Well, one would hope so. Fortunately, Twitter doesn't have one of those "president for life" two-class stock setups like Google and Facebook. The stockholders can fire Dorsey when necessary.
The post-growth phase of a social network doesn't have to mean its collapse. Look at IAC, InterActive Corp (iac.com, ticker IAC). They run a lot of sites - Vimeo, Ask, About, Investopedia, Tinder, OKCupid, etc. - have a market cap of about $5 billion, and keep plugging along. They were started by Barry Diller, the creator of the Home Shopping Channel, something else that keeps plugging along. Diller is still CEO. IAC is boring but useful.
Twitter doesn't have to "exit"; they're already publicly held. They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-growth.
This is a great comment. For most companies, grinding along and sometimes taking a hit, firing people, slow things down and then pick it up again and grow, is the norm. If every company that stops getting massive growth would stop, we wouldn't have factories mass producing our day to day products, the post office wouldn't be delivering us goods anymore, etc. twitter is a mature organisation. There are jobs. There is cashflow. We should stop letting journalists make a big deal of companies that don't have infinite growth and applaud the entrepreneurs that build the monster.
> They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-growth.
A phrase that sends shudders through stockholders!
It is amazing that companies seem to think that there is infinite growth potential if there ever was any growth -- sometimes you are just at your max level!
I don't think twitter is at max level, I just think that what they think is innovative is not innovative to users.
Twitter has huge room for growth, at least 10X from where it is. I just don't think they have done enough to figure out what is preventing so many other people to become its frequent user. In my own experience, I find Twitter's newsfeed algorithm pretty bad and completely lacking stickiness. I can easily find stories that would have kept my attention which should have ranked much above. The presentation of content is fairly complex (too many # and @ to parse). Ranking of re-tweets is especially bad. Lot of essential tools are still missing, for example, I can't even search my own tweets effectively. Lot of essential integration is left to 3rd parties (for example, no official Chrome plugin). If you think about it, we communicate a lot like Twitter by using medium of text messages. However text messages lack lot of desirable features (non searchable, history gets purged, hard to create one-off groups etc). Twitter, if done right, can replace text messages and even emails at large extent in addition to social aspects.
I've recently started using Twitter more to stay in touch with deep learning community and I can absolutely see why less tech-savvy non-fan user would turn away after few attempts. I can also see if they can turn this around and grow 10X in terms of DAW/MAU with good product planning.
The problem here is that it isn't Twitter that needs to accept this but Twitter's shareholders.
Other than that I am totally in agreement with you, Twitter is a success, just not as big a success as some people hoped but that doesn't mean it needs to sell to the highest bidder either. It's just another large company making a modest profit, and there is nothing wrong with that.
This! A thousand times this. Investors know that infinite growth in a finite environment is impossible. But, they always seem to expect that their project should be an exception, or at least, it should push everything else aside and take the world for itself. Can't we all just get along?
I propose that we call this the Scarface effect: "The world is not enough."
I think portraying it as a fight to the death is more interesting. This is why any new phone is "an iPhone killer" rather than a phone attempting to get some market share.
Some or much of the noise for that is brought on by major shareholders people who bought in and or have large positions which developed when the stock was much higher.
> They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level
Assuming such a thing exists. Which it might not; sure, Twitter could stop trying to generate growth and cut a bunch of costs, but there's no guarantee that that wouldn't result in a gradual (or rapid) exit of user time and attention (in general, or just in the advertiser-valued demographics) to other services, as Twitter stopped moving forward while the market kept moving forward.
I could understand your logic if Twitter was a private company, but it's not. Wall Street demands strong quarterly growth and anything else is failure. So Twitter trimming down to a profitable level only means that its stock is going to gradually decline as more and more investors pull out and reinvest their money into other companies that are growing.
The best thing for Twitter is to go back to being a private company and charting their own future and be free of what Wall Street wants them to be.
> The company has been rolling out products faster than ever, she noted, and has boosted engagement through enhancements to the timeline, such as showing people the most relevant tweets first.
The endeavor that drove me, a passionate user for several years, off the site for good. It's sad that they watered themselves down to become a second-place Facebook.
Maybe it's not even their fault, and it's just a side effect of being a public company and being measured by growth instead of by the uniqueness and quality of the product. It's still sad.
When the dust settles, there will be lesson in the danger of engagement-metric based product design. Twitter has a "while you were away" feature that shows you their idea of the tweets they'd like you to see first. (Even if you return to the site 5 minutes after your last session.) (This is different from the non-chronological timeline, and doesn't get turned off when you disable that.)
When you dismiss it, it asks you if you'd like to see less of that. It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline. A lot of users have been vocal about hating the feature. By dismissing it are they actually burying certain friends down further on their timeline? Who knows? Some people are guessing correctly what the meaning is, but others aren't. They're feeding a certain amount of garbage input into their algorithms.
That feature drove me, a technologist and casual social media user, to use twitter regularly for the first time.
I simply don't have the time or the interest to keep up with a long stream of tweets. It allows me to catch some highlights, and then move on to the never ending live stream.
As a passionate user since 2008, that feature made Twitter much better. Once you follow 1,000+ people keeping up is impossible. The new tweet-bumping (self-reply) and algorithmic features make Twitter a much more pleasant place.
It now feels much less overrun by marketers. Real interesting discussion is once more possible. Just like the old days.
> It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline.
Wow. They really are Yahoo. Founders take a back-seat in the midst of hyper-growth. Outside management team sourced from other industries (CFO of the NFL, for a tech company?). Product pivot into believing they're a media company. Eclipsed by newer technologies. Founder CEO returns amidst flat stock performance and boardroom turmoil. Exploring a sale to other big companies, who can't afford it because the market cap is too inflated. Talk of needing a turnaround CEO.
Maybe they should hire Marissa Mayer. I hear she'll be looking for a job in the near future, and she's got plenty of relevant experience.
Maybe this is what Twitter is. It Generates a couple billion in revenue. Instead of trying to grow how about shrinking the costs. If a company can consistently generate a billion dollar in cash flow that is pretty good. They don't need to have 4000 employees. Maybe they need to go down to 2000,1000 or 500. Maybe you won't be able to get the best talent, but I am sure you can find some people to run it.
Isn't it possible that when you hire 1000 bright engineers to build something like Twitter to scale, they build a bunch of crap and unneeded complexity that makes it difficult to get lean?
It's also worth noting that a huge percentage of those employees are ad people who are sorta necessary for their current revenue model.
I agree, people have wildly different perceptions from me, and I think their perceptions are tied to stock performance, instead of the fundamentals of whats going on here.
They have created a money printing machine in the middle of San Francisco.
They have 4,000 employees creating continual dilution in the stock and dumping it onto your mom's 401k every single day, and the market still retains a 17 billion market cap. That is printing money pretty freaking well!
Twitter is a success story, in this light, and will have even rosier fundamentals when if it has 1/10th the market cap and 1/3rd the employees.
That's why someone like Google just seems like a good fit for Twitter. Existing ad sales mechanism and super strong infrastructure seems like it would offer up a lot of opportunities to trim down.
Twitter keeps ignoring what its users want, and pushing ridiculous features nobody asked for.
Keep the timeline chronological! Instead of injecting 12 hour old tweets into my timeline randomly, give me a tab of popular tweets by people I follow.
Give me more options to discover interesting discussions. Let me subscribe to or follow hashtags.
Give me more options for filtering out the noise. Let me provide hashtags or keywords I don't care about.
Back before Twitter made the decision to transition from a service to a platform, there were Twitter apps and clients that provided all kinds of great ways to interact with Twitter. But Twitter shut them down, and never bothered to integrate the things that made them great into the official Twitter platform or apps.
Twitter's greatest potential is as a firehose of live data. Give users the tools to use and personalize that data and Twitter will become an indispensable part of people's daily lives.
This is the reason Jack Dorsey's return was doomed to failure. He was half-time and didn't take control like a general commanding troops must.
He was the Executive Officer but he was not a Chief Executive Officer.
For someone in this position, the natural human incentive is to build consensus and avoid ruffling feathers. An employee revolt could have gotten him fired. He had to worry what people thought.
Steve Job's return to Apple was dominating. He absolutely worked more than anyone else and ran circles around anyone trying to get in his way. And he fired people and replaced the board with friends. Things people would have faulted him for had he not had time to see his plans through.
But..even if he had gone full-time and led a successful coup, he probably would have still failed. Twitter was truly an accident and so no one really knows what it is.
There is only a finite amount of energy a person has and a finite amount of hours awake, you know? I can't imagine trying to re-steer Twitter while also being an effective CEO at a place like Square.
Turnarounds are super hard. A year isn't long enough and Dorsey would have been wise to both set expectations clearly that this is a 3+ year trek as well as lock in some protective provisions around that timeline.
Given the actual state of affairs though, the Board has a clear fiduciary duty to consider all options.
Since Dorsey didn't give himself enough time to actually effect a true fundamental product/vision turnaround, he would've been far wiser to simply focus on driving revenue as a first step. Then circle back to product later.
It seems the strategy here was either unclear or unrealistic.
On another note, I don't know why the Bay Area is so obsessed with cheesy. I mean, they do the most cliche, cheesy, predictable things in this regard, then try to poorly hype it as "profound and visionary thinking." They keep trying to recreate the magic that happened with Steve Jobs in 1997, for example. And they keep failing.
They probably aren't even really trying to recreate the magic, just trying to associate themselves with it and use that to take credit for what happened in that case. This is the kind of twisted backward stupid logic that was prevalent in the area while I was there (2008 - 2011). It was just more BS every time.
I mean, if you are trying to recreate the magic or emulate what's been done in the past, then do that, rather than do the dumbest things, then try to poorly and illogically spin it (in the most tired, played out, and "has never been successful" way) to look like something else.
Add to that the overrepresented judger (MBTI) population, and you have a recipe for the shht of everything past constantly repeating in the worst way, as arrogant egotistical self-centered know-nothing idiots use it to try to credit themselves with being something other than the dumbest shht.
For the same reason Hollywood promotes "Glamour", "Celebrities" and fawns over them on the red carpet. Gotta feed the machine with the bright-eyed and the impressionable.
TWTR has such much potential, there is not single day goes by that I won't hear Twitter's name been mentioned in some news or on TV. With Donald Trump as your Chief Marketing Officer for free, working day and night diligently, how could you not grow your user number?
The only reason you are not growing user number is you have an inferior user experience comparing with Facebook/Snapchat. That is something really easy to fix by just copying what other guys are doing better, but Dorsey did nothing. He lost interest long ago. TWTR does not need to sell, just need someone who is passionate, maybe a good engineer who knows the product.
I would love to have more privacy-focused features and more distance from the whole "everything's public" mantra -- following a user without anyone else knowing, following a user for only a specific hashtag, private-only hashtags.
The whole "everything's public or everything's private" shtick just doesn't work for me.
How I wish hashtags were actually useful. One of the things I hoped to get out of Twitter when I started using it was the ability to follow my favorite authors and hear more about their public appearances (e.g. book signing), progress on new books, release dates and such. Instead, I got "Facebook grade" stuff: look at this funny video, my spouse/child/buddy said something witty, here's some politics/activism in 140 characters, etc. Eventually, I lost interest in Twitter.
This is a pervasive problem in social media: signal-to-noise ratio is awful.
Serious question, I'm genuinely not trolling here. How can Twitter (or any other social site) be expected to maintain a high rate of new users, forever? After the first few hundred million users, wouldn't one expect new registrations to slow down a bit?
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Reduce the number of employees to 1,555
- Hire an additional 259-585 quality people (engineers and designers, mainly) to fix user experience and engineering issues
- Start paying attention to the user base and deliver what's actually needed
- Innovate and push things forward, rather than settling into stagnation and decline
There's really not much to it. Twitter is only having problems because they keep messing up, stagnating, or doing the dumbest things.
The biggest problem I think is that they constantly add features that don't improve the core functionality. For example, Moments really don't help with hashtag filtering, conversation searching, and the like. All they need to do is make it easier to filter conversations, basically. It's not that hard to see why that would get more people on board since they could make sense of their time line. But it seems Dorsey and company would rather just pile on stuff that's not related to that. I don't get their motivation for this. Can someone can explain it?
This along with the recent bidding could explain why Twitter is "suddenly" not censoring anti-Hillary/pro-Trump trending topics anymore. They didn't want anymore negative press about it when the negotiations started.
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
The post-growth phase of a social network doesn't have to mean its collapse. Look at IAC, InterActive Corp (iac.com, ticker IAC). They run a lot of sites - Vimeo, Ask, About, Investopedia, Tinder, OKCupid, etc. - have a market cap of about $5 billion, and keep plugging along. They were started by Barry Diller, the creator of the Home Shopping Channel, something else that keeps plugging along. Diller is still CEO. IAC is boring but useful.
Twitter doesn't have to "exit"; they're already publicly held. They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-growth.
[+] [-] fairpx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhuffman|9 years ago|reply
A phrase that sends shudders through stockholders!
It is amazing that companies seem to think that there is infinite growth potential if there ever was any growth -- sometimes you are just at your max level!
I don't think twitter is at max level, I just think that what they think is innovative is not innovative to users.
[+] [-] sytelus|9 years ago|reply
I've recently started using Twitter more to stay in touch with deep learning community and I can absolutely see why less tech-savvy non-fan user would turn away after few attempts. I can also see if they can turn this around and grow 10X in terms of DAW/MAU with good product planning.
[+] [-] jacquesm|9 years ago|reply
Other than that I am totally in agreement with you, Twitter is a success, just not as big a success as some people hoped but that doesn't mean it needs to sell to the highest bidder either. It's just another large company making a modest profit, and there is nothing wrong with that.
[+] [-] happyslobro|9 years ago|reply
I propose that we call this the Scarface effect: "The world is not enough."
[+] [-] blowski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gist|9 years ago|reply
Some or much of the noise for that is brought on by major shareholders people who bought in and or have large positions which developed when the stock was much higher.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|9 years ago|reply
Assuming such a thing exists. Which it might not; sure, Twitter could stop trying to generate growth and cut a bunch of costs, but there's no guarantee that that wouldn't result in a gradual (or rapid) exit of user time and attention (in general, or just in the advertiser-valued demographics) to other services, as Twitter stopped moving forward while the market kept moving forward.
[+] [-] bitmapbrother|9 years ago|reply
The best thing for Twitter is to go back to being a private company and charting their own future and be free of what Wall Street wants them to be.
[+] [-] rwc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caf|9 years ago|reply
Or News Corp / 21st Century Fox.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdulli|9 years ago|reply
The endeavor that drove me, a passionate user for several years, off the site for good. It's sad that they watered themselves down to become a second-place Facebook.
Maybe it's not even their fault, and it's just a side effect of being a public company and being measured by growth instead of by the uniqueness and quality of the product. It's still sad.
When the dust settles, there will be lesson in the danger of engagement-metric based product design. Twitter has a "while you were away" feature that shows you their idea of the tweets they'd like you to see first. (Even if you return to the site 5 minutes after your last session.) (This is different from the non-chronological timeline, and doesn't get turned off when you disable that.)
When you dismiss it, it asks you if you'd like to see less of that. It's completely ambiguous and unexplained whether they're asking whether you disliked those specific tweets or the non-chronological aspect of the timeline. A lot of users have been vocal about hating the feature. By dismissing it are they actually burying certain friends down further on their timeline? Who knows? Some people are guessing correctly what the meaning is, but others aren't. They're feeding a certain amount of garbage input into their algorithms.
[+] [-] go_go_|9 years ago|reply
I simply don't have the time or the interest to keep up with a long stream of tweets. It allows me to catch some highlights, and then move on to the never ending live stream.
[+] [-] vvanders|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|9 years ago|reply
It now feels much less overrun by marketers. Real interesting discussion is once more possible. Just like the old days.
[+] [-] pron|9 years ago|reply
I'm baffled by this, too. Which is it?
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 years ago|reply
Maybe they should hire Marissa Mayer. I hear she'll be looking for a job in the near future, and she's got plenty of relevant experience.
[+] [-] samfisher83|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james-mcelwain|9 years ago|reply
It's also worth noting that a huge percentage of those employees are ad people who are sorta necessary for their current revenue model.
[+] [-] cloudjacker|9 years ago|reply
They have created a money printing machine in the middle of San Francisco.
They have 4,000 employees creating continual dilution in the stock and dumping it onto your mom's 401k every single day, and the market still retains a 17 billion market cap. That is printing money pretty freaking well!
Twitter is a success story, in this light, and will have even rosier fundamentals when if it has 1/10th the market cap and 1/3rd the employees.
[+] [-] strictnein|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zikes|9 years ago|reply
Keep the timeline chronological! Instead of injecting 12 hour old tweets into my timeline randomly, give me a tab of popular tweets by people I follow.
Give me more options to discover interesting discussions. Let me subscribe to or follow hashtags.
Give me more options for filtering out the noise. Let me provide hashtags or keywords I don't care about.
Back before Twitter made the decision to transition from a service to a platform, there were Twitter apps and clients that provided all kinds of great ways to interact with Twitter. But Twitter shut them down, and never bothered to integrate the things that made them great into the official Twitter platform or apps.
Twitter's greatest potential is as a firehose of live data. Give users the tools to use and personalize that data and Twitter will become an indispensable part of people's daily lives.
[+] [-] david927|9 years ago|reply
In 1984, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus unveiled a unicorn. Later investigation revealed it to be a goat with its horns fused together.
[+] [-] thieving_magpie|9 years ago|reply
That's hilarious.
[+] [-] hrxn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superlad|9 years ago|reply
He was the Executive Officer but he was not a Chief Executive Officer.
For someone in this position, the natural human incentive is to build consensus and avoid ruffling feathers. An employee revolt could have gotten him fired. He had to worry what people thought.
Steve Job's return to Apple was dominating. He absolutely worked more than anyone else and ran circles around anyone trying to get in his way. And he fired people and replaced the board with friends. Things people would have faulted him for had he not had time to see his plans through.
But..even if he had gone full-time and led a successful coup, he probably would have still failed. Twitter was truly an accident and so no one really knows what it is.
[+] [-] 27182818284|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patwalls|9 years ago|reply
/s
[+] [-] erdevs|9 years ago|reply
Given the actual state of affairs though, the Board has a clear fiduciary duty to consider all options.
Since Dorsey didn't give himself enough time to actually effect a true fundamental product/vision turnaround, he would've been far wiser to simply focus on driving revenue as a first step. Then circle back to product later.
It seems the strategy here was either unclear or unrealistic.
[+] [-] baccheion|9 years ago|reply
They probably aren't even really trying to recreate the magic, just trying to associate themselves with it and use that to take credit for what happened in that case. This is the kind of twisted backward stupid logic that was prevalent in the area while I was there (2008 - 2011). It was just more BS every time.
I mean, if you are trying to recreate the magic or emulate what's been done in the past, then do that, rather than do the dumbest things, then try to poorly and illogically spin it (in the most tired, played out, and "has never been successful" way) to look like something else.
Add to that the overrepresented judger (MBTI) population, and you have a recipe for the shht of everything past constantly repeating in the worst way, as arrogant egotistical self-centered know-nothing idiots use it to try to credit themselves with being something other than the dumbest shht.
[+] [-] bravo22|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laic_sir|9 years ago|reply
The only reason you are not growing user number is you have an inferior user experience comparing with Facebook/Snapchat. That is something really easy to fix by just copying what other guys are doing better, but Dorsey did nothing. He lost interest long ago. TWTR does not need to sell, just need someone who is passionate, maybe a good engineer who knows the product.
[+] [-] ihsw|9 years ago|reply
The whole "everything's public or everything's private" shtick just doesn't work for me.
[+] [-] CodeMage|9 years ago|reply
This is a pervasive problem in social media: signal-to-noise ratio is awful.
[+] [-] harryh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epalm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharrlax|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigmar|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puppetmaster3|9 years ago|reply
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-03/dilbert-creator-sco...
How much traffic is that?
Ex: 2 Milo. Etc. So... what business is he in?
[+] [-] h4nkoslo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baccheion|9 years ago|reply
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Replace their mediocre management team (3.2 rating on Glassdoor, versus a threshold of 4.0 or a "damn, management's good" of 4.2) with people that actually know what they're doing
- Reduce the number of employees to 1,555
- Hire an additional 259-585 quality people (engineers and designers, mainly) to fix user experience and engineering issues
- Start paying attention to the user base and deliver what's actually needed
- Innovate and push things forward, rather than settling into stagnation and decline
There's really not much to it. Twitter is only having problems because they keep messing up, stagnating, or doing the dumbest things.
[+] [-] mucker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] norea-armozel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] venomsnake|9 years ago|reply