Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by rpgmaker » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 4:56 PM UTC

partiallypro wrote: post #139

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…

I don't think that's true. Twitter has stuck to the original 140 character format...true. Honestly I think they should stick to that. The reason why Twitter has took a turn over the years is because of their treatment of developers and their murdering of top apps instead of letting them flourish. Look at TweetDeck, it hasn't improved in years, and you could argue it has gotten much worse. They dropped the Windows cli…

> The reason why Twitter has took a turn over the years is because of their treatment of developers and their murdering of top apps instead of letting them flourish.

Oh how I wish this was true but sadly this is usually never the case. If it was Facebook would be long dead by now.

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

#152

Post by rpgmaker » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

niftich wrote: post #146

freyir wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples: [1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html [2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron [3] Finagle, a fau…

I think Fabric does "help" their revenue ID'ing all those phones where Fabric-enabled apps are installed.

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

#153

Post by dbot » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:12 PM UTC

Jordrok wrote: post #137

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…

I think this is a fundamental truth that is rarely acknowledged by the creators of "free" services. Delivering value to your users and increasing profit for the company are almost always in direct conflict. Large groups of users are drawn in by a free product which will ultimately be unsustainable. The companies which succeed after this initial period are the ones who are willing to degrade their original product, an…

One major social network that rarely gets mentioned is NextDoor. Unfortunately, they've just begun doing ads, too, and I already hate it.

It's disappointing because they have such a natural starting base for generating revenue: collecting neighborhood dues. It provides a useful service, would likely increase dues participation, fits within the value-proposition of the product. Lots of opportunities for premium features paid for by neighborhood associations, too.

That's why it's sad to see NextDoor chasing the same ad revenue of every other social network.

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

#154

Post by ilaksh » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:25 PM UTC

Why would you need multiple executives to handle a business that is mainly silly 6-second video clips and could never be more than that without changing the name in which case it becomes an unknown brand?

What do top executives do for these types of companies. It seems like a joke.

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

#155

Post by ladon86 » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #104

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.

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?

So WhatsApp had did have bigger team (you're comparing 50 engineers vs 50 employees total), and now it's even bigger. There are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp.

It seems to me that WhatsApp and Vine have a similar staff to user to ratio.

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

#156

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:53 PM UTC

niftich wrote: post #146

freyir wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 d…

Twitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples: [1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html [2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron [3] Finagle, a fau…

Great list! At some point, I think this would have included Bootstrap as well?

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

#157

Post by pxlpshr » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

intoverflow2 wrote: post #124

pxlpshr wrote: post #7

The founders departed very early after the acquisition, like Rus and Dom. None of the 'top executives' were ever the original visionaries that created the product to begin with. It's sort of shocking that after Jack left but hailed back to save Twitter, that the board didn't have more wherewithal to retain the founding team of Vine. Textbook post-acquisition problem. I agree with other commenters that they should int…

> they should integrate Vine into Twitter Twitter already does video better than vine though, whats the point?

I guess you made my point. I care very little about Twitter now because their 2016 innovation was turning a star into a heart.

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

#158

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 6:18 PM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #128

majani wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is the fate of all the social networks whose main purpose is to feed into people's vanity. Surely 20 year companies can't be built off of people's desire to show off how much better their lives are to ours?

Both true and false. Don't forget that even now there are real-life VIP clubs the entrance to which costs the members pretty penny just so they can drink overpriced wine and convince each other they are special snowflakes, all the while crowding together underground in a place I wouldn't go in even if I am paid to. (And this phenomenon has been going on probably since the early medieval ages.) Maybe a virtual variant…

Are you talking about all bars with a cover charge, or is there some cutoff above which drinking and dancing with friends is snobism?

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

#159

Post by g8oz » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:35 PM UTC

ladon86 wrote: post #155

ForHackernews wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So WhatsApp had did have bigger team (you're comparing 50 engineers vs 50 employees total), and now it's even bigger. There are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp. It seems to me that WhatsApp and Vine have a similar staff to user to ratio.

If there are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp I wonder why it's so difficult for them to continue supporting Blackberry 10. So what if it's not popular, they should aim for complete coverage of modern mobile OSes. Then again this is the same team that could not implement encryption without outside help.

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

#160

Post by dasil003 » Wed, Jul 13, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

_pmf_ wrote: post #109

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.

> 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?

Because people would actually use it. A feature which no one uses is worthless.

I'm not saying I agree with the strategy, but you can't really say it failed. For a $30M acquisition it was quite a value as it exploded in subsequent years, it would have easily been approaching a $1B valuation at its peak, it only petered out in the last couple years. I really can't see how building a looping video feature into Twitter would have achieved that kind of reach (of course it would also have been hard to measure)