2. The core product is pretty mature.
3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make.
4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators.
5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to make his mark.
Every member of staff fired now has a beef with the company, and being a social media company those staff will probably be big social media users with quite a lot of influence. Some may set up competitors or just badmouth you and your product.
Elon discovered this the hard way.
Genuinely curious to hear why you think this is the case. It's my anecdotal experience that the average social media company employee is just an average person like you and I, with an average number of followers.
The idea that software engineers at Twitter are influential on the platform is laughable.
How many of these accounts are software engineers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_Twitter_...
Twitter has historically hired people with large Twitter followings into roles that are more external. Some of them have been interviewed by the news media (eg The Verge). I’d be surprised if it didn’t have an impact on advertisers.
They also said they’ll be supporting AV1 and NVENC codecs soon which can help reduce bandwidth costs. They currently only support h264.
If you think about it, the less bandwidth that Twitch consumes through their CDN network, the less money a stream costs per minute. A viewer still watches ads with the same CPM, a viewer still subscribes for the same amount per month per broadcaster, a viewer optionally pays the same for ad-free viewing (Turbo), and a viewer pays the same premium for bits, regardless of what quality they're watching at. So, interestingly enough, the economics of limiting transcoding are more about limited capacity and ensuring a positive cost per streamer. If a streamer does not become an affiliate or partnered broadcaster on the platform, the only revenue Twitch gets from the streamer is the ad money from its viewers. By virtue, they want as many casters on the platform as possible to become affiliates, as being able to get commissions from bit sales and subscriptions gives Twitch more revenue streams for the same content.
So, to your point, they definitely want to be able to support more efficient codecs that are not as patent encumbered as h.265 (which IIRC did have limited support in SE Asian markets), because at the end of the day, if streamers are generating the renditions for the ABR ladder, and ultimately, folks are using lower bitrates, then overall, this cuts costs for the same operational cost.
You mean HEVC (x265)? I believe NVENC is just nvidia's hardware accelerated implementations of existing codecs.
Anyways, that sounds really interesting for both streamers who want more control over their streams' encoding, but obviously for Twitch, as it saves them compute power (though upping their intake bandwith?).
I wonder how feasible it would be for most streamers. Pushing one stream vs 3 or so is quite the difference.
Did he? Their revenue is way down, and they've had a lot of downtime. Unlike Netflix, they make most of their money on ads, not subscriptions, so more downtime is more money lost.
They're also on a huge hiring spree right now. Go look at how many roles they're hiring for. I don't think they'd be hiring that much if everything was fine and dandy.
It’s strange to see hiring as an indication that a company is doing poorly; regardless, obviously Twitter is in a position where they’ve needed to eliminate much of their headcount and replace much of the rest.
Firing the Trust and Safety team had a huge impact on advertising - that's why big brands find Xitter so toxic.
It is certainly also true that Musk's... emanations haven't helped relations with advertisers, but it is the lack of moderation that freaks them out, and also by-the-by chased off a noticeable fraction of the user base.
And now there's the bots:
https://www.threads.net/search?q=Twitter&serp_type=tags&tag_...
Yes, technically, adopting a principled stance favoring freedom of expression implies laying off people whose job is to infringe upon freedom of expression, but it’s disingenuous to cast that as a staffing issue rather than a change in policy.
And I’m sure advertisers also really hate the fact that even the ads on the timeline can get community notes. But, well, I’ve seen what other platforms turn into under the foul influence of advertisers and I’m frankly not interested. If that means it has to be subsidized by an eccentric billionaire out of principle, so what? Other billionaires subsidize much more toxic outlets, the Washington Post for instance.
Usually you dont hire if your business is not working or expected to grow
Twitter is possibly the website most well known for downtime, and has been since literally the beginning. There's no real measure for whether it's true it's down more than usual lately, and sensationalist journalism and anecdotal reports from people with an axe to grind aren't really reliable.
The closest thing I can think of is looking at Google trends, which shows that "twitter down" is pretty consistent over the years:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...
There's a spike in Nov 2022 when the layoffs happened, but again that's not indicative that it's especially bad - just that people were especially whiny about it or anticipating it would be bad
I utterly hate Musk, so firmly hope he was wrong. Just wish Xitter went down more.
Yes and no. Twitter was started before so much of the common “web scale” Open Source projects existed. Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, etc didn’t exist yet.
So versions of the aforementioned and then some were completely done from scratch at twitter, who has continued to maintain those projects despite them not being the premier open source offering in each of those categories. They also never achieved the scale of some of the largest tech companies where it makes economic sense to have say, a custom database or queue system.
Finally, Twitter has been using GCP for some of their new projects in the last few years, but they still had old legacy systems and teams to maintain that software, so they couldn’t fully reap the rewards of the cloud.
So, if you rebuilt twitter today you could likely do it for a fraction of the engineers they had at peak, by leveraging either cloud or popular existing OSS solutions. But that’s from scratch, not porting millions of lines of legacy code.
What Musk should have done was migrate various systems, then wind down teams. That probably would have worked, but been expensive in the short term.
So I think they cut too much, and I also think they honestly thought more engineers would be up for “hardcore twitter”, instead of quitting.
Musk forgot that all his very loyal Tesla employees may have also factored in their 10x RSU appreciation. It’s a lot easier to put up with insane working hours when your next years stock grant is 500k or million or something. Doesn’t apply at twitter.
Tl;DR: not a Musk hater at all, but he fucked up at Twitter.
exactly. most people with good enough internet stream at 6 mbps CBR. A streamer with 1k viewers costs them several terabytes! egress for a quick 2 hour stream.
They need to upgrade their encoding / codec
I actually did replace my liquid cooler and thermal paste on the beast machine, makes no difference
Big tech companies keeping tens of thousands of engineers on staff despite their core product not seeing substantial changes for years are just wasting money.
May be a bit different now (as others said, free money is gone, so competition cropping up is much harder to do and much less a concern), but the tech boom of the 2000's very much worried about becoming the next MySpace to some startup's Facebook. That's why tech salaries became so high to begin with.
>That was preventing other companies from hiring people away from them because they were useful employees, not hiring people to prevent them from competing.
Aren't these synonymous? You either entrap a necessary employee with contracts and/or absolute top compensation becsuse they are useful or even vital. No one's colluding to keep a janirot wage low (well, society is, but it's no one entity you can sue).
This is all fine and expected, you sacrifice engineering quality for development speed in the early days. Just expect to pay it back by keeping a large engineering team for many years to come, or see your entire tech explode in flames.
Those 'years' are finite however, Twitch has been mature for like a decade already. So finally the tech debt is all paid off, and given failure to develop major successful features, time to cut the staff.
With software, once you find PMF, it's not the building that's hard, but keeping the users paying and using your product. The entry barrier to building a copycat is very low. So you have to pile on resources to keep your software be the best available.
In big tech, having services without anyone having a semblance of maintenance responsibilities tends to lead to relatively quick failures. Even in boring enterprise companies, handing out maintenance to a 3rd party is still going to cost you, and is likely going to lower quality. I've seen way too many companies that ended up rewriting things after leaving a system mostly unmaintained for 5 years made it sop being fit to purpose.
If there's a lesson of software from the last decade is that undermaintained services become zombified software, and can eat your company's brains. That's why a place like google often would rather shut something down than claim it's finished.
I know some of my friends watch Twitch less because the ad policy became toxic.
[1] https://twitchtracker.com/statistics
[2] https://sullygnome.com/longtermstats
[3] https://streamscharts.com/overview#:~:text=Twitch%20growth%2...
Is it exploitative? Empowering? Toxic? Who knows! Everyone argues about everything.
Twitch is ban happy with anything even remotely controversial. Things that can be suggestive or comments that can be interpreted as offensive will garner a ban. And they hate anything even remotely sex-related.
Honestly, this stuff needs to move P2P. Platforms are indecisive and fickle. Just a month ago, they flip-flopped on their policy in just two days [1]. And it happens time and time again.
I don't blame the ad networks (after all Twitter had all of the world government and news orgs plus sex and nudity). I blame the Twitch leadership.
If you follow Twitch, the entire leadership is embroiled in the kind of drama you'd expect in a middle or high school.
The community is moving to mostly Kick [2] and somewhat to YouTube Gaming.
[1] https://decrypt.co/209998/twitch-walks-back-changes-after-su...
It seems incomplete to complain about this without also noting that Twitch (along with almost every other social media platform) has increasingly turned into a lead generation platform for OnlyFans. The rules keep changing because the OnlyFans streamers will find whatever line is drawn and absolutely spam the platform with whatever drives traffic to OF.
I don't want to see porn when I watch news or video games.
If I want to see porn, I know where to find it.
Aye. Payment providers.
Porn is "high risk" and the fees for processing payments for it are way higher.
It's all money anything else is rage baiting, kick's pull is the revenue split they'll never be able to maintain if they reach critical mass and the policies that get streamers to leave are the ad/revenue split changes.
Not to say that you are off, but what people here seem to be glossing over if not wholly overlooking is that Kick is entirely backed by founders of an online casino (quick searching will turn up very quickly who).
"partnerships" and "intertwined" that I'm seeing on this submission feel like they are understating it: Kick is owned by a casino.
A Harris Heller clip of a pretty thoughtful take, IMO:
Youtube is probably good enough for steamers.
Besides the ad policies, the Twitch revenue split for subscriptions has been changing over time. Historically it defaulted to 50/50 and most streamers of any decent size audience would have a contract to be granted 70/30 split. However, the 70/30 split has been phased out and today nearly no streamer on the platform has it anymore. This is a huge difference for streamers. The CEO of Twitch was handing out 70/30 split "coupons" as a prize in a live event[1], it's a big deal.
Besides subscription revenue, Twitch is constantly battling to reduce other sources of income, like branded sponsorships. Last year they announced significant restrictions on streamers displaying branded content with sponsors.[2] While these rules were soon reverted, it suggests Twitch is in a fight for its life. All indications point that this is going to continue to be a problem in the future. In short, streamers need to deal with the ads because their revenue from other sources is constantly at threat.
1: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/twitch-ceo-surprises-s...
2: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752437/twitch-new-ad-rul...
I’m not a heavy Twitch user so maybe I’m wrong but I’m struggling to think of a killer feature of Twitch or an aspect of the overall experience that’s better than YouTube Live videos.
At least with YouTube I can watch ad-free with a Premium plan.
First of all, an Amazon Prime subscription soon won't even remove ads from Amazon Video, so why would it be any different for Twitch?
Second of all, a channel subscription (through Amazon Prime or otherwise) removes ads from that channel. If you want an ad free experience across the whole site, Twitch Turbo is $11.99 USD.
I don't subscribe to any channels because Turbo exists; they probably don't like that.
Discoverability, content creators and community.
Live streaming is a second class citizen on youtube, and as such it is hidden under dropdowns, the live streams aren't always on the top of your followers, live recommendations are worse than useless and the big creators that move to youtube do like Ninja with Mixer, with a big fat paycheck to justify the loss of viewership and community.
Back in the day the streamer would take a break and roll some ads, so you knew you didn't miss anything ...
*I pay for youtube premium
Lockdowns were in 2020, not 2021.
Yes, April 2020 gave a huge bump to Twitch and the pandemic obviously had a large impact on the following years. Twitch had really good growth.
But look at the sources I linked. Looks to me like viewership has been down every year since 2021.
On the other hand: they host everything on AWS. Which Amazon owns. So while Twitch might make a loss the parent company might be perfectly happy making up the difference in AWS profits.
Unfortunately tech is probably the ur-contrarian and ur-isolated field, and from the reactions I see to this, I worry there will never be a systemic response by employees.
I think that has always been Amazon.com since it runs on AWS.
I'm surprised they don't have a 'choose your own revshare' setting, allowing the creator choose how much to pay twitch.
Obviously twitch will recommend more profitable creators, so you get a kind of 'race to the top', with creators offering twitch a larger and larger revshare, knowing that unless they do, their audience size will dwindle.
It also encourages creators to come in from other platforms - if you already have an audience and just want to extract money from them, then you don't need to be in twitches recommendations and can choose a low revshare to milk the subscribers.
Especially when I imagine a sizable portion of revenue comes from the very biggest streamers, who may not need discovery from twitch at all and would then default to the lowest value. Like, this model has sort of flipped setup from what I'd think you want; the more successful you are the lower twitches cut.
I suppose they could just make the minimum value 50% (iiuc this is the current value). But I'm still not sure how much it would help.
A 35% cut indicates something with the business is fundamentally wrong.
EDIT: I apologize for the completely unintentional derail.
Jokes on them, that's how its always been.
It's not foolish to imagine the world could be better.
I'm not saying to go back to the stone ages, but ultimately there have been movements to buy local and preserve traditional ways of crafting that are push back against industrialization.
While yes, so called "anti-work"[0] movement (or if you're from the early 2000s, the occupy wall street movement would be of similar philosphical values, for example) uses this term rather often, it derives from the work of the Ernest Mandel[1][2] based on his work in which he used the term to describe the latter stages of capitalism post WWII as he saw it, and how it inevitably would end up in deep inequality and power concentration, to paraphrase the thesis.
As far as "its always been that way" goes, I can't speak for all of the past, but there are clear models in the present that show it doesn't have to be that way. Norway & Sweden come to mind, for example.
[0]: Orewellian term at its best. The movement isn't actually anti work, much like luddites weren't anti technology. This label is attached by and large to people who are centered around ideas related to equitable wealth distribution in society & more worker rights, namely. They don't actually profess to be against work, as far as the movement goes. Individuals may vary. Never the less, its clear doublespeak.
[1]: Notably, a socialist. Wrote the book Late Capitalism (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/931838)
[2]: The term was then popularized by Fredic Jameson, another socialist, though his critique was centered around the culture of post modernism and capitalism intersections: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/ernest-mandel-marixism-late-capi...
Unfortunately, growth is hard, and it slows down. Over time, providing meaningful improvements to the lives of the participants in the economic system fails to keep up with the demands of growth, and you start to see the system going full ouroboros, consuming all the positive impact its created in the lives of its participants in a downward spiral of exploitation and value extraction until there's nothing left. The period of time after the inversion from "making people's lives better" to "making people's lives worse" is "late-stage capitalism", equivocating it to cancer or other terminal diseases.
Personally, I'm more of a "threshold events" theorist, and that enshittification is just reversion to the mean, but that's the pitch.
Capitalism means competition. Competitors mean reduced profits. As we get into the later stages of the game, that pesky competition aspect comes into play and firms do whatever they can to worm their way out of its consequences.
As profits inevitably fall, firms flail around doing whatever they can to maintain them and cause all sorts of misery for employees, customers, and the world at large. Increasingly brutal exploitation of workers, rotting product quality, all sorts of shenanigans with regulatory capture and rent-seeking as firms try to avoid competition and the need to sell a quality product at a competitive price.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
In practice, technology and some major events have prevented this from happening. The modern left-wing view is that we have run out of new frontiers to exploit, so the capital class will (has) return to reducing labor costs with more extreme measures among other tactics.
With recent events like a major labor shortage (or future one due to declining population) in the developed world, climate change, a stagnation in productivity per person, gig economy emergence, and widespread privatization being viewed as very destructive; this idea has gotten more popular. Part of this is driven by some companies, especially in tech, having manic levels of optimism about frivolous things.
Personally, it kind of sounds like Malthus. But it is hard to deny that we are in a slump of sorts and that startups that sound like scams appeared to be more common for a while.