Yesterday TWTR went down almost 7%.
Twitter announces layoffs
41–50 of 410 posts
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#42I guess the message was a bit too long for a tweet.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#43"Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight." Three paragraphs later... "So we have made an extremely tough decision: we plan to part ways with up to 336 people from across the company." Edit: My bad, I should have been clearer in what I meant. There isn't really any corporate speak, but I wouldn't call 3 paragraphs of fluff 'giving it to you straight'
Specific numbers like that makes for a nice change. So far touch wood I've never been in a company where layoffs have happened, but people I know who have been often just get notice that "some" layoffs will happen and it rarely seems like most of management has a clue how many they're intending to cut, with there being some target $$ value in salary reduction or similar in mind.
Often the process then more broadly resembles a farce, with managers trying to protect their mini-empires by sabotaging others. Giving an explicit number seems to indicate that Twitter has a clear idea of exactly what they're trying to do here.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#44"The world needs a strong Twitter, and this is another step to get there." Let's not get carried away here. Twitter is great. I use it too much of the day. But the world hardly needs Twitter.
Whatever. It's the equivalent of a parent thinking their baby is the most beautiful baby in the world, when it may not be the case to a more neutral observer.
I think he strikes a good tone in both emphasizing the importance of the work they are doing at Twitter, and how they need to do better. I think less than perfect objectivity can be forgiven.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#45> The world needs a strong Twitter Really? Does it? I think Twitter needs a strong Twitter, shareholders need a strong Twitter even Twitter employees need it. However the world is, at best, ambivalent about Twitter, if it disappeared tomorrow a replacement would spring up within a few weeks if the world really needed a way to shotgun their messages into the ether.
A few automated trading algorithms would become marginally less effective. Some poorly written ones might crash or make a few million dollars worth of bad trades. So, you know, there's that.
I don't know why the parent post is being downvoted: trading using Twitter sentiment analysis is apparently a thing [1][2].
[1] http://www.deltixlab.com/research/an-automated-trading-strat...
[2] http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2011/TrusheimChakoumakosYendlu...
Edit: typo
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that twitter has evolved into a kind of news/whistleblower network and that the world needs that. It could be something else than twitter but right now twitter is filling out an important role.
My theory is that Twitter is way more popular with newspapers than the general public because it is easy to extract trending tweets compared to almost anything else and generate stories based on it.
Agree but so is Reuters, still it's their news that a lot of newspapers uses for their papers.
Twitter is a news source not a newspaper.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#47Slightly OT, but honestly I think the world really doesn't need Twitter. If you view the evolution of the internet as a phenomenon fundamentally linked to the emergence of a global cultural consensus, or even consciousness, then to reduce a sizable fraction of its bandwidth to 140 chars, vicious echochambers and a communication mechanism custom designed to bump people's thoughts out-of-context for the purposes of ridicule then Twitter should be viewed as harmful. I hope some of these coming changes directly address the harm current Twitter does to the quality of human communication on the net.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that twitter has evolved into a kind of news/whistleblower network and that the world needs that. It could be something else than twitter but right now twitter is filling out an important role.
That's what Twitter was nearly from the beginning. That's not been their focus in recent years though, their focus has been on being a media platform.
Yeah but not enough IMO.
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#49What about Twitter's none-core products? GNIP and Fabric (crashlytics and Answers)
Re: Twitter announces layoffs
#50As a hobbyist coding small projects like Twitter in my spare time, I feel their pain and have consistently had to re-adjust the code base, and the amount of project contributors. This is observable on the micro-scale, and I would loathe to think how this plays out on the scale of Twitter, where unbridled and unchecked scale was allowed to take over the company, causing them to lose focus.
Twitter is essentially one big DevOps success story / failure after another, and I have faith they can start to focus again. One motif / question I have seen in every pundit's post about Twitter as a company is why the market (up until now perhaps) has not decided Twitter's faith? If it really is the case that Twitter is a big data company, then how come 90% (random estimate) of their users are fembots / fake accounts?