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Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

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Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#281

Post by chambo622 »

dejawu wrote: post #233

Ooh, I like this question. 1. Trim the fat. Reduce the number of employees dramatically. Obviously not a graceful change but I feel there should not be that as many people working there as there are now. 2. Focus on engagement, not growth. Twitter may not be growing in the way that the market wants, but the users that it does have are incredibly devoted to the platform. If I were to leave Twitter there's nowhere else…

> [Periscope is] a great platform but I think it also needs a desktop client (with OBS support, the way Twitch does) to allow the caliber of content creation to go up.

You can broadcast from OBS with Periscope Producer - https://help.periscope.tv/customer/en/portal/articles/260029...

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#282

Post by stevefeinstein »

tschellenbach wrote: post #106

Twitter in it's current form mainly appeals to power users. For every day users it's simply too much work to get value from Twitter. To fix that they will have to make some choices that will upset existing users though: 1. Move the chronological feed to the background, the feed should be sorted by relevancy not time. (If you're a power user you can click to the raw chronological feed.) 2. Right now you can only follo…

Relevance is relative.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#283

Post by JumpCrisscross »

I'd tear it apart until all that's left is a profitable, maintainable core. Like Craigslist.

Twitter's payroll (to say nothing of its stock-based compensation expense) is bloated. Slashing staff isn't a popular play. This is a textbook private equity deal.

Twitter's habit of ringing in the year with $500MM losses could be single-handedly cut with a 2/3rd staffing reduction (which costs lots in payroll and $800MM in stock-based compensation expense). How much of Twitter's $2bn in revenue would evaporate post-cuts. Over half? Still leaves $750MM of pre-tax income before R&D ($800MM in the FYE 2015). Cut that R&D budget in half, say you lose a further 25% of revenues, and you still have $160MM before taxes yielding $100MM of net income. That's worth $1bn to $2.5bn.

If you can grow that to $500MM over 4 or 5 years, you could sell it for ~20x. Discount back at 10% or 20% and you have an optimistic valuation of $4 to $7bn.

Twitter's trading at just under $12bn. I suppose I'd bid $3.50 per share and be willing to entertain someone talking just under $10 a share.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#284

Post by ChicagoDave »

I'd make accounts 3-tier:

1. anonymous, free, limited use (300 tweets per month) 2. consumer, verified identity, paid, $10/month (1500 tweets per month) 3. commercial, verified identities, paid, $25/month per user (3000 tweets/month) 4. commercial, verified identities, paid, $100/month per user (unlimited tweets)

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#285

Post by roryisok »

dotBen wrote: post #114
davycro wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Twitter's modern-day utility seems very low outside of news/sports/politics" Twitter has tremendous utility for the medical community. I am final year medical student and through twitter can follow worldwide leaders in emergency medicine (my field of interest). These doctors post clinical factoids, cases reports, unique ekgs, and other learning points live from the wards (all de-identified to protect patients of cou…

That's great but it's fair to say that's niche - both in terms of the number of people I'm guessing who are producing that type of content and the amount of monetization that can occur from that community. As a public company, Twitter has to focus on the mainstream, big numbers. I would also suggest that Twitter refocusing to sports and news would give the specialist apps you mention (and others) a better chance at s…

> If you don't fire up the app every few hours do you risk missing a crucial link or update?

One thing that's always bugged me about twitter - its so transient. when you log on you only get a snapshot of what's happening at that moment - scrolling back through the days or weeks traffic is next to impossible because of the sheer volume of content.

But in this way, the OP of this thread is correct - Live is most definitely where twitter is king.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#286

Post by npezolano »

Sell to Bloomberg:

1) Twitter is already used for financial news and real time financial trading of events.

2) Bloomberg has a huge financial data and news business.

3)Bloomberg would then be the sole provider of twitter data and the revenue from that alone could keep the product afloat.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#288

Post by yesiamyourdad »

OliverJones wrote: post #276

Imposing a modest signal cost should improve the signal - to - noise ratio substantially. Charge for reach. Ask accounts with more than 50K followers to either pay for all followers to receive tweets, or limit distribution to 50K followers, randomly chosen. It's the accounts with many followers that get the most benefit from the platform. And, a twitter crack could, in present circumstances, cause global political in…

I was hoping someone would say this!

I've been saying this for years, and I mean since 2007 or 2008, though I had figured just price levels. If you have 100K followers, that's probably worth some money to you. If you have 1M followers, that's worth even more. I was saying in the 2008 elections that CNN should have an entire rack in the data center sponsored by them, they were pushing their Twitter handles so hard.

One thing would be the fake followers, where you could DOS someone by creating bot accounts to follow people and use up their slots. I like the idea of randomly chosen followers, that's a twist I didn't think of; it also mitigates the issue of the fake followers. You could also do the opposite, charge to follow more than some number of accounts.

Re: Ask HN: How would you turn Twitter around?

#289

Post by pjc50 »

Have this conversation on Twitter. Listen to the users!

https://twitter.com/actioncookbook/status/684515262712967170

USERS: we love twitter but it has problems

TWITTER: great we'll fix them

USERS: do you want to know what they are

TWITTER: absolutely not

(18k likes, 14k RTs)

USERS: could you at least look at addressing the pervasive harassment of women

TWITTER [twirling like Maria von Trapp]: M O M E N T S

---

USERS: you're alienating the people who actually use your product

TWITTER: likes are now florps

USERS: what

TWITTER: timeline goes sideways

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