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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

#391

Post by inthewoods »

kordless wrote: post #346
inthewoods wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The data is valuable only if someone has fair access to it. What an individual or a thousand may do with that data is an unknown and that is the real opportunity here, not the promise of a million subscribers paying you a dollar each. Twitter took that unknown, turned it off, and tried to own all the opportunity and all the answers. They did this because they IPO'd and then the need by investors to know what's going…

"The data is valuable only if someone has fair access to it. What an individual or a thousand may do with that data is an unknown and that is the real opportunity here, not the promise of a million subscribers paying you a dollar each."

Why is the data only valuable if someone has fair access to it? Right now, basically anyone can go license the Twitter data and have access to the full firehose. And I don't know how you know if the data is real opportunity here (vs. advertising).

"The desire by some individuals to make insane amounts of money on an idea are directly responsible for a massive SUCK experience for the end users of the software because those users are then forced to use the software in a way that makes the revenue predictable. I used to love to use Twitter because of all the wide variety of apps and things I could do with it with code. Now it's just unusable and dying. I would pay to make that different, but there isn't anything they offer that's worth my time and effort, so I'll go elsewhere."

Are you offering a better path for Twitter and their shareholders, or are you offering a path that feels better, but may have a much lesser outcome for those parties? If so, why would they take it?

And while I agree with you that Twitter is dying, it's not unusable, it's just not usable in the way that you want to use it.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#392

Post by cpeterso »

lolive wrote: post #40

I used to be a Google Reader/Google Buzz addict. And was interacting with a very living community through those tools. I now use twitter as my exclusive medium for both mainstream and "niche" news. I appreciate the wide availability of content, but still think they are much too conservative with their user experience. The inability to browse tweets by topic is sometimes a pain. The inability to connect with the right…

Google Reader got so much right, except maybe feed discovery. Google could have incrementally morphed Reader, something that worked. Twitter is like RSS for regular people.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#393

Post by hugh4 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #85
Apocryphon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that how it works now? Companies with great products but not a sustainable long-term biz plan exit by getting bought out, and larger companies with a greater product but also no far-long-term biz plan buy those companies and survive by having them as fallback products?

Sounds like the beer industry. Five companies own half the world market. And new breweries are easy to start. If yours gains traction, you get acquired. And that's in an industry where the products are close to fungible, without depending on network effects.

I take offence to the notion that beers are fungible.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#394

Post by vidarh »

rjberry wrote: post #249
vidarh wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many well understood approaches to scaling this. There are operational challenges to it, but it's not that hard. E.g. decompose large follower lists by using reflectors, and cap the size in the messaging system to a suitably low number. Now you've reduced the issue to one of sharding it over enough machines.

Hubris, much?

Experience with messaging platforms. Keep in mind that Twitters platform is not particularly high volume for messaging systems. It is reasonably high volume for messaging between people. But people tweet rarely enough for Twitters overall volume to be all that special.

And Twitters core message exchange functionality is conceptually extremely simple.

You need to be able to take a message, and put it into the set of targets, T.

Problem is T can be "unreasonably big". E.g. millions of followers. Solution? If something is too big, see if you can divide the problem. Split T into smaller chunks t1..tn, and distribute them. If those chunks are still too large, split them again.

This reduces your problem to figuring out how to insert and remove and balance a tree, and how to process two kinds of message deliveries: Insert into timeline or reflect message to specified set of targets (each of which can be another reflector, or a final target timeline)

We all know of and use a system that does this at massive scale: E-mail w/forwarding and mailing lists. If you really wanted to (though it'd be extremely inefficient) you can do this with off the shelf mail-servers and other e-mail software. Using mail servers as messaging middleware might sound weird (and there are certainly better alternatives today), but it works just fine.

At Twitter scale there's certainly enough savings to be made from figuring various obvious and not so obvious optimizations (off the top of my head: for some of the users with the really extremely follower counts, it may make sense not to push their messages, but to push them to caches and weave them in dynamically) to justify the salaries of a few software developers to cut down on hosting and ops costs, but the basic problem is not hard.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#395

Post by vidarh »

oldmanjay wrote: post #329
jacquesm wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's actually dead on. After that it's a 'mere matter of programming', so there's plenty of work to be done but that's the exact way how you tackle this particular problem.

so in order to do what Twitter has done it is a mere matter of doing what Twitter has done, plus handwaving. how useful!

The "handwaving" here are simple, well understood problems both on the development side and operational side. As I've mentioned elsewhere: Twitters message volume or messaging patterns are nothing special. And it's a problem that is trivial to subdivide into manageable chunks.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#396

Post by BinaryIdiot »

volaski wrote: post #345
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. "Moments" just has that damn indicator showing stuff is unread on it and it drives me nuts but NOTHING is EVER relevant to any of my interests or even the people I follow. I don't even understand what the point of it is; shouldn't it just be displaying things it thinks I want to look at? At least that makes the most sense to me... Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don'…

it's because you're not their target. Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.

> it's because you're not their target

Fair enough. That probably goes for almost everyone on HN as well I would think but obviously we're an edge case.

> Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.

Hmm, how would this attract new folks? Like Facebook tries to show you things you care about but this I'm not sure how it's really sold to perspective users. Since it's a social network I'm guessing much will be word of mouth but that requires support from existing users.

I wonder if things like increasing the character amount and offering a better, maybe threaded conversational way of interacting with folks would bring in more people. Granted those may not be the best choices philosophically but I wonder if they've done any A/B testing where certain areas got different features like more character counts and how it turned out.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#397

Post by vidarh »

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 :)

You've "inflicted scale" but with constraints that makes it reasonable to handle:

As long as you first write the tweet to a durable canonical datastore, you can recover from the loss of any queue for individual users by re-processing the timelines of the accounts they follow. Hence you don't need those queues to be particularly durable. You can afford to cache a lot of data in memory, and write compressed updates to disk lazily. How durable you make the system is a tradeoff between the frequency of node failure and the cost of recovering from it vs. the cost of more nodes to handle lower write rates.

The alternative is to pull, but then you inflict polling costs + a lot of caching hassle.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#398

Post by inthewoods »

reubenmorais wrote: post #354
inthewoods wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp also appears, at the moment, to have a much simpler business model - you buy it. No advertising technology, no audience/data teams and, probably most significantly, no sales team to go out and get people to use the platform. And no big agency handholding people, no data scientists, no customer success account managers. I'd be curious to see what the breakdown is between tech and sales at Twitter.

That business model is almost certainly out the window after the Facebook acquisition. They renewed everyone's license automatically, and are probably going to remove it entirely.

Agreed - but this is about the number of employees based on their original business model, not what the future holds.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#399

Post by dghughes »

nyolfen wrote: post #118
dghughes wrote: post #59

> A Twitter spokesman declined to comment. That made me giggle. Their entire existence is communication.

i wonder if you think there is another kind of existence?

OK then "the Twitter Corp. business model" to be more accommodating to the pedant.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#400

Post by anonbanker »

STRML wrote: post #315
kelseydh wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most innovative technology to have come out of chat programs is Slack's feature that let's you EDIT chats in real time, and leave reactions. This is such a crazy innovation to the structure of chat programs, that it blows my mind other real time communication platforms haven't incorporated it. Even Facebook Messenger and GChat feel inadequate now that I'm consciously aware that they don't let me edit my chat mess…

Skype has had that functionality for a very long time, well before Slack was conceived.

my IRC client had s/wrong phrase/correct phrase/ for quite a while before Skype was a thought in the KaZaA developer's head.
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