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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

#161

Post by timcederman »

madgar wrote: post #111
timcederman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you can come run a team more leanly and successfully, I invite you to come do it - clearly, if there is a market inefficiency here you could reap the rewards.

Are you really so blinded by free-market ideology that you think one company having bloated headcount makes room for a direct competitor in their product space? You believe in a perfectly efficient market and don't believe in the existence of barriers to entry?

But this isn't one bloated company - this is a normal size and ratio of folks for this type of product. There will always be outliers - and in particular extremely small teams that can have outsized success, just as you'll also see behemoths not doing much (e.g. monster.com, 4,000 employees).

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

#162

Post by somebehemoth »

bmon wrote: post #90
timcederman wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you can come run a team more leanly and successfully, I invite you to come do it - clearly, if there is a market inefficiency here you could reap the rewards.

This kind of reply isn't really that constructive, the guy raised some fair points... A lot of smaller companies and startups seem to do incredibly well with not even 10 employees, let alone 50. I understand there's more to running a company than meets the eye, but I really do wonder if all 50 people spend their days at vine being productive.

Please name a company of 10 people that manages a user base in the tens of millions with similar technical requirements as Vine (bandwidth, storage, etc). If such a company exists I believe it would be an outlier.

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

#163

Post by freyir »

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…

Thanks, I wasn't familiar with many of these projects. I'm still not sure whether all this output justifies the staff, or whether they're over-engineering the hell out of a microblogging service.

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

#164

Post by madgar »

timcederman wrote: post #161
madgar wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really so blinded by free-market ideology that you think one company having bloated headcount makes room for a direct competitor in their product space? You believe in a perfectly efficient market and don't believe in the existence of barriers to entry?

But this isn't one bloated company - this is a normal size and ratio of folks for this type of product. There will always be outliers - and in particular extremely small teams that can have outsized success, just as you'll also see behemoths not doing much (e.g. monster.com, 4,000 employees).

My point is that your sarcasm was laughably bad. You came off like you genuinely believe that any perceived weakness makes room for a new company. Which is something people genuinely believe on this website.

If you want to make an effective point with sarcasm, you need to stay a bit more grounded.

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

#165

Post by HippoViolation »

sneak wrote: post #85
tlrobinson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that two major newsworthy events in the US in the past week (Philando Castillo killing and Dallas attack) were live-streamed on Facebook rather than Periscope. Facebook already has a huge advantage with 10x the active users of Twitter, AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't. "App constellations" may be a better…

Deray's arrest was livestreamed on Periscope. I think you might be cherrypicking, but even if I'm wrong, it's not quite that clear-cut.

Perhaps DeRay feels a bit of brand loyalty to the Jack Dorset empire.

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

#166

Post by andyjdavis »

lojack wrote: post #62
andyjdavis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it is just a jumble of collective stream of consciousness Much of it isn't even that. A huge proportion are not even real humans but are instead accounts being operated by one of the myriad of pieces of software that enable automatic posting on behalf of a human. Perhaps my view is skewed as we have a travel blog and know many other travel bloggers but a vanishingly small percentage are real humans actually typing t…

However, most of that software can be filtered and controlled via the API. Part of the reason Twitter is so hostile to third party apps (with exceptions) that duplicate its own functionality is so they can get analytics about actual users and not marketing bots.

Do you know if they publicly release analytics about humans Vs bots? I would be interested to know the proportion of tweets from actual humans.

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

#167

Post by timcederman »

madgar wrote: post #164
timcederman wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this isn't one bloated company - this is a normal size and ratio of folks for this type of product. There will always be outliers - and in particular extremely small teams that can have outsized success, just as you'll also see behemoths not doing much (e.g. monster.com, 4,000 employees).

My point is that your sarcasm was laughably bad. You came off like you genuinely believe that any perceived weakness makes room for a new company. Which is something people genuinely believe on this website. If you want to make an effective point with sarcasm, you need to stay a bit more grounded.

Based on what PeCaN said, it seems he/she thinks that Vine is an anomaly, and uses a vast amount of resources compared to what is required.

I believe they are perfectly normal, and if anything are slightly on the leaner side of average.

If PeCaN is right, and I'm wrong, then he/she should be starting a company much more efficient than the average, and benefiting from being that much more effective than his/her competition. There are plenty of opportunities out there - if someone like Vine is bloated, then surely PeCaN could be a consultant and not deal with barriers to entry, and still be wildly successful. There was no sarcasm.

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

#168

Post by beefsack »

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…

As a casual observer and non-user I'm actually quite happy to see them all reach feature parity. I'm hopeful that layman users will start to rue having the community so fragmented and we may start seeing faster progress towards common protocols and interoperability.

Part of me is seeing shades of the browser wars in these social network wars, and even though there were years of pain in the middle, we're all better off nowadays.

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

#169

Post by pdimitar »

jessaustin wrote: post #158
pdimitar wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am talking about the so-called VIP clubs, so neither.

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

#170

Post by paulryanrogers »

tlrobinson wrote: post #42
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…

Consider that two major newsworthy events in the US in the past week (Philando Castillo killing and Dallas attack) were live-streamed on Facebook rather than Periscope. Facebook already has a huge advantage with 10x the active users of Twitter, AND they integrated live video directly into the app that many of those users already have, rather than a separate app most of them don't. "App constellations" may be a better…

Constellations of separate apps are better for users who only want certain parts without ceding unnecessary permissions and space.

EDIT: 'is' to 'are'

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