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Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

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Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#31

Post by cft »

ajmurmann wrote: post #24
dkarapetyan wrote: post #14

I've seen this cycle a few times now. Just give it a merciful death (vine and twitter). Some things are meant to be ephemeral. I think vine and twitter are in that category. Just like a forest needs fires to be a healthy ecosystem. People should be more willing to let go of business ideas that see explosive growth but lack the business fundamentals to be sustainable. Instead what's gonna happen is that it is going to…

As a Twitter user I wouldn't like to see that happen. What other platform do you suggest I use instead?

At some point the numbers of remaining dedicated users simply do not justify keeping the service up, even if there's no alternative. It's a game of numbers (number of users and number of dollars).

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#33

Post by Kadin »

philsnow wrote: post #21
dasil003 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it had the potential to create a community around it. If they just wanted the feature they could easily have built it into Twitter for less than $30M. What made Vine work is the same thing that made Instagram work: a killer app. If Viners had to compete with everyone else on Twitter their work would have been too diluted to get traction, and you wouldn't have seen the same creativity and commitment.

Critically, the vine community is a younger demographic. Maybe Twitter wanted to keep them separate because they didn't want an eternal September killing the "bird in the hand" Twitter community.

That Vine's userbase consisted largely of younger people probably should have given Twitter pause, and in retrospect might have made them rethink that $30M valuation. Those are the same users who are most likely to drop your service overnight when it becomes uncool, for reasons that may never be clear or make sense. (See also: Myspace.)

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#35

Post by timcederman »

julianz wrote: post #32

How on earth does Vine need all those people with inflated job titles to deliver tiny videos over the internet?

This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running something at the scale of Vine, 50 people makes a lot of sense, and if anything that seems somewhat lean.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#36

Post by PeCaN »

timcederman wrote: post #35
julianz wrote: post #32

How on earth does Vine need all those people with inflated job titles to deliver tiny videos over the internet?

This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running something at the scale of Vine, 50 people makes a lot of sense, and if anything that seems somewhat lean.

You still didn't explain why they need that many people.

What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#37

Post by jakelarkin »

niftich wrote: post #25

It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can. I admire that. Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trendin…

"But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the original concept of microblogging."

right, they only added photos, video, FB style profile pages, link shortening, location metadata, algorithmic timeline, moments, messaging, and extensively developed mobile apps but otherwise yes exactly the same as when they were an 140 char SMS broadcast service.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#38

Post by timcederman »

PeCaN wrote: post #36
timcederman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running something at the scale of Vine, 50 people makes a lot of sense, and if anything that seems somewhat lean.

You still didn't explain why they need that many people. What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.

I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people, and for folks who work in the industry this should seem like a reasonable number just from their own experience.

However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data science, head of BD, editorial lead, and head of engineering who all just left. We're up to 26 people already. Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, help centre and customer support, a DBA, ops, or IT support.

Does that all make sense now? It's a company within Twitter and there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly. I'm not then going to go into what each person does each day, but with a product that you're trying to drive growth and new features for, while supporting existing customers, and just generally running a company, that takes a lot of bodies if you want to do it effectively and not cut corners.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#39

Post by beagle3 »

niftich wrote: post #25

It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as they can. I admire that. Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation, but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single social network is trendin…

Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve. They've tried small changes, and nothing helped their bottom line. Rumors are that part of the reason is that they are not sure what their "secret sauce" is, so they are reluctant to change anything in fear of harming it.

Also, they are dying. They have never turned a profit. Facebook or Google or Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users - but they have so far given no indication they can survive independently. And they have had a few billion dollars in funding and ten years to give that indication.

Re: Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left

#40

Post by skybrian »

PeCaN wrote: post #36
timcederman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running something at the scale of Vine, 50 people makes a lot of sense, and if anything that seems somewhat lean.

You still didn't explain why they need that many people. What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.

I don't know either but use your imagination. More traffic means more weird edge cases, more spam, more abuse, and more difficult policy decisions.
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