If I were running Twitter. | Hacker News Reader

If I were running Twitter.

orangethirty.blogspot.com

11 pointsorangethirty9 comments

Good for a laugh. The terrible advice starts early, though. If you start hiring developers without a good screening process a large percent of them will be developers who can't find a job anywhere else, often for good reasons. Classic Joel Spolsky.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

Let's do a quick fill in the blank quizz here.

If you start hiring _______ without a good screening process a large number of them will be _______ who can't find a job anywhere else, often for good reasons.

    a. developers
    b. managers
    c. plumbers
    d. mechanics

I didn't say I would keep them all, did I? :)

Firing people is fucking expensive.

It amuses me that only the very last item on the list is about making money, rather than spending it. Yes, if I had a billion billion dollars and a fantasy pony castle then I would also have a team of super hackers that would make my every twitter wish come true.

Other than that: yes, that would be an awesome way to run a company. But it seems that the bigger the companies get, the more they shy away from that structure (obvious exception: Valve).

It is satire with a twist (tweet?) of truth behind it. My point is that I would focus on exploiting the user base in order to find ways to be profitable. That takes lots of hackers, and less middle managers. It would be an awesome way to run a company, and I wish someone would give me the chance to even work in one like that.

You rlast sentence is true. Bigger companies seem to mostly focus on themselves. Guess its a side-effect of bureucracy, dilber-style management, and MBAs.

Throwing more developers at a problem doesn't always help things. Sometimes, it can actually makes things much worse. One very talented middle-manager can often lead to more productivity than adding 20 inexperienced developers to the mix.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Oh, I agree. I don't have an idea of how to properly run such enterprise, but had fun playing pretend. Though I'm serious when I say that I'd love to work with or for a company that would focus on software/hardware R&D. More so if someone would be kind enough to give me some funding to try and make such thing work. I don't aim to be rich, I just want to build stuff. :)

So the author would turn it into a nerd wet dream?

Twitter doesn't make money because the idea isn't amenable to making money. It's that simple. There is this weird theory that if you get a bajillion people to use some website, it's worth a lot of money. No, it's really not.

It's like trying to monetize a park. Sure, you can do that, but when you look around you'll realize you have built a carnival. That is the future of Facebook, of Twitter. They are going to turn into carnivals. Not because of bad management, but because they are corporations, and either they will decide to make money, or they will go away.

I would, indeed, turn it into a nerds wet dream. What is wrong with that? Their current strategy seems to be focused on alienating the very people who helped the grow. Twitter doesn't make any money because it is focusing on finding a way to make money with messages that are no longer than 140 messages. A big userbase does equal value, though I agree it does not mean it is worth a bajillion. Maybe two billion like instagram.

Monetize a park? Well, you can rent out some designated areas for birthday parties during the day. Then put a big movie projector during the night and sell over priced pop corn. You can do paintball matches during the weekends. Maybe build a small lagoon where people can row some wodden boats while reading poetry. You might even go as far as putting some small vending machines that sell bird food, so the kids can feed the pretty birds. No need to build a carnival when you focus on finding alternate business models. Though to build the lagoon, paintball course, outdoor movie theater, you need engineers... :)

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