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

361–370 of 372 posts

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

#361

Post by brianwawok »

jomamaxx wrote: post #295
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You don't need a PHD to understand what this means, you need only basic reading comprehension and minimal intelligence: Quote from FED: >The hedonic quality adjustment method removes any price differential attributed to a change in quality by adding or subtracting the estimated value of that change from the price of the old item. What do you think "attributing a change in quality" or subtracting "estimated value" me…

You seem to fail to grasp even basic common sense: most products and service increase in value over time, and though it's difficult sometimes to measure that value, it's not 'arbitrary'. For example - as Farmers improve their technology - Tomatoes become bigger, juicier and redder. Clearly - there is 'economic value' in those 'improved tomatoes' and that has has to be taken into consideration when comparing tomatoes…

Tomatoes is a bad example. They contain less nutrition and taste less good each year (Google it).

Maybe cars or something your story works with

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

#362

Post by user5994461 »

majewsky wrote: post #351
user5994461 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp is a simple, single purpose app. It's not a complex engineering problem at all. Maybe it could be if it were done in the year 2000. It is not nowadays. [Granted, there is still work to be done to make a decent product, they had great people and they executed very well.]

And isn't Twitter a simple, single-purpose app, too? (At least before they purchased Vine and Periscope.)

Twitter and Wikipedia were created more than 10 years ago. It was way more challenging at the time.

Just think about the infrastructure for example. There was no SoftLayer/AWS to save your ass. You had to handle servers/hardware on your own. That alone could use a (small) company.

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

#363

Post by siquick »

cookiecaper wrote: post #138
intrasight wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since FB ads are useless, that's saying something

The ads on both platforms are primarily useful for gathering a following local to the platform. For example, on Facebook, you want to buy likes/engagement with your page, not outbound stuff. On Twitter, you want to buy followers. Once you have a following, you engage with them and use the content you post to drive them to your site where you (presumably) make money from them. The ads on the social platforms are not w…

I don't understand this logic. I've had great success in driving traffic my FB to websites, and for much lower cost than Adwords.

Buying FB page likes seems like a pointless exercise considering that only a tiny percentage of your users actually ever see your posts unless you boost them.

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

#364

Post by trymas »

em500 wrote: post #190
trymas wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not, but it could if twitter would stop spending huge piles of money that makes them go nowhere.

For software companies, "stop spending huge piles of money" means cutting jobs, see headline of this article.

but maybe they simply have too many employees in the first place?

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

#365

Post by dbbk »

enraged_camel wrote: post #195
gozur88 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? The short answer? Because they don't make money. I guess it's possible you could grow your company to a point where you say "Okay, we've filled our niche. Growing more doesn't make sense, so we'll just extract as much cash as we can." The problem is you have to make money to do that. Twitter doesn't make money and never has…

I think they have good revenue, but their insanely high expenses (coming mostly from the high number of employees, but probably other things that assume hyper growth too) make it impossible to turn a good profit.

They have just under 4,000 employees and spent $2.7 billion last year. Surely that can't be just it?

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

#366

Post by gozur88 »

artursapek wrote: post #342
gozur88 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? The short answer? Because they don't make money. I guess it's possible you could grow your company to a point where you say "Okay, we've filled our niche. Growing more doesn't make sense, so we'll just extract as much cash as we can." The problem is you have to make money to do that. Twitter doesn't make money and never has…

I think if Twitter settled down and optimized they could probably be making a healthy profit. That's sort of what I was getting at in my OP.

I doubt they can do it. We'll see.

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

#367

Post by intoverflow2 »

niftich wrote: post #113
Rapzid wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, which ones have they developed?

Some software that Twitter has put out: [1] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron [2] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ [3] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb [4] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consisten…

Keep seeing people on HN championing Twitters huge employee number by bringing up this stuff.

In the light of this news was any of this time well spent?

Or is it just engineers hoping that dev-facing work is actually of value to a company when the wolves are circling?

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

#368

Post by prirun »

I can always tell when Twitter is in trouble, because I get a security notice from them that there has been suspicious activity on my account, it has been locked, and I need to login with an assigned password. (I never use my Twitter account). Happened after the last quarterly earnings report and also yesterday.

In other words, "We need more active users, so please log in soon so we can count you as an active user."

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

#369

Post by VLM »

brianwawok wrote: post #360
VLM wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"than the producers want to provide" Yes this is the analogy to TV where the market provided precisely 3 channels (plus PBS) for decades and a third of the population reliably watched each show on each channel, but that was 1970 and now in 2010s there's 500 cable channels and a wildly success narrowcast might reach as many as 1 in 40 citizens. Usually far less, of course, as little reach as 1 in 300 is possible with…

Not sure tv analogy plays out. We have many shows because people want different stuff to watch sure. Why couldn't Reddit be the only BBS of the internet? Everyone in the same website, but live in a unique subreddit. TV doesn't work like that.

The problem with Reddit is its bigger than the Dunbar number so its possible to predict there's going to be severe problems with politics and censorship (and hey, golly, it turns out there is!).

Meanwhile in the Slashdot 90s a weblog discussion type site took a lot of money and an entire corporation to kinda run, but in the 10s a splinter group like Soylent News takes like three part time dudes, if that much, to serve up more than Slashdot ever did in the 90s.

So anything big automatically leads to political problems and 20 years ago, or even today, people just have to tolerate it, but as technology advanced eventually you'll be able to do more than reddit does with a simple $30 model 2025 raspberry pi and a sd card, so people will just move there instead.

Or rephrased the primary network effect of sharing Reddit is the joy of being a victim of raids from SRS, so people will be quite happy to leave.

Also I'd say we have very few TV shows because of expense and the resulting risk aversion. We have many nearly identical shows none worth watching. If the cost of TV shows scaled downward with technology we'd have some pretty interesting diversity of TV shows, but we don't.

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

#370

Post by s0me0ne »

Wonder if Twitter will end up like Delicious. Even with Pocket, Diigo and such, I'm not sure what people use to save bookmaks these days. Delicious went through several hands, Diigo was almost there but their bookmarklet doesnt let you know if you already have something tagged. Delicious abandoned their FF plugin and so its basically not worth using the site anymore.

I'll be honest, I wont miss Twitter if it dies out, as I'm not a user. The thing I hate is how Twitter killed RSS for many browsers and users. So if Twitter dies, so be it for causing that to happen.

Post reply on HN