Hacker News Reader

Comment by Firebrand | Hacker News Reader

What caused this surge of products from Twitter lately? The platform has been accused of being stale for years but then 2021 rolls around and now they have Clubhouse, Substack, and Patreon competitors ready to be released. Were they repaying technical debt before?

View on HN

An activist investor came in (Elliot Management Corp) and pointed out that they had failed to innovate for 5 years and that their CEO had literally decided to go part time and move to Africa. Twitter's share price has been absolute trash for a long time and something needs to change. It has given them a massive kick up the arse and they're trying to demonstrate some new features and value.

It looks a lot like senior management at twitter was asleep at the wheel. Frankly though, I don't think that any of twitter's feature-a-like products are going to work, they don't have the scale of facebook.

Twitter stock price was $20 on Jan 1st, 2016. It is $70 on Jan 1st, 2021. That's a 350% increase.

But that's not 1000%.

On Jan 1st, 2020, before their stock price was boosted due to external factors, the price was $32.31. In that period, Twitter trails VGT (Vanguard tech index fund) returns by over 100%.

Twitter has a long history of incompetent product decisions and lethargic tech improvements. Vine and Periscope were both lazy, half-hearted and fumbled disasters. They could've been amazing.

They need the scale of Facebook to work?

They were planning the roadmap (pun intended)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com