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Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

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11–20 of 87 posts

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#11
post #10

Can't companies and products simply hit a natural limit? There are inherent limitations to any given "thing" and perhaps Twitter has found its own terminal velocity.

Certainly they can. The issue is that the stockholders had previously believed that this limit was much much higher. They also, to some degree, still believe that (And maybe they are right. Maybe not. It's hard to say!). So if you are the management team at twitter and your stockholders think you could be doing better you are at constant risk of getting fired.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#13
post #4

No.

Perhaps HN should enforce a minimum comment length, like at least 3 words... One word comments clearly don't add value to a discussion.

I almost agree, but I suspect it's a reference to previous discussions around Betteridge's Law, for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9232419

I'm sure it's come up more than once, and it's a sensible response to clickbaitesque headlines like this one.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#14
(Note to Jack Dorsey fans: if you want to downvote downvote with arguments)

Obviously Jack Dorsey is not very capable and is bad at business execution. There is/was a simple way to increase Twitter revenue and profits: giving small and medium companies a way to pay for entry level access to their API in the same way Google AdWords, etc work. I think there is a lot of money there but they only know about wholeselling to companies/agencies with big budgets.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#15
post #11
post #10

Can't companies and products simply hit a natural limit? There are inherent limitations to any given "thing" and perhaps Twitter has found its own terminal velocity.

Certainly they can. The issue is that the stockholders had previously believed that this limit was much much higher. They also, to some degree, still believe that (And maybe they are right. Maybe not. It's hard to say!). So if you are the management team at twitter and your stockholders think you could be doing better you are at constant risk of getting fired.

This mismatch between expectation and reality is why so many internet companies "die". It's not that their business model failed, necessarily, it's that management, or the board, has set expectations for growth that defy reason. The company then has to embark on an ever-more-doomed set of initiatives to try to meet growth targets, which inevitably fail.

Many companies could still be thriving today (e.g., Yahoo), if not for this destructive aspect of capital in our markets.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#16
>Twitter announced what it hoped would be the antidote for its user decline: “Moments”

Yeah, I can't believe anyone thought that would work. It's like thinking that the recent "you can now type 10 more characters because URLs don't count" thing will save Twitter.

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#18
post #16

>Twitter announced what it hoped would be the antidote for its user decline: “Moments” Yeah, I can't believe anyone thought that would work. It's like thinking that the recent "you can now type 10 more characters because URLs don't count" thing will save Twitter.

I've always thought that overtime, gradually, they should've expanded their character limit to something reasonable like 200-300 chars. Are they that Microsoft like tied to being backwards compatible with SMS?

Re: Twitter Is Betting Everything on Jack Dorsey

#20

Twitter seem to serially fail in understanding their own product and the needs of their users. Jack isn't doing any better.

I think they understand the appeal they have, it's just that they're deciding it's not what they want. They're trying to pivot it to make it grow. That's what investors want to hear about, apparently; coverage, not depth.

Unfortunately for them they're trying to widen their appeal by making it less appealing to their current user base. I think we all know how it ends.

It's not a new tale.

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