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

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#281

Post by bshimmin » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:13 PM UTC

werber wrote: 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?

I've been a Twitter user since 2006 and mostly just use it to post sarcastic and pretentious remarks for my own enjoyment; the social aspect of it is almost meaningless to me. Many of my friends in tech do have Twitter accounts, of which they make varying degrees of use (though I'm not sure how many of them would regard it as essential - probably not many).

Most of my non-tech friends in real life broadly do not have Twitter accounts, or if they do, they follow about eight people (usually including Stephen Fry) and have either never tweeted, or only tweeted about four times, usually starting with, "Well, I'm on Twitter now. What do I do next?"

I'm talking about people in their 20s and 30s here. The same set of people do make a lot of use of Facebook (though a few, like me, find it vastly irritating and have deleted their accounts in recent years - but I'm not sure I know anyone female in that age bracket who doesn't have and use a Facebook account).

A bit more anecdata while I'm at it: Instagram seems pretty popular in cities, where people enjoy posting pictures of their pulled pork burgers and cocktails in jam jars - out here in the countryside, I don't hear much about it. The younger generation definitely do use Snapchat and the like, but I think most people over about 25 have no understanding at all of it. WhatsApp seems to have a very broad and universal appeal, and is a real common denominator for anyone who falls under the category of "I want to keep in contact with a friend who lives abroad" (I don't fully understand how it won out over Skype, apart from Skype being a very poor experience on mobile). Lastly, I'm not sure I know anyone who doesn't work in online media who actually uses Pinterest.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#282

Post by tedunangst » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:14 PM 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".

You are the product. But apparently a poor one.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#283

Post by inthewoods » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:16 PM UTC

j42 wrote: post #193

jeff_marshall wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

While not stated eloquently, I do think there's some truth in that. 1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and…

Monetization of the queries doesn't appear to be a significant revenue opportunity for either Google or Facebook - why would this be different for Twitter? Not that this can't be a revenue source, but how big is it?

An alternative: I agree with everyone that they should have turned the APIs back on - they just should have made it mandatory to carry advertising as part of the feeds in order to access the feeds. They could have also layered on federated advertising for anyone consuming the API - meaning, allow those folks to show their own advertising in-stream. They simply pay Twitter a cut. Both of these may have helped them both grow the audience and advertising at the same time.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#284

Post by kelseydh » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:25 PM UTC

x1024 wrote: post #232

petercooper wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales? If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?

Very few innovative startups have ever succeeded by declaring that "technology has its limits, we better work within them!"

To be successful, you usually have to do something outside the comfort limits of existing technology.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#285

Post by calibraxis » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:25 PM UTC

TheBlueDot wrote: post #254

mahouse wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will see it. :-/ No criticism? Is it bad if I say that they have a very simple product that doesn't need so much people? Is it bad if I say every feature they add they ruin it more? Is it bad if I say I would rather go back to 2010 Twitter?

I'm talking about rude comments about the intelligent people that work there. Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?

I would be grateful if people could now leak what's up with all the racist/misogynist terrorist bullying, which I constantly see when looking at Twitter responses. (I'm sure many would defend Twitter's actions despite getting fired, but there's gotta be a couple ethical people who wanted to seriously act.)

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#286

Post by dmritard96 » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

pavornyoh wrote: post #46

dmritard96 wrote: post #21

rise of cockroaches was the techcrunch headline, arguably this is a bit of a nod to that.

@dmritard96, care to elaborate a bit on your post?

sure. There was what seems to be a correction in the PE market where funding become a bit more difficult to get a hold of. As such, an article came out suggesting that unicorns would have problems but cockroaches would survive. While the unicorn portion is a bit silly, the cockroach part is reasonable. Essentially, the companies with low burn rates and actual, real, cashflow will be more likely to survive.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#287

Post by mrweasel » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:27 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #213

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…

Don't make the assumption that because you don't like, or see any use for, a particular product other people won't.

While I agree with you, with Twitter the opposite seems to hold true. Many people like Twitter and see it as an integrated part of how they work and interact and that has driven the evaluation of the company. Not once has I heard anyone in the tech press or end in the financial news question Twitter.

Twitter should never have been a publicly listed company. They don't have a business plan, there was never any prof that they would be profitable. But Silicon Vally types, news media and bankers liked using the platform so: hey presto Twitter is a billion dollar company.

Twitter could be profitable if each user paid just $10 per year, but sadly I don't think people like it enough to pay up.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#288

Post by kelseydh » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:28 PM UTC

princetontiger wrote: post #262

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.

Several SF tech companies have been polluted by former investment bankers. I presume pushing paper and face time have become even more important.

Not to mention Twitter got a lot of its early success from making connections to media companies in television.

That may have worked for them, but I suspect it's filled the company with many media-only types in a toxic way similar to how Yahoo got hurt by thinking of themselves as only a media/ads company. That killed them against Google, who as Paul Graham pointed out, was a company that was still successful in feeling like a startup technology company well after becoming large.

Given Twitter's lack of technology innovations, I'm inclined to think they are more towards Yahoo than they are towards Google.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#289

Post by roye » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:29 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #186

jacobwcarlson wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool. I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchi…

... in messages of 140 characters designed to provoke outrage and retweets, not to engage meaningfully with any of the complex issues of the day. Their entire userbase could do a MySpace overnight.

Twitter is actually becoming quite popular in science. It's a great tool to hear of new papers, find out about new findings reported in conferences you can't attend, and communicate in a public forum. Don't think you would have had much of that in MySpace...

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#290

Post by TheBlueDot » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 1:30 PM UTC

draugadrotten wrote: post #217

mrweasel wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

How is it even possible for a company like twitter to spend a billion dollar and change in one quarter? That's enough to run a small country complete with golden bathroom for the dictator. Time to go read about their OPEX I suppose. Anyone got a link to a good write-up?

Half a billion but...

People are expensive, office space in their 30+ offices is expensive, hundreds of thousands of servers are expensive...