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Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

nytimes.com

161–170 of 414 posts

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#161
post #5

I don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or is it super niche now?

Same here. I just don't see the value in Twitter when I can easily get personalized content from Facebook's news feed and use an RSS reader for the sites that I follow.

Now imagine you're yourself, but you don't know what an RSS feed is, like 99.9% of the population. Doesn't Twitter sound useful?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#162
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.

Especially when the stock was up the day before

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet.

Facebook is building the most sophisticated AI Research Lab in the world. I think they'll be okay.

No where near as sophisticated as Google's or IBM's. These companies were not founded by rebranding MySpace as Facebook did. Google was founded based on a sophisticated algorithm that had its roots in AI while facebook was copying and pasting text entry boxes.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet.

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.

Facebooks acquisitions of users overlap. Think about that. They have nowhere near as many users as Google.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#165

Maybe it's finally dawning on investors that nobody wants to pay money for #sarcastic #selfpromoting #hottakes #mixingcontentandmetadata

I would not go that far, but I can certainly say -- seems like half the accounts are re-tweet bots and random products I have no interest in trying to follow me.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#166
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. Twitter was never really a technology company to me considering it was essentially just a mimic of a wrapper around an email list.

Any company that operates at web scale is a technology company. Besides that look at their opensource contributions. Twitter has/had some impressive engineering talent.

Try duplicating Google algorithms compared to Twitters wrappers and other functionality that can be easily duplicated.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#167
This sort of thing can happen when society insists on building multi-billion-dollar businesses around stuff that should have been an RFC.

On the plus side, shorting TWTR has been rewarding. Won't be doing it any more with a founder at the helm, of course.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#168
post #73

Genuine question - why do recruiters hire new people when the company is laying off?

They don't always, but I can think of a few reasons why they would: - they're hiring for different specialties and departments than what's being cut - at least in theory, they're hiring people who would be above-average workers while laying off those below average - they still need to compensate for normal churn, which is probably exacerbated by the layoffs - they can try giving new candidates weaker compensation to…

This is a good list. Two more reasons: - Corporations are inefficient, sometimes the HR department is not even aware layoffs are coming - Corporations are sometimes unethical, they don't care about the unfairness of hiring a new worker rather than trying to re-place a worker about to be laid off

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#169
post #148
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That analogy doesn't hold up as well to tools. I mean we're still using E-mail right? Twitter is basically a format in its own right at this point

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#170
post #35

The second dotcom boom is coming to an end. Have fun everyone

Not necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non-revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the idea)

Um, no. The OSS evangelism team is three people total.
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