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Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

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Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#381

Post by lkrubner »

thom wrote: post #378
lkrubner wrote: post #359

When Twitter got going, RSS was marred by political infighting: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-... And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature.…

Twitter may be worse for developers (more's the pity, I was at Chirp in 2010), but it's a vastly better platform in terms of content discovery, curation and consumption. I fail to see how any amount of cohesion from the RSS community could have overcome that, even in a world of simple, ubiquitous pub-sub, or whatever ideal one might imagine for syndication technology. I'd be really happy to hear how that battle could…

Content discovery and curation for RSS were the issues that startups like Technorati focused on. Their failures were partly failures of management. My startup wanted to build its business using Technorati data, circa 2006, but their sales strategy was bizarre. The API was supposedly pay-for-use, and I was happy to pay, but instead of offering an automated system for creating an api account, they asked that you write to their sales team. I wrote to their sales team at least a dozen times, and I tracked down the personal email address of the CEO, but no one ever responded to me. I was convinced then that they could have made a lot of money if they had made it easier for developers like me to give them money. But they made it impossible. And now it seems they gave up on RSS aggregation. They seem to be in a different business now:

http://technorati.com/

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#382

Post by thom »

lkrubner wrote: post #381
thom wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter may be worse for developers (more's the pity, I was at Chirp in 2010), but it's a vastly better platform in terms of content discovery, curation and consumption. I fail to see how any amount of cohesion from the RSS community could have overcome that, even in a world of simple, ubiquitous pub-sub, or whatever ideal one might imagine for syndication technology. I'd be really happy to hear how that battle could…

Content discovery and curation for RSS were the issues that startups like Technorati focused on. Their failures were partly failures of management. My startup wanted to build its business using Technorati data, circa 2006, but their sales strategy was bizarre. The API was supposedly pay-for-use, and I was happy to pay, but instead of offering an automated system for creating an api account, they asked that you write…

Ha, similar stories - I'm aware of Technorati, they really should have been the firehose of their day (I guess Wordpress.com is the closest thing now). I was building a feed reader that would cluster conversations around the blogosphere so you'd get a better sense of the daily zeitgeist than just following quotes or trackbacks. Which brings me to the more direct comparison - comments and trackbacks to replies and retweets. Finding new content branching from what you're already reading, and frankly the experience was just clunky and terrible compared to Twitter. And that's assuming you've even _found_ a feed reader and subscribed to some feeds. And even if _that_ was easy, where are you yourself publishing? Every task was harder, and only Tumblr has really come close to replicating Twitter's level of integration on a blog-like platform.

Tons of Twitter's best features were stumbled upon by accident, but a lot of their decisions, especially around limiting third-party clients, were justified in their minds by their user testing that showed just how confusing it was to locate and install a useful Twitter client and sign up for an account. The control they had allowed them to reduce friction to nearly zero. For anyone like Technorati to replicate that with open standards, they would have just exercised the same level of ownership.

This is all a shame, I'm sure there's some alternative universe in which longform content has been saved from invasive advertising by a frictionless, open system. And I certainly don't think Twitter is going to come up with a particularly interesting or successful business model. But I open my Twitter app more than my feed reader, and I think I'm happier for it.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#383

Post by kelseydh »

i386 wrote: post #377
kelseydh wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think profits are still the driving force of what matters, then you will never build an Instagram or WhatsApp at the exit values they achieved. This sounds like 90's bubble talk, but "eyeballs" do matter. Investors and the market care about the current social value of a product in terms of the value / growth of their user base. Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with Instagr…

That is the exact cargo cult bullshit thinking that got Twitter and many other companies into this situation in the first place.

Was Google cargo culting by turning down efforts by its early investors to have them show banner ads like Yahoo?

Their willingness to hold off for many many years without revenue was now brilliant in hindsight, given they found a much better way to make money on advertising than how Yahoo ever imagined it. But they wouldn't have got there if they caved into short-term thinking obsessed investors who think you need to post immediate revenue.

Twitter's issues are more to do with a lack of product innovation or evolution, not that it has gotten too large. Its problem is that it has gotten too large without expanding its product base to support or justify that growth.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#384

Post by lern_too_spel »

beagle3 wrote: post #209
kkhire wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Profit is not a problem as long as you have growth. Twitter doesn't have that, and neither does Square.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#385

Post by toomuchtodo »

kelseydh wrote: post #302
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.

If you think profits are still the driving force of what matters, then you will never build an Instagram or WhatsApp at the exit values they achieved. This sounds like 90's bubble talk, but "eyeballs" do matter. Investors and the market care about the current social value of a product in terms of the value / growth of their user base. Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with Instagr…

> Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with Instagram than Facebook. That fact about social trends is worth its weight in gold in terms of its user base.

Ask how many millenials or teens have bought something or spent money because of an ad on Facebook or Instagram.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#386

Post by felixhandte »

encoderer wrote: post #364
trhway wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Well, you can do write fanout, or you can do read fanout.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#387

Post by x1024 »

kelseydh wrote: post #284
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?

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.

WhatsApp innovated by smart use of technology within the limits of how real social interaction works.

Twitter innovated by redefining how social interaction works - and then proceeded to slowly grow bloated and cashless.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#388

Post by twistedpair »

mvc wrote: post #106

Has someone told their recruiting team? My twitter feed today was about 30% "join the flock" tweets.

I got an email from a Twtr recruiter two days ago and now am trying to word my polite reply that now doesn't look like the best time to be quitting a good job to join a company that's in the middle of layoffs. I guess they didn't get the word.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#389

Post by twistedpair »

tajano wrote: post #234

I predicted Twitter would be the next unicorn to cut staff and offices ten days ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002 ). To be honest, I didn't think it would happen quite this fast. But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But rapid growth is over.

But how many engineers if they were still on Ruby? Perhaps they can drop Scala for Erlang and get down to 100 engineers?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#390

Post by nemothekid »

oinksoft wrote: post #245
nemothekid wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp can't tell me how many users were talking about Peanut Butter Sandwiches 30 seconds ago. WhatsApp can't alert me when people suddenly start talking about earthquakes, super bowls, or Elon Musk. WhatsApp doesn't need to fanout a message to millions of consumers, millions of times a day (and with multi-second latency to boot!). WhatsApp also doesn't provide a CDN, mobile analytics/monetization/debugging platfo…

You're underestimating the difficulty of scaling Mnesia the way WhatsApp did (one source says "In-memory Mnesia database using about 2TB of RAM sharded across 16 partitions to store about 18 billion records." [1]). The prevailing wisdom in the Erlang community was that Mnesia could not be made to do such things. The only well-known user of Mnesia at anywhere near this scale prior to WhatsApp was Klarna. To achieve th…

When I checked this post, you were below zero - I'm not sure why you are downvoted.

In any case, my main point isn't that that WhatsApp is simple. When I said the parent posted was being reductionist, I was referring to Twitter's product offering. AFAIK (I could be wrong) WhatsApp is a messaging backend and multiple client frontends. The "50" engineers is deceiving becaus, despite the fact that Mnesia could or couldn't have scaled, there is a very non-trivial amount of engineers who worked on it and Mnesia is a good & proven system. In a similar light, Instagram was 13 engineers (or was it employees) and hundreds of django instances - and that maybe all you need for a photo feed, however Instagram didn't have a trending feature until earlier this year and how knows how many engineers that took.

If WhatApp hired another 200 engineers, likely 195 would either be twiddling their thumbs or working on new features outside what was needed in that acquisition to Facebook. Now we can make the argument that Twitter is bloated because they have too many products (Fabric, Vine, Crashlytics, and their numerous other acquisitions) - and the scaling back of those engineers may mean sunsetting those products - and thats fair. To imply they have 4000 engineers building a glorified 140-char mailing list is not.

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