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Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

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Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#91

Post by georgeecollins »

amflare wrote: post #81
georgeecollins wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree about its success, but I think you could build off of that. Have you ever used other twitter clients? Why shouldn't the official client have at least some of the features they offer? Let me ask the HN community! Can anybody here suggest a feature that they would like added to Twitter?

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. "Better" is subjective anyway. Any change with make some people mad, and no change will make others mad. If your product is stable, that's about the best you can hope for. No need to keep tweaking it out of boredom.

Seriously can you think of any tech product that doesn't get new features every couple years?

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#92

Post by georgeecollins »

buboard wrote: post #88
georgeecollins wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Twitter is a tech company with a great brand and a monopoly platform that has a stock that performs like a mall chain. The rate of product change is so slow. There are so many opportunities for growth that are not advertising. Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.

sure you can pull a digg and expect more money, but actually lose your users to a competitor. i 'd definitely quit twitter if it starts doing things like what facebook did to FB-page owners by holding their audience hostage for ransom. I think twitter, like reddit, inherently don't have high monetization potential because their format doesn't appeal to the massive audiences which flock to fb / instagram

>> but actually lose your users to a competitor

Twitter would be incredibly hard to supplant at this point.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#93

Post by dhimes »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #78

Why does Twitter need to have a huge market capitalization and return for investors? Can't it just be the "global heartbeat of the information age", as the author so humbly (/s) puts it?

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. They are profitable; they exceeded expectations by a lot Q2. Not sure what the problem is.

This happened to Yahoo too. They were quite happily tooling along, making profits, building cool stuff, and employing people with remote-work policies, small-biz tools for folks, and what-not. Then along came an activist investor who turned it into a royal shit-show.

He finally convince Verizon to buy it, but man it was a wild ride. I don't know if it made the investors money, but it made a lot of people sad.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#94

Post by patelh »

spsful wrote: post #83
patelh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no real comparison. Twitter is unique in its market (where it makes money). You can't really compare it to Facebook.

That is also true. I did agree with the author's position that Dorsey should not be the chief executive of both Square and Twitter. That's probably his strongest case towards removal. But your point about Twitter's uniqueness is also valid, and something I hadn't seriously thought of before. Around the time of their IPO, I think the general analyst consensus was that Twitter would not make money and their stock was n…

I am not sure I agree with the author on how many companies a person should be able to run. Depends on the success of the companies themselves. Look at Musk.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#95

Post by patelh »

arcticbull wrote: post #80
patelh wrote: post #37

Drivel. Nothing directly actionable. If a CEO has to be physically in his office to successfully run the company, he has done a poor job in building leadership under him/her. Jack is doing what he should be, finding new growth opportunities. Milking the users with more Ads will just piss off users for short term gains.

With that attitude why even have CEOs? Company’s been built, it should just run itself. Let’s just have CEOs step down as part of the IPO process. Literally nothing could go wrong. I’m proud of how Apple was able to dig itself out in the 1990s all by itself through the will power of the board and executive team. I mean what with Steve’s many South American getaways. Jack spends half days at two companies and as such…

No, I didn't say they aren't involved at all, but they don't need to be involved with day to day operations once they have consistent flow of revenue coming in. They should be finding ways to unlock the next growth multiplier not sitting at a desk in SF worrying about operations.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#96

Post by ganstyles »

buboard wrote: post #86
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s still a trivial fraction of the company It's an activist position, not a takeover. The shares are acquired for (a) shareholder rights, which can be accomplished with a single share and (b) economic upside. When a hedge fund pursues this strategy, it typically purchases advertising to make its case. (The case isn't just made to current shareholders. Shares owned by a sympathizer who bought on your activism vote…

how is an activist shareholder different from an activist?

An activist shareholder owns part of the company and has additional ability to effect change through voting shares. An activist without any shares cannot attend the shareholder meetings, etc. for example.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#97

Post by _k8si »

_8j50 wrote: post #84
georgeecollins wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Twitter is a tech company with a great brand and a monopoly platform that has a stock that performs like a mall chain. The rate of product change is so slow. There are so many opportunities for growth that are not advertising. Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.

The rate of product change at twitter is something every company should learn from! Devs like new features a lot more than users do. Users feel disrupted by new features. Users don't open up their favorite app and say "gee whiz,I wonder what new feature there is today". Users don't even think about twitter, they think about tweets,replies,likes and other users. You focus on what matters to users, not what matters to…

One example of a feature that I (a user) would love to see get a little love is Lists.

I use them frequently, but Lists are not well-designed at the moment. I can't see if I've already added a user to a list, the "update" is weirdly different from that of the main timeline, there are no aggregations/stats/summaries and AFAIK, there is no interaction with push notifications. They do nothing on the platform to draw anyone's attention to the feature.

But Lists are great! I can pare down my feed to a curated set of users who are all talking about the same thing -- I have an NLP list, and ML list, a "politics" list, etc. I can follow other people's curated lists too. Twitter is huge, it's awesome to have some path to a smaller cohesive community.

It's really weird to me that they would have a feature "above the fold" on the main menu of the platform that seems so dusty and under-utilized. What's the deal? Do they not have enough engineers over there or something?

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#98

Post by amflare »

georgeecollins wrote: post #91
amflare wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. "Better" is subjective anyway. Any change with make some people mad, and no change will make others mad. If your product is stable, that's about the best you can hope for. No need to keep tweaking it out of boredom.

Seriously can you think of any tech product that doesn't get new features every couple years?

stable !== static

Its like a car, you don't keep pressing the accelerator further and further to travel down the road. You find the optimum location to maintain a safe speed. If something changes, like the road turns, you adjust the accelerator until you are once again safe. If you stayed static, you'd probably fly into a ditch. If you are unnecessarily pumping the pedal, your speed would oscillate unpredictably, and any number of consequences would occur.

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#99

Post by [deleted] »

larnmar wrote: post #45
kgraves wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe all the author cares about is writing and content? I don't think this is an issue at all for the majority of people. Remember that you (and people visit/comment on articles on this orange site) are the 0.01% of people in the world that care about JavaScript being an issue.

Why doesn’t he just serve some nice plain text then?

[deleted]

Re: Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down

#100

Post by jdck1326 »

tguedes wrote: post #64
anaphor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems pretty likely to fail. How often does that actually result in positive gains?

All the time if its a good activist investor, just look up that term.

Not all of the time. Way too much chance involved. But enough to make a profit on average.
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