comments

This, I suppose, is unexpected. It reflects a similar fate of a lot of technology plays that grew fast.

I would like to reflect however on this comment in the article -- "The truth is that the Periscope app is in an unsustainable maintenance-mode state, and has been for a while. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen declining usage and know that the cost to support the app will only continue to go up over time."

I understand how a startup madly codes and adapts to get to something that "sticks" with the user community. But where I get lost is how, in the process of acquisition and integration of a startup's technology into a company that is nominally not a startup, how is it that you go 5 years after acquisition and NOT retire the technical debt? How does a VP of Engineering oversee the integration of a startup into their domain and not spend the time it takes to reduce the operational costs of maintenance to as close to zero as possible?

In today's world of BigCorp adding features by buying HotStartup, how can they not follow through an actually make that new tech a feature? If a feature is not getting anything new, it should take zero engineering resources. If the plaform's on which it runs change/update, there can be documentation on all of the platform features used, and how, a build system and a regression system, so that you take the code out of the box. Port it, test it, put it back in the box and go away again. Same thing with bugs or CVEs.

When I was at Google it amazed me how many pieces of infrastructure were 'hot messes' in the sense that the people maintaining them didn't really know anything about how they worked, just how to run a test and revert if they broke. But there was no senior leadership pushing to understand the component interfaces and how the 'fleet' was at risk or interconnected. Just a bunch of fiefdoms. And inevitably people who kept things complicated so that they were "irreplaceable" for their own job security anxieties.

If you are an engineer and you start moving up into senior leadership roles, understand that this is your job. Not to be be the whiz kid that just came up with a billion dollar idea, but to be the careful, thoughtful, strategist that makes sure the billion dollar idea doesn't eat all of its revenue in operational costs.

> If you are an engineer and you start moving up into senior leadership roles, understand that this is your job

Product wants new features and new products, and they want them now. Sales wants new features and new products, and they want them yesterday. Finance people want everything to be cheap, but since most engineers have no idea how to prove to them with actual hard data that it's cheaper in the long run ship features more carefully and slowly, and build things with reliability and robustness in mind, finance people go in the opposite direction and think that hiring inexperienced developers from the cheapest places on the planet is the way to go, because "cost of R&D per head" is a very easy number to quantify.

Unfortunately very few companies have an engineering department that can overrule all of product, sales, and finance. In general even one of those three being stronger means engineering never has the buy-in to take the time to do things the right way. And if you're the engineer who consistently pushes back product and feature releases because you want things built correctly, you get fired, or at best marginalized.

Interesting that you mention Google, since it has a reputation for being more engineering-focused that most companies. From what I read on HN (perhaps not a representative sample, but...), it seems like Google has a culture of "build something cool to get promoted and then stop caring about what you built because maintenance doesn't get you promoted any further". If true, I think that very easily explains Google's "hot messes".

Exactly right. Thank you for writing this. I’m in a similar position, where I’m responsible for reducing tech debt, reducing internal operating costs, while ensuring the infrastructure still operates, and while being responsible for testing and pushing out releases on time. With 4 people on my team.

If we dropped every new feature today and just focused on tech debt, it would take us months to catch up. But in the meantime, the show must go on, so we just continue accumulating debt. Nobody in engineering, nobody in sales or product management even has the power to stop the madness - this is all driven from the customers. And it gets worse if you are a b2c business or provide services to a government or two - you just don’t have much wiggle room.

> Interesting that you mention Google, since it has a reputation for being more engineering-focused that most companies. From what I read on HN (perhaps not a representative sample, but...), it seems like Google has a culture of "build something cool to get promoted and then stop caring about what you built because maintenance doesn't get you promoted any further". If true, I think that very easily explains Google's "hot messes".

Countering my Gell-Mann amnesia here (many times I read about my area of expertise I see snappy criticisms trickle into the mainstream when the reality on the ground has long moved ahead and the supposedly insightful HN criticisms are cliches being routinely addressed within the expert circles, think "deep learning is just X, it doesn't address Y!" or "physicists are obviously boneheaded and got stuck at assumption Z!").

So, with the above in mind, I wonder if Google is actively countering this. If random people know this as a stereotype (and I read this often, and hear it as a stereotype of Google also in real life), then perhaps leadership is even more aware and either decides not to change or has already implemented things they think would help. Any current Googlers to chip in?

It is not. It is only getting worse. Src: recently departed Googler.

The most plausible explanation, to me, is that operating the product was not considered the primary purpose of the acquisition.

To be less subtle: it's to eliminate competition.

If my neighbor has a nice big cow, it's not crucial for me to obtain that cow for myself; it suffices that it die, while my cows live.

It can also signal that the acquirer is now relevant in this market space, and to buy shares in the acquirer is now an investment in this market space.

Nitpick but this implicitly requires I buy-in to a zero sum system

What is being described is a net-negative sum strategy. Value is destroyed, and the monopolist is able to extract more rent because there is less competition.

No, it does not.

Just mathematically the thing you said is clearly false. Suppose I say that, for some system, the return to each player is a function of the number of players: r(n) = 100 / (n+1). One player makes 50, two players make 33 each for a total of 66, three players make 25 each for a total of 75. Clearly not zero-sum, but I can still move up in the world by killing someone else's cows.

One might observe that much of the world is like this; not truly zero-sum, but with payoff matrices that incentivize hurting or helping strangers.

Note that almost all traditional microeconomics is this kind of curve-following system, one way or another. I'm not saying that kind of economics is right or wrong, just that it's a very traditional model, worth understanding as a starting point.

It's enough that you understand that others have that view. You don't make the rules. The view of others shapes the incentive landscape.

Things aren't zero sum, but our psychology has developed for a more or less zero sum environment. There was no exponential growth or constant innovation in every generation in those times.

It is valuable to learn what drives people and what interpersonal forces elevate some strategies and suppress others.

It doesn't; it requires you buy into the economics of monopoly.

Your neighbor doesn't want your cow to die, it's the megacowcorp trying to charge four times the equilibrium price for milk.

Nitpick on nitpick: .. or it could be a complex non-zero-sum game.

A kills B's cow, so that milk supply decreases, price increases, and C pays more to A for the milk.

Many things are in fact zero-sum systems.

It should be noted that I strongly suspect the "declining usage" and "unsustainable maintenance mode" was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I would frequently want to tune in to a Periscope of a commentator, and then discover that if I locked my phone to listen to, rather than watch, the commentator, the stream would immediately halt. That shitty behavior that EVERY FREAKING USER complained about made me stop using the app.

I've seen this many times in my career: The suits refuse to invest in a piece of tech, and then cite the loss of users as a reason to not invest, despite clear evidence that the loss of users is caused by the lack of investment.

Per the announcement, the live video infrastructure that powers Periscope will continue to power live video on Twitter.

Costs to support a standalone app are more than just infra and CDN costs - think support, moderation, legal, comms, QA, etc.

I had read that, and so the 'cost' is the marginal cost of "support", "moderation", "legal" (assuming no features QA is probably not huge). So is it possible to operate a feature that has user generated content at at a positive margin? One without compromising privacy or incurring an untenable liability? I accept that this may not be possible, but it seems like that is where the engineering work is.

And yes, I know product managers are "we need new stuff" to push all the time. And sales is constantly trying to sell something you don't make. But those are execution issues that good management will moderate.

I don't want to be snarky, but there can totally be a non-technical outer context where all this was a very good strategic move.

Certainly, one should not always assume dark Machiavellian moves, lest we become too bitter and cynical, but business isn't engineering.

Read the book "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life" by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. If not for other reasons, to acquire a different set of mental tools to understand motivation. Because I feel like you seem technically proficient but lacking in imagination of more important games of power in the background. And these aren't Disney villain machinations, they are normal everyday things that people implicitly understand and participate in, while being perfectly ordinary, nice, polite people, no mustache-twirling villains. Eat or be eaten. Periscope was eaten, now they are being shat out.

> When I was at Google it amazed me how many pieces of infrastructure were 'hot messes' in the sense that the people maintaining them didn't really know anything about how they worked, just how to run a test and revert if they broke. But there was no senior leadership pushing to understand the component interfaces and how the 'fleet' was at risk or interconnected. Just a bunch of fiefdoms. And inevitably people who kept things complicated so that they were "irreplaceable" for their own job security anxieties.

This is the curse of a large bureaucracy. It seemed like Google was immune to this for a while, perhaps due to the engineering culture, but it's only a matter of time when there's enough money and organizational inertia at play. Once things reach a boiling point, the transformational programs pop up, and the cycle continues.

> 5 years after acquisition

Similar timeline with the Vine acquisition and subsequent dismemberment, except Twitter announced Vine's discontinuation after 4 years rather than 5.

> and NOT retire the technical debt?

I would be surprised if this were the honest reason, at least more surprised than I'd be were it any other web giant, mostly because Twitter seems to have a mature grasp on why an average tenure of 2 years is insane for an engineering job and attempts to avoid the problems you mentioned. I reckon Twitter had motivations that simply don't scan well with people who enjoy using a product of yours and don't want to see it quashed.

My bet is that it doesn't make sense as a separate product when every other platform has live streaming. As simple as that.

I disagree. It is NOT your job to fix any of this sh*t given the way you are rewarded and grow your career in BigCorp is by shipping new features and growing the customer base. Cost saving or optimization is barely ever an important priority in any tech organization BigCorp that wants to attract and retain talent because most developers wouldn’t want to work there - there would likely also not be delicious food in the cafes and kitchens either. Startups similarly spend money extensively to attract talent and keep them, not by being cost, efficiency and order focused.

> how is it that you go 5 years after acquisition and NOT retire the technical debt?

That seems like the most simple thing in the world to me- you just ignore it. Have you ever talked to a product manager about "technical debt"? Newsflash- they don't give a shit.

I don't know how things are run at Twitter but in general, people want to do "impactful" things and get promoted/get raises. Paying down technical debt is the opposite of that.

You're moralizing about "this is your job" and all that junk. Feel free to do that, but the incentive structures are what they are. And it really ain't about morality, Jack. I'm not saying it's right or good, of course.

>> Have you ever talked to a product manager about "technical debt"? Newsflash- they don't give a shit.

Eng manager turned product manager here.

It's not that we don't give a shit - but paying down the debt isn't always worth it. For example in this case, if they always knew they were going to wind down Periscope (or at least that it wasn't strategic compared to what they were doing with Twitter) then investing deeply into it would have just been a waste.

Here's an example.

You buy a house in the spring. You know the heating system is very old and will likely fail soon (technical debt.) Should you invest in it?

The answer is "it depends." If you plan to live in this house for a long time, then yes because the last thing you want is for heat to fail in the middle of next winter.

However, what if this is just your summer residence? Suddenly fixing the heat is much less urgent (you still have the debt but the risk of it coming due in a very bad way is much less.)

Or, you bought the house for the land and plan to tear it down. You would be stupid to fix the heat.

I think the Periscope situation is much closer to that last thing. They bought it for something other than the stand-alone Periscope product so throwing a bunch of resources at it didn't make sense. Which isn't the same as not giving a shit.

People should be thinking more in terms of game theory, incentives, iterated games or one-off games, the effects of imperfect information, lemon markets, delayed effects and the difficulties of credit assignment, job hopping and the lack of long-term reputation the way we evolved to have in close communities we stayed in for our lives in the ancestral environment, etc.

Strange how neither Periscope nor Vine, both getting pretty popular early on (lots of celebrities used Vine and Twitter were getting quite some traction) are now no more. Meanwhile Musicaly/TikTok did the basically same once more, and what do you know, there was a demand all along. Twitter could have been running "today's TikTok" and it's an incredible blunder.

I'm not sure why Twitter abandoned Vine but I think it had to do with feed moderation, that they didn't have the resources and infrastructure in place to moderate illegal content. At least there were some noise over underage porn trying to dodge filters and banned keywords in media some time before they pulled the plug. If so, that reeks of misunderstanding the potential and not just throwing cash at the problem. They obviously have what's necessary in place over at Twitter.com and they aren't novices at this, so just... why. I remember seeing everyone from Game of Thrones cast members to comedians to just random people being enthusiastic over it. They were sitting on a gold mine and didn't even fight.

Periscope was also cool in a different way. I could click on a map at some person in Scandinavia and see her live stream stuff as she was talking a walk on the snow clad streets.

Woah, that map feature sounds amazing! When I’m super bored and feeling curious about other places, I’ll pop on over to https://map.snapchat.com

It doesn’t require an account, works on any browser (including mobile) and lets you see snaps from anywhere in the world. It didn’t fully scratch my itch like I think that periscope feature would have. I’m a little sad to have just learned about it today.

Btw, my favorite places to check out on the snap map are rural arctic countries. It’s so cool to see people in their cozy houses sharing pictures of their local food. It also blows my mind that their lives are not much different than mine, except they have a foreboding icy world right outside their doors lol

It's interesting how quickly the social space changes. I remember when this first came out, and there was Meerkat as well, it felt like a lot of interesting innovations were possible when it came to social media. The space is starting to feel mature, and to me, a little stale. There isn't a sense of adventure and wonder now with social media.

I think people are just waking up to the fact that they deep down prefer being social in person. If it weren't for COVID-19, probably would have started to accelerate.

Shame I really liked this. I could watch stormy weather in the South of the USA, hurricanes rolling in. I even saw someone live streaming driving about in it.

The best ever use I got from it was watching the attempted coup in Turkey. I was able to see a news station get overrun, I saw bullets fired from helicopters against protests. The worse one was an armoured personal carrier getting surrounded and then other soldiers fire into the open APC after the occupants opened up.

Twitter seems to keep failing at these acquisitions. Hence we can give Zuck some credit for the continued success of Instagram, WhatsApp and Occulus.

If Twitter has been successful with Vine and Periscope, they would have had successes as big as TikTok and Zoom.

Ironically, there would be calls to break-up Twitter today.

Twitter's CEO is basically an absentee leader, time-splitting with his other company which actually makes money and spending his free hours sucking up to rappers because he is desperate not to appear as an uncool white guy. Is it any shock that their strategy is garbage?

Damn right. I saw a picture of him recently and he looks like a bum. That’s what happens when they brainwash you into thinking you should be ashamed of what you are.

Will this be like Vine > Tiktok all over again?

I used to follow Brian Goulet of fountain pen fame on Periscope. I think either he stopped streaming or I stopped watching when Twitter bought Periscope and stopped letting people easily record their streams by sending them to a recording service.

Since then, I've not heard one mention of Periscope in my local circles, which is only anecdotes, but my point is that there is definitely room for a startup to redo the same app idea.

For me, Byte replaced Vine since iirc some of the Vine founders were involved with Byte's startup. Byte <> ByteDance

Which vine founders? Colin who sadly passed away?

My kids still spend hours watching Vines on YouTube. Twitter really missed the boat on that one.

IMO Periscope missed the boat purely because of lack of marketing. The only reason I know of its existence is because Scott Adams uses it daily (or used to) for his political commentary on Coffee with Scott Adams. Aella_Girl just discovered you could live stream on Twitter, and that feature is, as far as I know, backed by Periscope.

why not use the Periscope brand as their Stories feature? Instead they use something new called Fleets?

It’s a commodity feature that now even Youtube has so I don’t think there’s much to leverage a brand into.

Kind of like how I’ve never seen someone call Periscope by name as people just say they’ll be streaming on Twitter.

Similarly I doubt I’ll ever see someone use Fleet to refer to a Twitter Story.

Couldn't they pick a better name? Fleet is some kind of enema.

It's a fair point. The enema company was the 2nd-4th entry everywhere except google's search product and Twitter didn't make the first page (again, except on goog). The only time I've heard fleet used outside the enema context is when specifically talking about a group of vehicles.

Fleet and fleeting don't really have much overlap in terms of definition. Presumably Twitter was going for the latter meaning, but went with the former.

Right, and they probably thought it was clever since it rhymes with tweet.

It's a fleeting tweet.

I strangely have always read it as some designed-in-SF "Fleet Week" reference. Only after reading your post did I make the "fleeting" connection to gone-after-24-hours Stories.

I at first thought you were just free associating. But no, if I search Google Shopping for "fleet", it's enemas and suppository laxatives: https://www.google.com/search?q=fleet&tbm=shop

That is definitely not the best product association.

The name "fleet" is supposed to be a pun on "fleeting tweets".

For a moment, I was wondering if this was the amazing Periscope DOS debugger that had somehow lived on (it's not).

Anyway, this is the best link I could find about it:

https://books.google.com/books?id=-j4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=P...

I was wondering how that amazing debugger that hooked to the NMI pin of a PC made its way into a Mobile App... different thing poaching the name.

I haven't seen anyone else mention this yet, so maybe I'm completely out to lunch, but it's possible that Periscope had similar issues that PornHub (et al) had to deal with recently but, due to all of the reasons they mentioned in the article, are choosing simply to shut down rather than invest in heavier moderation.

If you look at the top streams worldwide on any slow news day, a moderate to high percentage will be OnlyFans models doing self promotion. Periscope bans nudity, so there is a non-zero human cost to moderate this. And with declining numbers in general, the amount of moderation needed goes up relative to the overall userbase.

I'm also convinced that there is a Periscope "underground" where people anonymously share and promote truly illegal content via private streams (where the only "private" aspect is the URL). In the past, Periscope may have been able to turn a blind eye because it's not visible through the app, but with increased scrutiny on illegal content, the easiest and cheapest way to deal with it is to shutter the service.

I always thought that Dick Costolo overpaid for Periscope when it was pre revenue as one of his last decisions before being (possibly) fired. It was wreckless and borderline shady. Mostly because they could have cloned it for much less and it didn’t get have any users or brand equity.

> "We’ve brought most of the core capabilities of Periscope into Twitter. [...] We’ve learned so much, shared incredible experiences together"

Another one for "Our incredible journey" https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Unlike the announcements in "Our incredible journey," this one seems fairly honest and to-the-point.

Considering the years of effort that went into Periscope it's reasonable for them to reflect on that time in a positive way.

>Considering the years of effort that went into Periscope it's reasonable for them to reflect on the work that their users have invested into that platform to make the founders rich only to be sold for profit in a positive way

FTFY

I'm so glad there's a site that's been keeping around the corporate-speak and well wishes for acquihires (no sarcasm intended). It's part amusing and interesting to see how founders or leaders of an org spin a acquisition or shut-down.

Meerkat initially lost to them but has since pivoted to Houseparty

My main use of Periscope was to watch live football (not the American one) matches. Going to miss that!

The part of the world where I live sports subscription fees are simply too high and controlled by duopoly of old school companies. On Periscope, it was great to have some good person point their phone camera to a large screen TV and watch the match together with many others on chat.

Thanks Periscope for letting me enjoy live action of a few El Clásicos!

Dang :(

I always got excellent engagement on my periscope livestreams given my existing twitter audience, will have to look for an alternative that has as good integration

It sounds like the existing (albeit semi-hidden) ability to stream live from Twitter is not going away, so if your audience is mostly on Twitter that might still be a good option for you.

What I really liked with Periscope was the map view, where you could see on a world map where a live stream was happening. It was a great way to find random interesting streams around the world.

I didn’t see Twitter Live having that same feature. Is it hidden somewhere?

I remember in 2015 when Meerkat launched. I liked it and everybody thought it would be the next big thing. People were starting to do very creative things with it.

But Meerkat was not to be. You see Twitter had bought a competitor for $86 million that had yet to launch called Periscope.

Meerkat spread quickly through the use of Twitter. But when Twitter launched Periscope (which I always thought was the inferior product) and cut off Meerkat's Twitter access in effect torpedoing it. Twitter bought a previous short video startup previously (can't remember the name) only to kill it too.

I would have liked to see what Meerkat might have been.

I’m surprised Twitter didn’t add stories into Periscope

So all periscopes that weren't shared with Twitter are just being deleted in three months?

I’ve never used periscope but a few years ago I was at a comedy festival. There was this guy in the audience who was being obnoxious, and when Jeff Ross confronted him, the audience member said he was streaming the show on Periscope. He eventually got booed out of the hall.

Let's hope that active periscopers will see this as an opportunity to explore other, better mediums, like e.g. peertube, rather than simply return to youtube.

(I'm looking at you Scott Adams!)

Is it perhaps insensitive to say 'Down Periscope'.

What's Periscope?

Twitter’s standalone app for live video streaming.

It hasn't been Twitter's until Twitter bought it a few years back.

It's yet another one of the acquire - erase stories deserving a spot on Our Incredible Journey blog.

[1]https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

It was acquired before launch

Does it make it any better?

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