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Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

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41–50 of 372 posts

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#41
post #10

You'd think they would have figured out targeted ads by now. If I follow people who post about RF/Microwave, antennas, SDR, and ham radio, one would think I'd see ads from Keysight and Tektronix, but no, it's garbage like football and pop music. FAIL! I also don't like that I don't see all the tweets from a person. They are pruning the timeline. Good riddance to twitter.

I've spent about $100 trying to promote my history podcast curation site on Twitter, and only got about 5 hits.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#42
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have answered this before, and what it boils down to is: because they took VC money, and then went public. If you bootstrap a business from nothing and grow it on its own, then sustainable growth and stable profit is fine. But Twitter got VC and IPO money with a promise that it would have Facebook-like growth in return. I think the analogy I saw used was that they promised investors a Porsche and instead deliv…

Are they liable for those promises though? I am legitimately curious to know if they are contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate or be at certain valuation at this point in time.

I don't know that they're "liable" in the sense that people could win a shareholder suit- the bar for those is set pretty high and I doubt Twitter would qualify. My comment was more in response to the accusations that the market is somehow being "unfair" for "punishing" Twitter's lack of continued growth. They're only punishing Twitter for failing to meet the expectations Twitter itself set.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#43
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you buy a stock that is guaranteed to stay flat for the discernible future? No? Then you have your answer. (let's not forget that, thanks to inflation, 'flat' is actually losing money over time.)

If a that stock over time covers inflation and pays a dividend, absolutely.

You're leaving beta. Any stock that fluctuates with the market is expected to have a much higher return than inflation, and with good reason.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have answered this before, and what it boils down to is: because they took VC money, and then went public. If you bootstrap a business from nothing and grow it on its own, then sustainable growth and stable profit is fine. But Twitter got VC and IPO money with a promise that it would have Facebook-like growth in return. I think the analogy I saw used was that they promised investors a Porsche and instead deliv…

Are they liable for those promises though? I am legitimately curious to know if they are contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate or be at certain valuation at this point in time.

Well yeah. "They" would be fired, and new leadership would be brought in to do better. When you're reporting to the board or shareholders they run the show. And they want more money.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#45
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they liable for those promises though? I am legitimately curious to know if they are contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate or be at certain valuation at this point in time.

I don't know that they're "liable" in the sense that people could win a shareholder suit- the bar for those is set pretty high and I doubt Twitter would qualify. My comment was more in response to the accusations that the market is somehow being "unfair" for "punishing" Twitter's lack of continued growth. They're only punishing Twitter for failing to meet the expectations Twitter itself set.

Even the word punishing is really too strong. The stock market isn't making a moral judgement. It's merely an estimate of the value of the company. As twitter's growth prospects decrease the value of the company goes down.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#46
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have answered this before, and what it boils down to is: because they took VC money, and then went public. If you bootstrap a business from nothing and grow it on its own, then sustainable growth and stable profit is fine. But Twitter got VC and IPO money with a promise that it would have Facebook-like growth in return. I think the analogy I saw used was that they promised investors a Porsche and instead deliv…

Are they liable for those promises though? I am legitimately curious to know if they are contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate or be at certain valuation at this point in time.

It's murky, and depends entirely on how concretely they made those promises. To me, common sense should dictate no, but to others, it might [1].

(Story covers lawsuit against Twitter for misleading shareholders on user growth numbers).

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-17/twitter-su...

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#47
post #13
post #10

You'd think they would have figured out targeted ads by now. If I follow people who post about RF/Microwave, antennas, SDR, and ham radio, one would think I'd see ads from Keysight and Tektronix, but no, it's garbage like football and pop music. FAIL! I also don't like that I don't see all the tweets from a person. They are pruning the timeline. Good riddance to twitter.

Is there a third party app which would not show promoted tweets? they are so annoying and un related

I use Tweetbot on ios and I don't see promoted tweets

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#48
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have answered this before, and what it boils down to is: because they took VC money, and then went public. If you bootstrap a business from nothing and grow it on its own, then sustainable growth and stable profit is fine. But Twitter got VC and IPO money with a promise that it would have Facebook-like growth in return. I think the analogy I saw used was that they promised investors a Porsche and instead deliv…

Are they liable for those promises though? I am legitimately curious to know if they are contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate or be at certain valuation at this point in time.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager a bit more than that to maintain existing services. But they haven't given up on growth yet, disappointing news doesn't = throw in the towel. If these rumors are true, best of luck to those affected.

Even to grow, does twitter really need 3,800 employees? The site hasn't exactly seen much change in the past few years.

Jonathan Blow gave a talk to Berekley college students a few months ago, complaining about the poor quality in modern software.

He picks on Twitter in one part, showing the graph of the number of employees by year, challenges their claims to the complexity of implementing Twitter, and mocks a UI problem he just had.

Twitter starts at 7 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#50
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have answered this before, and what it boils down to is: because they took VC money, and then went public. If you bootstrap a business from nothing and grow it on its own, then sustainable growth and stable profit is fine. But Twitter got VC and IPO money with a promise that it would have Facebook-like growth in return. I think the analogy I saw used was that they promised investors a Porsche and instead deliv…

Are they liable for those promises though? I am legitimately curious to know if they are contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate or be at certain valuation at this point in time.

Companies stop growing all the time: it happens all the time, and no company grows forever. A stock price is not just the value of a company's business today: It has future growth and risk priced in. What the stock market has been saying to Twitter is that the public believes that Twitter's ceiling is far lower than we thought in 2014.

In practice, this says that all the bets on hypergrowth were wrong, and the company must adapt: The stock grants that looked competitive before don't look competitive today, so top engineers leave. Staffing plans designed to keep a system operable at 10x of Twitter's current volume stop making sense, so projects change, and people are laid off.

So this has nothing to do with liability to promises (they've already IPO'd), but with the pain of becoming a less promising company. Twitter is too important to disappear in the near term; all you have to do is look at how big they are for journalists and presidential candidates to figure that out. There is, however, an opportunity for someone to make a competing product that fits the same needs and is easier to monetize.

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