Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to hear how you think they make money in this world.
The didn't apparently.
They are absolutely making cash revenue. GAAP losses come down to share-based compensation, which doesn't affect their bank balance.
Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
131–140 of 347 posts
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, just a hair over three quarters. Anyone can see that's perfectly reasonable. (...he said, not realizing it was on the close order of what someone else here is advocating. Whence comes the idea that Twitter is overpopulated? Do we hear it from current or ex-Twitter-ers?)
Not going to argue with you. 4000 employees is going to lead to a lot of inertia when doing development (even if only 10% of them were devs). However, the culture and process changes you need to institute in order to make such a change work is not trivial. Probably necessary for the future growth of the company, but could quite easily end up killing it in the process.
Not asking you to argue with me. I'd just be interested to see some substantiation for the claim that Twitter is overstaffed. It seems like that claim turns up a lot, and I'm sort of surprised that no one seems to have taken the time to explain why he thinks so.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh neat. So, in order to avoid having ads filtered at federation boundaries, thus delivering zero value to ad buyers and zero revenue to themselves, they now have a very strong incentive to come up with advertising only imperceptibly different from everything that is not advertising.
see edit, I assumed the question was referring to the status quo. A better model than advertising would be to charge those broadcasting their message to a large number of recipients (your CNNs and Trumps should be the ones paying to play).
So you drive away your biggest draw? In the media-centric view of the world, those people would be asking for a cut of revenues. There's clearly a major disconnect from reality on one side or the other here. Any examples of successful businesses that do it the way you describe?
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frankly, I wouldn't mind if we saw an end to Trump's tweets. Not because of their content, but because of their impulsiveness, which is a behavior that Twitter's design encourages. Which is cool when it comes to celebrities and such in which it's fun to see what they think about sans filter. But the president of the United States speaks with the executive authority for an entire nation. It's questionable enough when…
You do realize he's not the one posting there? Neither was Obama. These accounts are ran by teams...
That would go against most public accounts of how Trump has been using his phone for tweeting.
For one thing, Obama's personal account (i.e. not @POTUS, but @BarackObama) explicitly says in its profile: "This account is run by Organizing for Action staff. Tweets from the President are signed -bo. [0]
No such disclaimer has been made about Trump's account, which tweets with the same characteristics and tone as it did well before his current presidential campaign [1]. You're right, though, that Trump's team does tweet for him on occasion. Either that, or Trump, who is famously not a computer user, has mastered the art of using two different mobile operating systems [2]
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#135Twitter can make money, all it has to do is reduce its operational costs first. Then launch new products to grow. Twitter isn't going to become the new ad-sense or Facebook if it isn't a platform at first place. And you don't become a platform if your product isn't relevant to a lot of people.
People use Google for search. People use Facebook to connect with friends and family. Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-seekers? my grand mother doesn't need a twitter account. Nobody cares about her cooking a chicken or planting cucumbers in the garden BUT her closest relatives. And there is already Facebook for that.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moment Dick left was when I felt a disturbance in the twitterverse (but I also have a disdain for Dorsey). It kind of felt weird to me that Twitter went from this platform of literally starting revolutions to managing expectations of its users in the name "fighting harassment". I now use it simply to tweet out my latest recipes...
Since the US election, Twitter has been headline newsworthy nearly every day. Whether you think that's a bad thing or not, it's still a potent force in the world, surprisingly to me.
twitter itself is newsworthy, or are you saying what people write on it.
do you consider the email protocol or telephone newsworthy daily?
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#137I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of a…
Thinking about it, Twitter barely evolved since its inception. At least changes are barely noticeable on the website in terms of features or UX. And I agreee with you, it's impossible to follow a discussion on Twitter. It is almost impossible to know who is answering to whom when tweets pile up.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#138I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can force them to take action and quickly. Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of a…
It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of companies that were trying to invest on that and build actually innovative software.
As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#139There is this thing called the foundation of America and it centres on what's called the 1st amendment. If you think twitter or any social platform should interfere with that and somehow grants him a platform to destroy the world then I suggest you re-evaluate your stance, stop over reacting like a 15 year old, and pick up a copy of 1984.
Before someone comments noting that the 1st amendment only restricts government and is not binding on twitter: please note that free speech is a valuable community principle for the same reasons it is a valuable legal principle. The "marketplace of ideas" is very real and very valuable and ought not be censored. Moreover, it is very hard to consider social networks in this day and age to be acting as anything other t…
Should there be an absolute right to speech, however, especially when it can be used to, for example, silence other people?
This is something that countries differ on. The US's notion of near-absolute free speech is rather unusual.
Re: Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been saying this for a little while now: Twitter should really try to capitalize on Tweetstorms. What they don't seem to realize is that Tweetstorms enable Twitter to be a kind of inverse annotation platform. Most annotation platforms enable large chunks of text to be dissected by readers, but a Tweetstorm is the opposite: the author specifies the exact segmentation of the text as they release it, and each segme…
(Shameless plug) I've been working on an open-source tool to visualize twitter conversations and I've come to appreciate tweetstorms a bit more. Here's this tweetstorm visualized with the tool: https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-website-staticfiles-25g9k/tvp.h...
That's really cool. I've always found it difficult to follow discussions on Twitter. Maybe the UI is better for logged-in users but I've never bothered.