From the WSJ, so no complaining about liberal bias.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...
They cut ~$1B in operating expenses, to go from $4.73B to $3.31B in advertising revenue, and forecasts don't look much better [0]
What has Twitter left to offer? They don't have the manpower to add new functionality, and they are bleeding advertising money.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271337/twitters-advertis...
I've never personally believed in Twitter as a business model, so you're preaching to the choir there. As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.
They're not unrelated. Advertisers like to know that their ads work; you need staff to do that.
Look at how much tailored the FaceBook ads were vs Twitter [1]. Advertisers would be sticking with Twitter if they thought the ads were worth it.
> Facebook targeting allows advertisers to drill down, ensuring your ad is targeted at those most interested in your ads’ content.
> The Facebook ad targeting based on interests looked like this:
> Science > Mari Smith > Joel Comm > Social science > HootSuite > Post Planner > Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn > Kim Garst > Sprout Social > Social Media Examiner > Buffer
> Twitter’s targeting is not quite as refined, but we targeted these keywords:
> instagrammarketing > socialmediamarketing > socialmediaexaminer
[1]: https://www.agorapulse.com/social-media-lab/twitter-ads-cpc-...
However, my point is that the top parent's claim of Twitter's problems aren't engineering is wrong. Their targeting is god awful to the point that Advertisers don't want to bother with it anymore. If they had better ad targeting (aka Engineering) then Advertisers would sweep the problems under the rug.
There are also many non-engineering examples of this.
- "If Jeffrey Dahmer ran a 4.3, we'd call it an 'eating disorder.'"
- Russian Oil / Gas is still buyable by western countries.
- Lack of repercussions for Jamal Khasoggi assassination [1]
- Massive amounts of advertising on FaceBook post-Cambridge Analytica
- USA Companies selling your active location (to journalists pretending to be not-journalists).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...
Unrelated in the short term. In the long term, I disagree.
Twitter is not that interesting of an app that users are flocking to it, nor it is so fundamentally different from any of its competitors and essential as a social network, that it would have a captive audience.
Twitter user base peaked in 2022. There haven't been any new major features, no concrete plans, but regardless, they have not enough manpower to implement them even if they wanted to.
> As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.
Good luck with that. People in the US, and especially the EU, don't like to have their payment apps linked to their social media. It's not like big tech hasn't tried already, e.g. Google Wallet, Facebook Pay, SnapCash, etc.
East Asia runs on a different gear. They have their own "everything apps", e.g. Kakao, Line, WeChat. Musk is not going to convince them to switch, that's for sure, and I highly doubt he would succeed where so many others have failed, definitely not with a withering platform like Twitter.
Why wouldn’t everyone use Apple Pay? And as successful as Elon has been in his other companies, is it wise to go up head on against Apple, literally one of the most valuable companies in the world? Making Twitter into a payment app sounds like one of the worst ideas I could possibly think of.
or may be they dont need new functionality. It works fine as it is today.
What twitter needs is revenue sources, and i don't see how they are going to get it.
The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.
Are new features being added? Honest question -- I don't use the product.
Keeping the lights on for a product with 10% of the workforce isn't shocking or new. We do it in this industry all the time. Can you iterate and ship with 10% of the workforce? That's much more impressive.
Whether or not a lean team is the way to go perhaps remains to be seen, but what I'd say is that my anecdotal opinion on this is that the majority of engineers are a liability and assuming that 10x more engineers means 10x more work done is incorrect. Most engineers can build stuff, but they also add complexity and require hand holding. Both suck time from the most productive engineers.
A team of 10 excellent engineers is easily better than a team of 100 good engineers, in my opinion.
It lost 3/4 of its value, partially because it's losing advertisers, partially because they fired everyone outside of engineering.
I'm an avid Twitter user to this day; do you think it's thriving, just because the website is still up? It has more spam, bots and porn than ever.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1743028102446408026
heres a total feature map of what was released in 2023:
https://twitter.com/enriquebrgn/status/1740950767325024387
I think thats definitely a signal that the B and C teams werent needed, considering they cut 90% of staff LOL.
As for the bots, AI is making it easier than ever to bypass those systems. CogVLM is just sitting there menacingly on github https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM
This is debatable.
Twitter hasn't added any meaningful functionality in recent years, which is fine if you think your product can survive stagnation for the foreseeable future. I wouldn't think so, but who knows.
Also, random Twitter functionality seems to be broken once a month, more or less. Last time I checked, new signups were having trouble following accounts and posting, which is as essential as it could be for Twitter to work.
After telling the advertisers to go 'F themselves', those paying customers are leaving in droves plus the ad ecosystem is one of the worst in the industry.
The only alternative is to get enough paying users. Good luck.
It's not though. I assume you're trying to claim Twitters only problem is the Advertisers leaving and that the platform is fine but that's not the case.
Lets ignore all visible technical problems such as outages or broken features that have happened since the purchase.
You have to compare Twitter to FaceBook. Both of them have had similar outrage by Advertisers for the respective companies actions. However, Advertisers keep coming back to FaceBook because of the engineering. FaceBook has much better targeting and also staff that interacts with the Advertisers. Twitter has absolutely horrendous targeting; Jews don't want their 'buy a Torah' ad next to a pro-gaza post not just because they disagree with the post but also because that somebody isn't their target audience. This is an engineering problem; if Twitter had better engineering the Advertisers wouldn't be leaving.