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Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#141

Post by jeff_marshall »

kordless wrote: post #89
InclinedPlane wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, a…

They turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.

>What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together

So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems contary to "profit!!!", from a laymans perspective.

It seems to me like API/User info availability is their leverage w.r.t. profitability, much as it pains me as a potential developer who would like that information for free. How does decentralization make them (and their investors) money? I can't see a way to do both given the incentives.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#142

Post by kzhahou »

scurvy wrote: post #102
kzhahou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Instagram had ~13 employees when they were acquired by FB, and they were obviously already huge. WhatsApp had ~30 when they were acquired, and were also huge. ("Huuuuuge!", says The Trump) Those teams are gods of scalability. Twitter is.... kinda the opposite.

Did WhatsApp have much in the way of storage needs? I don't think that they did. This is where the cost goes, durability. They were basically just a giant switchboard with some buddy lists (aka glorified MSN Messenger with SMS gateways). It's no wonder they were able to keep costs down and grow. They didn't have a lot of storage and persistence needs, just passing datagrams around the Internet between phones. Edit: M…

It doesn't matter that you personally know him and that he's a humble guy. They scaled to mega-usage with a small eng team --> scalability genius.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#143

Post by trjordan »

smacktoward wrote: post #95
InclinedPlane wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, a…

> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.

1) Operating is not the same as building, especially if you have to figure things out.

2) Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#144

Post by rdtsc »

joshkpeterson wrote: post #112
rdtsc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction? But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising). Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, c…

I don't know, I'd be willing to bet twitter usage is up compared to 4 years ago. Also, stock price != coolness, and further coolness != making more money. Isn't that what this story is about?

> bet twitter usage is up compared to 4 years ago.

It probably is. But probably not as much as everything believed it would be.

Coolness is about making money in case, but indirectly. If investors see others not being interested in Twitter and not regarding it as cool, they will pull out. I understand Twitter's primary revenue tool is advertisement. That requires users to advertise to.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#145

Post by incepted »

calcsam wrote: post #8

This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading. Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adj…

> the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading.

Any fluctuation within 5% is perfectly normal and totally meaningless.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#146

Post by rhizome »

nosuchthing wrote: post #75

"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants. Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish move.

If they're really going toward content, I think Moments is a good idea with a questionable name. Something like Super-GoogleNews could eventually evolve, Sprinkle a little recommendation engine over and you got yourself a custom page full of wordstuff.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#147

Post by InclinedPlane »

smacktoward wrote: post #95
InclinedPlane wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, a…

> The truth is that with modern technology you can build a company that has hundreds of millions of high-volume users and yet is not very expensive to operate. Investors had to dump more than a billion dollars into Twitter to get it to where it is today.

And? Aside from the fact that that's not really true, what does it matter? Twitter already IPO'd, the original investors got their money back, now it's just owners. And it doesn't require a team of 4000 to operate twitter. It requires far fewer, and as time goes on twitter will generally just get cheaper to operate.

Twitter can easily bring in enough revenue to keep doing what it's doing indefinitely. And that's totally fine. But it's unlikely they're going to grow by 10x in a few years or pivot drastically. Yet those unrealistic expectations were built into the current stock price.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#148

Post by hugh4 »

wyclif wrote: post #11
swingbridge wrote: post #3

A sad day for Twitter, but a dose of reality for a lot of the fluffiness in the market at the moment. Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.

Yes, it's sad for employees being let go, but it's good news for Twitter. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jack might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.

>I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet.

It's not going anywhere in the next year or two. But in five years? Ten years?

Twitter's main problem is that it has one product, and it's possible to get bored with that product. It's not really possible to get bored of googling things or buying things off amazon, but it's entirely possible to get bored of twitter.

Remember when every man and his dog had a blog? (Or possibly a livejournal?) Remember when the word "blogosphere" was all over the news? What happened to all the blogs?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#149

Post by sinxoveretothex »

bandrami wrote: post #134
joshkpeterson wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I'd be willing to bet twitter usage is up compared to 4 years ago. Also, stock price != coolness, and further coolness != making more money. Isn't that what this story is about?

But then again stock price != making more money. Particularly for non-dividend-paying firms.

Would you care to expand on this one?

It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#150

Post by bdcravens »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
addicted wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion user mark. And they are already reporting profits. I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.

Nothing lasts forever in tech. How will they monetize Instagram and WhatsApp? Don't show me users. Show me profits from those users if you want to count them.

Inserting ad images into Instagram would be fairly trivial. Given the large number of celebs on Instagram, shared revenue on product placement is another option. Promotion of high profile Instagram accounts (say, a new movie) etc
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