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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

Brain drain? Twitter stock basically hasnt appreciated since IPO. They have been treading water for a decade, what brains are there providing value?

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Whoever decided to kill Vine certainly created a lot of value for TikTok, Instagram via Reels, and YouTube via Shorts.

Vine was just early right? I would assume hosting and delivering video was just too expensive at the time.

It wasn't that early. YouTube was, and still is, full of vine compilations. It really blew up for a while just serving 6 second videos at a low/moderate resolution. It could have been TikTok easily.

People make that comparison, but the secret sauce of TikTok is letting users score their content with high quality copyrighted music.

That's a great point tbqh. Had vine lived I'm guessing they would have had to play catch up with that feature and who knows maybe they would have been too late.

That and it's probably very difficult to monetize 6 second videos.

The entire platform essentially died in 2015 and then was resurrected by Donald Trump being obsessed with it, which got a ton of political and finance people to join. None of their recent initiatives have moved the needle. Musk is going to lose a lot of money on this deal, but they'd probably be better off under him if not for the crushing debt load

Perhaps the problem is greater than Twitter since many other companies (Snap, Pinterest, Reddit, etc) are in similar positions

There are still a lot of smart people there that are working on hard at scale problems. Just because the stock is stagnant doesn't mean there aren't smart people there keeping it running.

Hard at scale doesn't necessarily mean useful. Putting lots of people on hard projects that don't increase revenue is a pointless endeavor.

Metaverse is full of hard questions and big problems, is running a 9B deficit, and provides 0 value.

For some reason, people seem to assume that people will like virtual reality. It all seems very forced to me, much like 3D TVs, and won't live up to the hype.

Have you tried it?

VR mini golf with my friends is the closest thing to hanging out in person without actually doing so. It’s a pretty dramatic difference over a phone call or other type of video game together.

Have you tried it Oculus or similar tech? I found it to be a different level than 3D TV and 3D cinema, both of which were cool when you first saw them but quickly lost their novelty factor. To me, VR hasn't, and the immersive experience is still great.

I haven't tried the Metaverse and have no clue whether that'll take off, I'm more talking about the general technology. I have to admit, I'm still surprised it hasn't taken off stronger.

VR is amazing. Metaverse is not.

Unbelievable that you're getting downvoted for saying Twitter has smart employees.

Ehh, pretty believable.

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