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

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#331

Post by Axsuul » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

imron wrote: post #195

rtpg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No it's not, and unlike email, it's a proprietary system under the control of a single company.

A format like Twitter requires major infrastructure to work well so being under one company makes complete and necessary sense. This doesn't detract from the fact that it's become a format that a lot of the Internet now depends on for communication and news. Simply saying "no, it's not" doesn't prove anything.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#332

Post by pavornyoh » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

dmritard96 wrote: post #286

pavornyoh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@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.

@Dmritard96, thanks for clarifying:).

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#333

Post by applecore » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 4:52 PM 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.

Twitter's third-quarter revenue is expected to be around $560 million USD. WhatsApp is certain to be a major source of revenue for Facebook, but right now it's de minimis.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#334

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

beagle3 wrote: post #318

jacques_chester wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can fit 500 billion of them in memory You will also need space for fulltext indexes, indexes per hashtag (a set which grows constantly and never shrinks, but has a power distribution, meaning that some hot tags will overwhelm any single machine and it constantly changes), the ability to call up any tweet from any point in history (growing by one beefy Dell server per day), the ability to fan out to 1 or 10 or 1…

I do not claim it is trivial. But .. fulltext index done right, including per hashtag, doubles the storage requirements at most. And the ability to call up any tweet from history does not need to be as instantaneous is recent tweets (It's ok to wait 5 seconds for a tweet from 5 years ago). > The fanout problem turns sharding into a lumpy problem because again, there is a power law distribution that can overwhelm any…

> I do not claim it is trivial.

By saying it can be done with $12,000 of hardware, you essentially claim it is trivial.

> everything is so perfectly shardable as it is in Twitter.

Shardability, or partitionability, depends on the underlying distribution. It's only "perfectly" partitionable if that distribution is perfectly uniform.

Twitter's traffic patterns are power-laws. Some tags vastly outnumber others. Some users have vastly more followers. Those distributions are unstable across time and space in surprisingly short order.

> Twitter had the resources to do it better from very early on, and they didn't (I think it was 2012 or so before Twitter became reliable).

Twitter wasn't interested in a contest to use the least hardware. They were in a race to keep up with surging load, while migrating from Rails to something that didn't exist yet. Meanwhile they have, under the hood, built infrastructure that could not be bought off the shelf from anyone at the time.

We can't actually come to a conclusion here, because you're arguing a counterfactual. It's always easy to have the ideal solution to a problem you never actually solved yourself, because the visible features of a problem are obvious and the many, many invisible problems are where the bulk of the effort are hiding.

If you want to prove that Twitter doesn't need such large and complex distributed systems, you can probably round up a few hundred thousand in angel funding and sell yourself to Twitter for a nice return.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#335

Post by jarsin » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 5:05 PM UTC

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…

Twitter is suppose to be a growth company. Layoffs and downsizing are not what growth investors want to see. Thats why it went down.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#336

Post by bshimmin » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 5:06 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #320

bshimmin wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Excellent survey! The part i liked most was where you didn't even mention Google Plus :).

The fact I completely forgot about it is probably quite telling!

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#337

Post by inthewoods » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 5:13 PM UTC

kordless wrote: post #324

inthewoods wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Monetization of the queries isn't a significant revenue opportunity because of scaling payment issues. Solve that, and you solve getting paid for doing something you are good at, which is throwing millions of statuses at millions of users.

I'm not getting why you think this data is so valuable or who you think the audience is - are you suggesting that millions of people would pay for the feed and it is just a problem of being able to pay?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#338

Post by j42 » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 5:26 PM UTC

inthewoods wrote: post #283

j42 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I'm sorry but I'm not quite sure what you mean by this?

In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was from AdWords -- in recent years that has lowered slightly due to their diversification and cloud services, but it's still at least a 70% share of their gross revenues.

Facebook is currently ~80%.

The money is in the ads.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#339

Post by inthewoods » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

kordless wrote: post #321

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…

Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers. As for directly monetizing the APIs, one thought that springs to mind is charging for the firehose in a federated way. You could, for example, have a quer…

"Note I said "or" there. Decentralizing the infrastructure would make things cheaper and might give you revenue opportunity (and growth) that you wouldn't have otherwise. For example, perhaps you get into the business of aggregating ad sales to downstream providers."

Well, maybe, but you can't save your way to $2b in revenue. Stock prices don't generally go up on cost savings, they go up because of future revenue AND profit expectations. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both prize growth in revenue way over profit. But you're correct that they might discover another revenue stream - but now you're betting a lot on the value of federation.

"Make a payment to the address, then start querying at 50MB/sec for the duration of your valid token (in this example, 2 hours):"

I think you are vastly overstating the number of people or companies that would be willing to pay for this firehose. While it may be useful to some companies, overall the data isn't likely to be enough to be a $1b opportunity. More importantly, the number of people willing to buy isn't likely to grow - so a B2B play can be a minor part of their revenue but I don't believe they'd be able to depend on it for massive growth.

"And yes, I'm proposing Twitter should use Bitcoin to monetize query traffic. Even better, charge people for posting lots of statuses, or following and unfollowing lots of people. Link ask price to signal/noise ratio."

Given the current cost structure of other services (Facebook/Instagram/SnapChat), I'd argue you're unlikely to get anyone to pay for it, and you're reducing both the size and any potential growth of your audience dramatically.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#340

Post by inthewoods » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 5:32 PM UTC

j42 wrote: post #338

inthewoods wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I'm sorry but I'm not quite sure what you mean by this? In 2011, 96% of Google's revenue was from AdWords -- in recent years that has lowered slightly due to their diversification and cloud services, but it's still at least a 70% share of their gross revenues. Facebook is currently ~80%. The money is in the ads.

You and I agree.

The original poster is talking about queries in a difference sense than a Google query - he's referring to it as an API call in a "firehose" sense - so I'm buying access to the Twitter data for my application. I'm suggesting that the number of people who will pay for those API calls is limited.

But no doubt that money is in the ads - that's why I suggested that they should turn the API back on, but require clients to display the ads. Sadly, I think this opportunity is gone as they have killed their developer ecosystem.