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

Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 372 posts

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

#141

Post by cookiecaper »

riteshkpr wrote: post #24
artursapek wrote: post #6

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…

"why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually?" -> Capitalism - growth, year over year, leads to higher stock price (market valuation) which in turn justifies higher payouts to ceo's, bonuses to employees... as growth == innovation If you din't keep growing and managed to keep the business profitable (hit the ceiling), then you weren't 'innovating' and should be replaced ... ... that's the mindset…

Yeah, it's a symptom of the way that companies are valued on the open market. No one can be content with well enough as long as our pricing and ownership models work the way they work.

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

#142

Post by dlubarov »

wefarrell wrote: post #43
planteen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Presumably the parent meant a stock whose share price tracks inflation in spite of its dividend. So if you reinvest the dividend, you beat inflation and potentially beat the market, depending on the dividend yield.

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

#143

Post by cookiecaper »

josep2 wrote: post #117

Twitter is by far the #1 service I use everyday. It's been the most valuable to me from a networking perspective where I've made friends and professional connections. I also happen to be a shareholder. It's been disappointing to watch Twitter try to become a business and completely falling flat. The acquisition of Vine and Periscope haven't led to much and the user growth from Live video is still t be seen. The produ…

Twitter needs to find a frictionless way to get paid by their regular users that most users won't notice or think much about. Several potentials exist: can charge to follow additional users above a certain threshold; can charge to expand publishing platform (i.e., to be followed by more than a certain quantity of users); can have "premium channel"-style users that only paid members can follow (this may also be a way to allow publishers to monetize; set your feed "paid follower only" and split the revenue with Twitter), and so forth.

The FREE! model only works out when you can sell your users' attention. Twitter has proven that it can't do that -- for whatever reason, user attention on Twitter is not worth what it's worth on Facebook or Google and they can't make a profit from it. So they need another way to monetize, and IMO that should be the tried and true "make people pay for what they use".

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

#144

Post by detaro »

madengr wrote: 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 at least get tech-related ads, but they are surprisingly useless as well. People trying to sell me tips to market my (non-existing) content better. Companies trying to be "hip" for young people. Ads that clearly haven't been translated by a native speaker. There is some monitoring service whose ads I get shown ALL the time. The ad says "The Pingdom Alternative" in large letters and I can't even remember the name of the company making the ad. So good job anchoring your competitor in my mind...

This means either their targeting is pretty crap or they only get low-quality ads.

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

#145

Post by traskjd »

windowsworkstoo wrote: post #123
inimino wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping up with inflation isn't growth.

You knew exactly what was meant but just in case - you still need nominal growth to avoid negative real growth

Thanks, and yes that's what I meant :-)

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

#146

Post by yeukhon »

kmonsen wrote: post #71
hibikir wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

If they are staying stable, do they really need those top engineers? The probably need a different set of engineers who can find a cheaper way of doing what they are already doing.

Staying stable finanically is okay, but staying stable and no optimization (better algorithms) might hurt. Hiring good engineers is surprisingly expensive and hard.

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

#147

Post by lmeyerov »

danieltillett wrote: post #101
aub3bhat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your competitor can raise those million dollars, and eventually your 20k profit per month becomes 20k loss per month. You can build all your imaginary arguments about magical businesses that make 20k profit per month while being self-sustained with holocracy, cruelty free, authentic, organic etc. etc. But the reality is that doing big things at bigger scale requires huge capital. If you are willing to pass up…

I run a bootstrapped SAAS business and I make far more than $20K a month profit and have done so for years. The key is choose a niche that is large enough to make the level of profit you want, but too small to attract VC funded competitors. The sort of market size you want is in the range of $5 to $20 million per year. Big enough to be worth the hassle, but too small to attract the big guys.

This reasoning feels safe for services, and risky for software:

* Big companies start small. VCs will tell startups to find something their tech can make them the best at and grow into nearby verticals.

* Software goes to zero. Academia, side projects, whatever. Either you keep up, and reach some sort of scale that you have a moat, or your risk goes up.

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

#148

Post by chinese_dan »

Twitter lost the trust of many users and are now suffering the consequences. It was once supposed to be the place for the freedom of speech and truth and is now just another arm of the left-leaning politicians in the US.

So many conservative/libertarian political figures and personalities have been permanently banned from Twitter in the last year for only posting an opinion that it can no longer be chalked up to circumstance.

Good riddance.

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

#149

Post by beedogs »

Analemma_ wrote: post #20
artursapek wrote: post #6

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…

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…

Well then they're pretty much doomed to failure. There's only so much blood you can squeeze out of a 140-character stone.

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

#150

Post by viraptor »

branchless wrote: post #92
Analemma_ wrote: post #20

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…

And what should also concern people about this is that our entire issuance of money as debt demands constant growth ahead of interest rates. Or you can have a time where you continually cut rates, print and call it growth, until you get to zero and it all falls apart. I'm not sure either are a good outcome from a bad idea. I'll also put my other question in this post seeing as I have tripped the HN rentier alerts by…

> What is patio-11 ?

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11

Post reply on HN