Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#201

Post by mrweasel » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 8:53 AM UTC

trjordan wrote: post #143

smacktoward wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter

And yet managed to lose 136 million dollars. While revenue is interesting, it just doesn't matter if you can't turn a profit.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#202

Post by joosters » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 8:56 AM UTC

eva1984 wrote: post #190

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instagram is pretty trivial: ads. AFAIK, their user base is largely female, and this catalog of inventory is very much desired by advertisers. In terms of Whatsapp, micro-transaction maybe? That I am not quite sure, it is not going to be as straight-forward as Instagram.

Whatsapp used to be monetised before Facebook bought them, so in theory it shouldn't be that difficult to go back...

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#203

Post by beagle3 » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 8:57 AM UTC

Tinyyy wrote: post #126

There's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product". I think an exception is " or they're just not making any money".

Note that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay or not.

Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream.

Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#204

Post by simonswords82 » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 8:58 AM UTC

Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made.

Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides value.

Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting information.

If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#205

Post by eggie » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 9:04 AM UTC

jliptzin wrote: post #97

smacktoward wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Uh, most of that money was from the IPO and that was probably done because founders/early investors wanted to cash in. I'd say the vast majority of that funding was not necessary to scale to where they are today.

It didn't help improve the interface much. For example, on this site the interface shows me quickly who is replying to whom. A billion dollars in and Twitter still can't do this. They tried to be the world's largest chat room and basically came up AOL.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#206

Post by amix » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 9:05 AM UTC

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.

I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#207

Post by eggie » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 9:07 AM UTC

simonswords82 wrote: post #204

Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made. Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides v…

I find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a solution to this.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#208

Post by beagle3 » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 9:08 AM UTC

biggest_lou wrote: post #172

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; their head count was absolutely insane. Yes Twitter has some insane needs for scaling but 4,100 employees for a 140 character service with some basic ads? Absolutely far too many.

Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much, much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.

Those 4,100 people are not just facebooking all day. The question isn't whether they produced anything - it's whether it is actually needed to run twitter. And personally, I believe the answer is "not really".

As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.

If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#209

Post by beagle3 » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 9:09 AM UTC

kkhire wrote: post #104

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is another bloated company with an unclear growth story right across the street from Twitter, and it happens share same CEO. How long can Square keep up its act?

What makes you say that? Last I saw they had great revenue/were filing for IPO. Just wondering.

Twitter has great revenue too. It's the profit that's problematic.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#210

Post by Al-Khwarizmi » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 9:12 AM UTC

amix wrote: post #206

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

The new video and calling system, innovation? Skype, Hangouts and Viber have had those features for years...

I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.