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Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

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Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#71

While I understand Twitter from a technical perspective, I have never understood why a large number of people use it. The value proposition for an average person is effectively zero. It's great for businesses and celebrities, but one-sided value propositions tend to not work out long term. We are now starting to see that inevitable result play out. You can only defy gravity for so long.

The serious interactive users of twitter typically use it like a threaded IRC channel, with added benefit of being able to search based upon user and hashtags.

I've used it to good effect to watch real-time events like protests and riots.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#72

Meh, I don't get it. They're making money, they grew to 18% more active users (that sounds like a lot), what seems to be the problem?

Welcome to the stock market. If I had to guess, they predicted bigger growth, which in turn set higher valuations and expectations.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#73
post #35
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What works for me in Chrome is to disable plugins by default. It seems to work universally, including for Bloomberg. I don't even bother running an ad-block, because disabling plugins is so effective at suppressing annoyances.

Chrome has made this worse recently, though. I disabled Flash more than a year ago on an older computer, and all that's required is clicking to enable. When I recently installed Chrome on a newer computer, the new method is Ctrl+Click to get a context menu, and then selecting "Run this plugin". Not sure why they made it more complicated, and I wish I knew how to get the older behavior my older computer has somehow re…

I really appreciate what Chrome did. People got clever and would move their player (or triggers) in front of your regular clicks to get their annoyance to play. They can't do that with right-click and a left-click in a context menu.

At least, that is my assumption, and if not, they should consider that as a positive outcome for me.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#74
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the problem is in generating revenue. According to their numbers, Twitter's user base is still trending upwards no?

It is still growing, but the momentum has been slowing for over a year. I googled, "twitter user growth" and every result points to disappointing user growth

Well at some point growth has to slow. There are a finite number of people interested in what Twitter has to offer.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#75

I think the writing is on the wall for Twitter. The younger generations are increasingly flocking to snapchat, yik yak, and similar apps. I never hear of anyone using it anymore(college student here). I would have stopped facebook a while back as well if I didn't use OAuth for damn near everything

Granted I'm an old fogie no longer in the target demo for hip stuff (turning 40 imminently) but I don't know what I'd do w/o Twitter. I communicate with friends, use it as a defacto news aggregator, an aggregator for chatter on various topics that interest me, a way to discover new things, keep up semi-professional acquaintances (largely w/ people I've never met in person) and even met a handful of friends w/ it.

I've no interest in the visual based media that's slowly replacing it, but I've always been more of a text person than a picture person anyways. Also I like being able to quickly scan dozens of messages instead of the large amount of real estate a picture would take up in relative terms.

And speaking of the compact size, I find the 140 char limit to be feature, not bug. At least for the people I follow they generally use that as a way to hone their thoughts and not just blather about.

I have my complaints, nothing is perfect but while I enjoy using FB losing Twitter would put a giant hole in my day to day life.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#76
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking that the revealing PDF was linked on an RSS feed. People don't read XML directly, because it looks funny in the browser... b^)

So ... someone tricked a bot into triggering an uninformed crash of the stock? Pretty clever, if true.

My understanding is that the "crash" was actually better-informed than Twitter had intended. They do have a bad earnings report, which was released sooner than they intended. Perhaps before various insiders' sell orders had a chance to complete? b^)

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#77

Meh, I don't get it. They're making money, they grew to 18% more active users (that sounds like a lot), what seems to be the problem?

The way stock prices work is that the price of a company's stock (or more relevantly, the price*num_shares) incorporates their current earnings as well as their potential future profits (which is driven by the company's forecasted growth). Updates on how the company is actually performing (e.g. earnings releases) are a chance to get concrete information that allows everyone to update their expectations of future growth. If the market at large was expected some number $N, and the actual released figure less than $N, then self-evidently the expected growth would be adjusted down.

If I expect that I'll have 50,000 dollars in the bank a year from now (starting from 0), and 6 months in I only have 15,000 dollars, then naturally I would adjust my expectations downwards.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#78
post #50

I think the writing is on the wall for Twitter. The younger generations are increasingly flocking to snapchat, yik yak, and similar apps. I never hear of anyone using it anymore(college student here). I would have stopped facebook a while back as well if I didn't use OAuth for damn near everything

i think the problem is in generating revenue. According to their numbers, Twitter's user base is still trending upwards no?

Revenue hasn't been a problem, Twitter will do over $2 billion this year. Wall Street has been fixated on user growth though. Probably thanks to Facebook touting its ever increasing user base.

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#79

Ya'll need to chill out and look at a price chart of TWTR over time. This is very common run-of-the-mill volatility. Source: http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=TWTR&p=W&b=5&g=0&id=p870792...

Well, chilling is perhaps still the right thing to do, but the daily view does tell a different story:

http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=TWTR&p=D&b=5&g=0&id=p456401...

Re: Twitter Reports Weak Earnings and the Stock Is Crashing

#80
post #2

https://twitter.com/Selerity/status/593136296236752896 "Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website https://investor.twitterinc.com . No leak. No hack." Looks like someone found a draft post. Yeesh.

So can we assume Twitter will be pressing charges under the CFAA?[0] /s

[0] https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-auernheimer

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