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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

#361

Post by hugh4 »

rtpg wrote: post #169
hugh4 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

I don't see it so much as a tool as an experience. The twitter experience is almost always the same, which is why I got bored of it.

> What my vague acquaintance had for breakfast

> What my vague acquaintance had for breakfast

> What my vague acquaintance thinks about politics, which I need to grit my teeth and not reply to.

> Slightly amusing post from a well-known celebrity I follow, which someone will post on facebook later in the day anyway.

> Slightly amusing post from a well-known celebrity I quite deliberately don't follow, but which gets retweeted into my feed anyway.

> A politician I am starting to regret following wants my money.

> What some well-known celebrity I don't follow had for breakfast

Tools do something useful. Twitter doesn't -- at least, not for 95% of users.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#362

Post by ryandetzel »

scottu wrote: post #325
TheBlueDot wrote: post #223

Well, there goes my weekend/week. As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few months in I might be looking again. :-( To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they can't start telling people there will…

Is there enough demand in the San Francisco area to absorb say 20% of Twitter employees? It always feels like everyone is hiring out there.

They have over 30 offices so some if not most will be in other offices around the world.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#363

Post by trhway »

petercooper wrote: post #225
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.

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…

>If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues.

if your system design is actually done that way, i.e. that that amount of actual msgs, in one shape or another, hitting actual queues... well, you would definitely inflicted "scale" onto your system. It is like for any powerful data system there is always possible to make a cartesian query that will kill it :)

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#364

Post by encoderer »

trhway wrote: post #363
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…

>If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. if your system design is actually done that way, i.e. that that amount of actual msgs, in one shape or another, hitting actual queues... well, you would definitely inflicted "scale" onto your system. It is like for any powerful data system there is always possible to make a cartesian query that will kill it :)

How else would you process notifications, etc?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#365

Post by marcusgarvey »

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.

>Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples.

I wonder how many unicorns lack these criteria. Only Twitter has the discipline of public markets. If it doesn't deliver, public shareholders get burned.

If unicorns don't deliver, private investors get burned, but where do the losses go? VCs, founders, employees, as well as some family offices, banks, university endowments, pension funds...where else? And I sure am curious about the exposure of these last three groups.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#366

Post by marcusgarvey »

aetherson wrote: post #116
Scoundreller wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp charges a subscription fee after the first year of $1/year. When you have several hundred million users, that adds up. An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.

But it actually doesn't charge that subscription fee. At least not to the overwhelming majority of its users.

I really do not understand what the logic is here. They already have your loyalty presumably, and it's not a high sticker price.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#367

Post by bpicolo »

joe5150 wrote: post #34
bpicolo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it used most heavily for, like, customer support... Surprised that's not a more core part of their business

Even just setting up a Twitter account for a business feels like it's not something they've put any effort into. You can set up an advertising account with multiple users, but for a regular public-facing Twitter account it's either use TweetDeck or share passwords.

Yep. It sounds like a real, viable market too. They probably have a lot more insight into this than me, it's just something that surprises me as an external party

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#368

Post by dnr »

forgetsusername wrote: post #261
blumkvist wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple often beats expectations and trades lower after the earnings call.

No, Apple often outdoes its previous quarterly results, but fails to meet lofty analyst expectations, so its price falls after earnings. Exceeding expectations with a price drop afterwards is inexplicable.

I think I remember that happening to Google at least once. There are expectations and "expectations". Analysts' published expectations are often different than the ones they believe privately, and the expectation might be to exceed the "expectation".

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#369

Post by [deleted] »

jacques_chester wrote: post #334
beagle3 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 use…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#370

Post by mtw »

petercooper wrote: post #240
x1024 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge, but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only be able to talk to people one knows closely. There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of val…

For "friends", there is Facebook. You don't do " friends" on twitter, except if the friends are hackers or marketing types.

Twitter is more for information

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