Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 172 posts

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

#101

Post by freyir »

niftich wrote: post #54
beagle3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information. Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a bro…

> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space

So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees?

Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.

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

#102

Post by fao_ »

warcher wrote: post #94
valgaze wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform. A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4 years ago) ex. “The median Twitter account has a s…

This is such an important point, lost in the punditry. Twitter gets a lot of love from journalists and people with a profile, who write the articles about twitter and control public perception. They have an interest in maintaining a personal brand and have enough visibility that Twitter works for them. If you listened to those people, Twitter's biggest problem would be trolls writing mean (and often abusive) tweets a…

Twitter is better than Reddit because it is decentralizes the information from single, topic-related feeds people can post to, to one feed per person that you can subscribe to. This makes it much faster and more convenient than Reddit for getting status posts on things you like, i.e. an independent game developer's latest WIP.

Some people have split accounts that you can choose to follow to receive different kind of status updates from them, so an example of this is a person with a 'oh look this interesting thing happened in my life' account, and a separate account for 'oh jeez I'm really angry and need to vent about this to a subset of people I know in relative privacy'. Because of the nature of twitter it feels easier to throw away or make lots of accounts than, say, facebok.

The real connection comes not when you follow celebrities, but when you're a creator (Or a budding creator), and you interact with other people who are creating things for support or advice; or you have an interest in what your friends are posting and doing, and like viewing their traveling posts and their reactions to things. If you have those sorts of relationships twitter helps facilitate them extremely well, and if you don't, or the people you interact with in that way don't use twitter, then it won't have that value for you.

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

#103

Post by Thlom »

tatoalo wrote: post #89
chmars wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Messenger is the new Facebook – there won't be a re-integration, it will more and more replace today's Facebook as we know it.

I don't see where Messenger could replace the Facebook native app at all...Messenger is growing every day and with bot support and SMS handling it's also becoming way more useful but from there to "Replacement of Facebook" there's quite the jump...

Most people use Facebook to communicate with their friends and family. With the regular Facebook platform everyone can see everything and your comment on a friends obnoxious photo might be posted on your moms news feed. Not so with Messenger. It's easy to have groups for friends, groups for family, groups for your Sunday football group etc. I bet most young people already are using Messenger a lot more than regular Facebook already.

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

#104

Post by ForHackernews »

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.

WhatsApp handles much more traffic than Vine (~1 billion users vs ~200 million) and they apparently do it with only about 50 engineers: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use...

I guess serving video is somewhat more complicated than delivering text messages (although texts need to be delivered in nearly real-time).

Maybe staff size follows a logistic curve w/r/t traffic?

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

#105

Post by ForHackernews »

rimantas wrote: post #97
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.

Wasn't Reddit run by just a few just fine? Or am I imagining things.

Reddit is kind of a slow-burning tire fire. The site is down or responds with an error page frequently. They have no good revenue model, and they're too old to easily attract new VC funding. They're a small team because they don't have money to hire a bigger team.

(Also, stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2u7ddq/the_real_r...)

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

#106

Post by coldtea »

udkl wrote: post #78
niftich wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew this was going to be challenged, and you're not wrong. But Twitter still feels closest to the original incarnation of 'here be a (roughly) reverse-chronological list of text-message length posts'. They had the timeline, the "friend feed" first, and most enhancements affected only the payload of their messages. Moments was a big innovation, and it's presented as a separate offering on their website. Whereas Fac…

Why are we putting a premium on 'retaining it's original features' ? This looks like a logical fallacy.

Because a lot of radical changeovers in other services are not user needs driven and look more like bait and switch.

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

#107

Post by coldtea »

niftich wrote: post #54
beagle3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information. Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I see it as a bro…

>Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is: You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to broadcast snippets of information.

Parent means their secret, money-making sauce. Not just what makes it appealing to some people.

>Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space

And 90% of them are almost dead.

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

#108

Post by krisdol »

niftich wrote: post #50
jakelarkin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I knew this was going to be challenged, and you're not wrong. But Twitter still feels closest to the original incarnation of 'here be a (roughly) reverse-chronological list of text-message length posts'. They had the timeline, the "friend feed" first, and most enhancements affected only the payload of their messages. Moments was a big innovation, and it's presented as a separate offering on their website. Whereas Fac…

Twitter switching away from a chronological see-everything timeline was a massive departure from its original idea, on the same scale as many of your other examples. To me that was a core feature and not having it just makes Twitter much less interesting to open.

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

#109

Post by _pmf_ »

dasil003 wrote: post #6
ceejayoz wrote: post #2

I have no idea why it wasn't just a minor product feature in the main Twitter app.

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.

> Because it had the potential to create a community around it.

How is "having the potential to create a community around it" (and failing) more valuable than catering to the actually existing Twitter community?

Post reply on HN