Meh, I'm pretty sure now that Twitter is publicly traded it no longer exists to meet some perceived societal need and is now just a profit engine.
I don't like it when CEO's flavor their koolaid with lofty missions, while simultaneously looking to maximize profits.
Twitter deserves the skepticism it is receiving, and I hope a downgraded evaluation waterfalls to further downgrades in the tech sector. Specifically in the SV messaging app space.
>I don't like it when CEO's flavor their koolaid with lofty missions, while simultaneously looking to maximize profits.
Why not? In a capitalist society, it's the only real hope for linking economic output to "the greater good".
As long as companies think it good PR to even pretend to have a loftier goal, then there is incentive for creating and operating companies that actually do. This can only be good. Shouldn't we want them to have this incentive?
Or, would we prefer a society wherein we give social license to all corporations to behave like blatantly psychotic entities--whose only goal is profit--imbued with corporate personhood, and wielding the bulk of the economic, political, and societal power?
If you have evidence that contradicts what these CEOs have said, then please raise it. But, it's socially counter-productive to issue a blanket condemnation of any CEO at the helm of a for-profit enterprise who expresses a desire to do social good.
For me personally, I would rather corporations be honest with their customers, investors, and employees. I know it's unfair to generalize but the average behavior of corporations in the last few, well forever, hasn't been good. Forgive me for being skeptical.
I agree and believe that your skepticism is definitely warranted. IMO, that's exactly why we need to encourage more social enterprise and an environment wherein having a mission is a good thing. We just need to do a better job of holding companies to account.
So, it's the blanket condemnation that's the problem. If every CEO who claims to have a vision for something "good" is immediately met with skepticism, allegations, and outright anger, I don't think it takes us to a good place.
I confess to taking this a little personally. My business is concerned with social good and we get a good bit of this. Meanwhile, businesses that run rampantly over their customers and everyone else in pursuit of profit get less scrutiny, as it's expected behavior.
It's a perversion of incentives and a self-fulfilling prophecy. In my view, skepticism is healthy, but irredeemable cynicism is hopeless.
Talk is cheap, is the thing; without any enforcement that the CEO is doing what they say, it's correct to treat their claims as worthless. When we see substantive action there's less scepticism - e.g. Etsy is legally structured in such a way that social good can be a higher priority for them, and the reaction to that was generally very positive.
>As long as companies think it good PR to even pretend to have a loftier goal, then there is incentive for creating and operating companies that actually do. This can only be good. Shouldn't we want them to have this incentive?
Transparent BS like this alienates insiders when it isn't based on substance. I'd say it hurts Twitter as an organization.
In private enterprise I believe it is perfectly acceptable to champion a social cause.
However when a company goes public it does in fact become"psychotic entity". It eschews its social cause in pursuit of funding, and supplants it with a single minded focus on profits for shareholders.
That is why PR exist as an industry, to convince consumers that the initial social cause is the primary motivation behind the company's actions. This is a lie.
> Or, would we prefer a society wherein we give social license to all corporations to behave like blatantly psychotic entities--whose only goal is profit
I would prefer a society where we all accept that this is the only thing corporations are capable of being and then structure the legal systems in which they operate to ensure that their actions don't contradict "the greater good". "Psychotic entities whose only goal is profit" will do fine in any environment, despite lamentations to the contrary.
The PR incentives you're talking about only incentivize companies to look like they're doing nice things. Sometimes the easiest way to achieve that goal is to actually do nice things, but not always.
(Thought experiment) I think its easier to frame what that legal structure should be if we agree on what Profit actually means. If I define profit as: Provide goods and / or services people want in a sustainable fashion -- does that impact the story? E.g. if its not profitable (generally), is it sustainable? (I think no). But the converse is clearly not true as profits can be sought at the expense of something less obvious (say, environment).
Profit is the accumulation of capital. What you've described is a way of pursuing profit. Outside of economics, I think the word "profit" is meaningless.
As you've demonstrated, however, there are two conflicting senses of the word "sustainable". Sustainability for a business means that it accumulates more capital than it expends. Sustainability for human beings is a much fuzzier notion that is tied up in the idea of health: the health of the individual, of our species, and of our environment. We can sacrifice health from these areas to reach different goals, but if our actions continuously deplete it, then they aren't sustainable.
Is it possible to express the human sense of sustainability systematically? I'm not convinced it is, as I think it requires vision and sensitivity to understand health. So I think we need a legal structure which is sensitive in this way in order to create a sustainable society.
>and then structure the legal systems in which they operate to ensure that their actions don't contradict "the greater good
Ideally, sure, that sounds great. But it has, thus far, proven to be unworkable. The drive for profit supersedes virtually all else, and much "not good" has been done for that cause. Worse, there has been little to no recompense, even when the public good has been harmed egregiously.
In spite of this, even now, a major ideology says that we need to roll-back what regulations there are.
The political and economic climate don't currently exist to implement what you advocate, but, I do think it's a worthwhile effort. In the meantime, I don't see the downside to encouraging companies to be more socially-oriented, and rewarding those that actually are.
I've been making an app that filters Twitter[1] and I've been realizing, from the kind of people who are positively reacting to screenshots and want to use it, that there's an interesting phenomenon in services that aren't necessarily "mass audience" but still engage an "influencer audience." Let's say you make an app and it doesn't become like Youtube where random shepherds are on it all day. But the President and Ellen DeGeneres use it every day.
How do you value that? Maybe not in the Facebook metric of Monthly Active Users?
The last episode of The Talk Show[1] spent a while discussing just this point, that it was a mistake for Twitter to accept MAU as a benchmark of their success early on, since it didn't capture the value of the specific users they were attracting.
Guest Matthew Panzarino also made the observation that Twitter's audience goes beyond active users: Millions of people who will never use Twitter will still see tweets every morning on SportsCenter. How to use that reach across media to make money is, of course, an open question for Twitter or a potential buyer.
It's a nice hoorah letter. I'd be interested to hear from some people working there what they think of a letter like this. Bullshit? Heartfelt? Motivating?
I think probably apathy. Most devs I know don't drink the koolaid and just want to get paid. Maybe it's different with the people that are closer to the CEO and more affected by their day-to-day decisions.
This morning I read (and just submitted) a Vanity Fair piece on how morale at Twitter is really low and people are straight-up not coming to work. It ended with this letter, which makes no mention of a forthcoming acquisition and seems rather empty in context.
I know a Twitter PM who doesn't work any more. He collects a paycheck, but he doesn't do anything but travel the world on Twitter's dime. I'd imagine that there are dozens if not hundreds of other Twitter middle management doing the same.
Twitter needs to focus entirely on real time news, and forget giving any attention to the mounds of random garbage tweets on there. Aggregate news hashtags into something meaningful, and just be a better news source. That's it's most useful service at this point.
This has been my feeling about Twitter for years. There's plenty of value in news, especially real-time news, that Twitter isn't exploiting. I honestly believe that for Twitter to survive, it needs to make news and real-time discussion of news and events its single biggest priority.
I don't say that lightly either. I've invested in Twitter in more ways that one. I've got shares in Twitter, but that's a tiny part of what I've invested in Twitter: I did a PhD on real-time detection and tracking of breaking news on social media (Twitter), and started a company that uses Twitter to detect breaking news [1] before it it hits mainstream media.
> Twitter needs to focus entirely on real time news
Why would anyone want this when Twitter has already been shown to influence news spread on their network to silence news that goes against their own white west coast american ideology.
Is it me, or "we are news", "we are real-time" has been Twitter's mantra for ages? Why does it sound like he thought long and hard for a year about what they are, and then came up with an obvious answer?
I think it has taken Twitter management a very long time to publicly identify what it is. There have been many attempts under different CEOs though. "The people's news network" in real-time seems to ring the truest for me.
This lacks content and looks a capitulation - an admission that he's lost, wholesale replacing the Jobsian persona he nurtured previously with a wholesome 'we're all friends' skit.
The end is just bizarre, as if he's being coached to "show appreciation to your closest associates to avoid more churn" and does so in the most literal, superficial way possible.
To be fair, often one does that to avoid people wondering if the order means something (ie order of importance). It's sometimes meant to signal that they are in no political order, but simply listed alphabetically.
That makes sense. It came off as a little impersonal for some reason, like he was just going down a list of email contacts, but I can see why you might do that on purpose.
There's a lesson for us here somewhere. Twitter undeniably provides value that is impossibly difficult to quantify by any widely-used economic metric (e.g. share price). It remains a platform where millions of users can interact directly with influencers (or, at least, their social media teams) on a platform that is comparatively less colored by political bias than others.
This doesn't just extend to celebrities and politicians. Twitter can do a good job of holding public entities accountable. One example -- companies often react more quickly to customer service complaints submitted via Twitter than those that are submitted directly to the company, since those complaints are now part of the public domain. A failure to respond properly could mean a company gets bad word of mouth at an unprecedented rate.
I rarely find myself actually using Twitter. But despite the financial shortcomings of the company, I agree with Jack Dorsey. Twitter has inherent societal value -- but it lacks real shareholder value.
This strikes me as serious cognitive dissonance. We know what kinds of public goods our society should promote, but our society isn't really structured to facilitate their promotion. Maybe that's why everyone is so angry about politics these days.
> Twitter undeniably provides value that is impossibly difficult to quantify by any widely-used economic metric (e.g. share price)
Twitter has an 11 billion market cap. The "share price economic metric" values the company at 11 billion dollars. There is nothing wrong that.
Because it doesn't trend upwards it is hard to see the value? There are 4,000 employees dumping their newly authorized stocks on your mom's 401k every single day in exchange for cash. The market still retains an 11-figure valuation for Twitter because there is enough demand for the shares.
First you got to look at who is making money here.
Second you have to look past Twitter's consumer facing product. They have massive infrastructure and massive data and they offer plenty of products from that.
Think about how many little SaaS startups could be inside Twitter hidden beneath that 11 billion market cap. The projects are there, the clients are there.
> Think about how many little SaaS startups could be inside Twitter hidden beneath that 11 billion market cap. The projects are there, the clients are there.
And before they closed down their API those products were actually being built...
There is no cognitive dissonance. Twitter makes plenty of revenue - $2.2B in 2015. But Twitter's costs are nonsensically high.
They spent $1.2B on labor and SGA (marketing, sales, rent). They spent $800m on R&D (your guess is as good as mine where this money went, most likely extremely overvalued acqui-hires). They spent $700 on cost of revenue (running servers, hosting fees, electricity presumably - the actual direct costs of providing the service). For a net loss of $500m.
Twitter needs to lay people off and stop spending so much on "R&D". I imagine the company could easily be viable if it downsized.
As citizens we should feel about as bad as Twitter's possible failure as we would about a mismanaged mattress store failing.
I wonder what is the fewest number of employees needed to run Twitter with some way to financially support itself. Could it reduce to the number of employees as at Reddit and still substain itself?
How they're spending 30% of revenue on R&D and have little to show for it is beyond me. They can probably cut staff by a huge percentage and there would be little impact on day-to-day operations.
Whatsapp was having comparable traffic and users with something like 20 engineers. It is not directly comparable, as all whatsapp users at the time were app users whereas twitter's users are web users (more expensive to run). Furthermore, with everything public, Twitter needs a lot more policing than whatsapp ever did. But they can probably reduce their stuff to 2-5 percent of current size and still provide the same service that users get - though it will have to be better engineered than what they are currently running.
This is an apples and oranges comparison. The changes Reddit instituted under Pao, and the return of spez, were designed to create a platform that can be "remotely controlled." The entire site is being gamed from behind the scenes now.
Oh, wait. No, this IS apples to apples. You're right. Why in the world do they need so many people? I'd say Twitter is directly employing their gamers, and Reddit leaves it to political PAC's.
I don't think acquihires would count as R&D, acquisitions are booked differently.
My guess is that a large part of Twitter's R&D costs involve initiatives that don't relate to the main site's user experience at all: ads, live streams and mobile apps. Improvements on the sales/admin side for advertisers and content producers can be vital for revenue, but you don't see that if you're a Twitter user rather than a paying customer.
Same with apps: Twitter has Vine, Periscope, and who knows what else in development... But these don't improve the tweeting/timeline UX.
> There's a lesson for us here somewhere. Twitter undeniably provides value that is impossibly difficult to quantify by any widely-used economic metric (e.g. share price). It remains a platform where millions of users can interact directly with influencers (or, at least, their social media teams) on a platform that is comparatively less colored by political bias than others.
This won't be taken seriously, but I propose nationalizing it. The world needs a good free speech platform and with the actual requirements of the 1st amendment in place Twitter's banning and censorship practices would have to cease. The world might learn to become more tolerant of diverse opinions and thoughts even if they are "mean."
Now being a strong first amendment advocate is a position that puts you on the right? Nationalizing things puts you on the right? Bizarro world indeed.
Free speech is not in itself a right-wing position, obviously. But the grandparent poster referenced "Twitter's banning and censorship practices", which is essentially an alt-right code phrase. Combining that starting point with a desire to nationalize a private media company makes for a very strange position.
Really? I am the GP and don't like the alt-right at all. Where is the code phrase book? I'd like to take a look at it so that I don't confuse anyone else.
Fact is, Twitter has banned people selectively not only in the US but also across the world when tweets fall outside an ideological boundary or the views of the local government. As a private company, it's their right to do so but the world would be better served by a platform that guaranteed freedom of speech.
I apologize for making an unwarranted assumption about you. There has been so much talk about "Twitter censorship" where it really seems to mean "Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart should be able to continue trolling even when their methods violate Twitter's ToS".
I think Bloomberg LP is actually a good candidate for buying Twitter. Bloomberg already dominates the business-data and financial-news space. Twitter could be their channel for consumers. They could take Twitter private, and reduce the market pressure for quarterly metrics. Leverage their in-house technology to cut operational costs. And feed data from Twitter into their terminals for consumption by financial markets where appropriate.
Give me the fire hose - don't force me to rely on a feed of who I follow or run searches for hashtags - then I'll come back to daily use. The 'stream' of consciousness totality is far more interesting to observe, then jump into when something 'pops'. TW for news? Yawn...
Given the rocky CEO roller coaster history of Twitter, I would recommend the board to sac Dorsey, nothing to loose here. He might be a good engineer but not a good CEO, and he's totally failed to increase the value of Twitter product for years (He was either the CEO or have a voice to make a difference).
- Twitter's user experience is a disaster. It changed very little for years, but there are many frustrations if you use it daily (small image popups, inconsistent behavior, scroll problems ...).
- Twitter do not kick trolls out or give you tools to do it yourself. It does not make any difference if you report them or not.
- News are plenty, but Twitter do nothing to ease the consumption. You can only unfollow to control the firehose, no other tools.
- Recommendations are graph based, not content based, although they have the data.
- Hashtags are not enough to access filtered content, either too much noise or too little signal.
We're only limited by our sense of urgency," Dorsey said in the memo. "Life is short. Every day matters. And the people who use Twitter every day deserve our best. They are why we're here. So let's show them what we're made of and deliver a better Twitter faster than they thought possible. We can do this every day. We can do this!"
Obviously the Twitter I use didn't change for the last 5 years. So clearly they don't have sense of urgency.
I propose the following steps:
1. Fire Jack.
2. Put it up for sale
3. Bring the costs down to be able to have at least a 200 million dollar profit in year 2.
4. Don't tell anyone :)
if news was is so important to twitter why did they spend time and resources on stickers? seemed like a bizarre product decision at the time and told me they didnt understand how their users were using their product.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadMeh, I'm pretty sure now that Twitter is publicly traded it no longer exists to meet some perceived societal need and is now just a profit engine.
I don't like it when CEO's flavor their koolaid with lofty missions, while simultaneously looking to maximize profits.
Twitter deserves the skepticism it is receiving, and I hope a downgraded evaluation waterfalls to further downgrades in the tech sector. Specifically in the SV messaging app space.
Why not? In a capitalist society, it's the only real hope for linking economic output to "the greater good".
As long as companies think it good PR to even pretend to have a loftier goal, then there is incentive for creating and operating companies that actually do. This can only be good. Shouldn't we want them to have this incentive?
Or, would we prefer a society wherein we give social license to all corporations to behave like blatantly psychotic entities--whose only goal is profit--imbued with corporate personhood, and wielding the bulk of the economic, political, and societal power?
If you have evidence that contradicts what these CEOs have said, then please raise it. But, it's socially counter-productive to issue a blanket condemnation of any CEO at the helm of a for-profit enterprise who expresses a desire to do social good.
So, it's the blanket condemnation that's the problem. If every CEO who claims to have a vision for something "good" is immediately met with skepticism, allegations, and outright anger, I don't think it takes us to a good place.
I confess to taking this a little personally. My business is concerned with social good and we get a good bit of this. Meanwhile, businesses that run rampantly over their customers and everyone else in pursuit of profit get less scrutiny, as it's expected behavior.
It's a perversion of incentives and a self-fulfilling prophecy. In my view, skepticism is healthy, but irredeemable cynicism is hopeless.
Transparent BS like this alienates insiders when it isn't based on substance. I'd say it hurts Twitter as an organization.
However when a company goes public it does in fact become"psychotic entity". It eschews its social cause in pursuit of funding, and supplants it with a single minded focus on profits for shareholders.
That is why PR exist as an industry, to convince consumers that the initial social cause is the primary motivation behind the company's actions. This is a lie.
I would prefer a society where we all accept that this is the only thing corporations are capable of being and then structure the legal systems in which they operate to ensure that their actions don't contradict "the greater good". "Psychotic entities whose only goal is profit" will do fine in any environment, despite lamentations to the contrary.
The PR incentives you're talking about only incentivize companies to look like they're doing nice things. Sometimes the easiest way to achieve that goal is to actually do nice things, but not always.
As you've demonstrated, however, there are two conflicting senses of the word "sustainable". Sustainability for a business means that it accumulates more capital than it expends. Sustainability for human beings is a much fuzzier notion that is tied up in the idea of health: the health of the individual, of our species, and of our environment. We can sacrifice health from these areas to reach different goals, but if our actions continuously deplete it, then they aren't sustainable.
Is it possible to express the human sense of sustainability systematically? I'm not convinced it is, as I think it requires vision and sensitivity to understand health. So I think we need a legal structure which is sensitive in this way in order to create a sustainable society.
Ideally, sure, that sounds great. But it has, thus far, proven to be unworkable. The drive for profit supersedes virtually all else, and much "not good" has been done for that cause. Worse, there has been little to no recompense, even when the public good has been harmed egregiously.
In spite of this, even now, a major ideology says that we need to roll-back what regulations there are.
The political and economic climate don't currently exist to implement what you advocate, but, I do think it's a worthwhile effort. In the meantime, I don't see the downside to encouraging companies to be more socially-oriented, and rewarding those that actually are.
How do you value that? Maybe not in the Facebook metric of Monthly Active Users?
[1] Think Nuzzel for tweets https://twitter.com/firasd/status/781602728728469504
Guest Matthew Panzarino also made the observation that Twitter's audience goes beyond active users: Millions of people who will never use Twitter will still see tweets every morning on SportsCenter. How to use that reach across media to make money is, of course, an open question for Twitter or a potential buyer.
[1] https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2016/10/06/ep-169
Can't take feedback like this seriously coming from someone like Gruber with a disproportionately high follower count from being an early adopter.
Only people Twitter as a company and Twitter the service/apps/concept seems to actually benefit are these early adopters and journalists.
Average person has a completely different experience with the service than these people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684114
I don't say that lightly either. I've invested in Twitter in more ways that one. I've got shares in Twitter, but that's a tiny part of what I've invested in Twitter: I did a PhD on real-time detection and tracking of breaking news on social media (Twitter), and started a company that uses Twitter to detect breaking news [1] before it it hits mainstream media.
[1] http://scoopanalytics.com
Why would anyone want this when Twitter has already been shown to influence news spread on their network to silence news that goes against their own white west coast american ideology.
The end is just bizarre, as if he's being coached to "show appreciation to your closest associates to avoid more churn" and does so in the most literal, superficial way possible.
Felt so robotic it was almost a mail merge
I would contend Dorsey was doing this to making it difficult to make a bid.
http://brontecapital.blogspot.com
This doesn't just extend to celebrities and politicians. Twitter can do a good job of holding public entities accountable. One example -- companies often react more quickly to customer service complaints submitted via Twitter than those that are submitted directly to the company, since those complaints are now part of the public domain. A failure to respond properly could mean a company gets bad word of mouth at an unprecedented rate.
I rarely find myself actually using Twitter. But despite the financial shortcomings of the company, I agree with Jack Dorsey. Twitter has inherent societal value -- but it lacks real shareholder value.
This strikes me as serious cognitive dissonance. We know what kinds of public goods our society should promote, but our society isn't really structured to facilitate their promotion. Maybe that's why everyone is so angry about politics these days.
Twitter has an 11 billion market cap. The "share price economic metric" values the company at 11 billion dollars. There is nothing wrong that.
Because it doesn't trend upwards it is hard to see the value? There are 4,000 employees dumping their newly authorized stocks on your mom's 401k every single day in exchange for cash. The market still retains an 11-figure valuation for Twitter because there is enough demand for the shares.
First you got to look at who is making money here.
Second you have to look past Twitter's consumer facing product. They have massive infrastructure and massive data and they offer plenty of products from that.
Think about how many little SaaS startups could be inside Twitter hidden beneath that 11 billion market cap. The projects are there, the clients are there.
And before they closed down their API those products were actually being built...
They spent $1.2B on labor and SGA (marketing, sales, rent). They spent $800m on R&D (your guess is as good as mine where this money went, most likely extremely overvalued acqui-hires). They spent $700 on cost of revenue (running servers, hosting fees, electricity presumably - the actual direct costs of providing the service). For a net loss of $500m.
Twitter needs to lay people off and stop spending so much on "R&D". I imagine the company could easily be viable if it downsized.
As citizens we should feel about as bad as Twitter's possible failure as we would about a mismanaged mattress store failing.
Oh, wait. No, this IS apples to apples. You're right. Why in the world do they need so many people? I'd say Twitter is directly employing their gamers, and Reddit leaves it to political PAC's.
My guess is that a large part of Twitter's R&D costs involve initiatives that don't relate to the main site's user experience at all: ads, live streams and mobile apps. Improvements on the sales/admin side for advertisers and content producers can be vital for revenue, but you don't see that if you're a Twitter user rather than a paying customer.
Same with apps: Twitter has Vine, Periscope, and who knows what else in development... But these don't improve the tweeting/timeline UX.
This won't be taken seriously, but I propose nationalizing it. The world needs a good free speech platform and with the actual requirements of the 1st amendment in place Twitter's banning and censorship practices would have to cease. The world might learn to become more tolerant of diverse opinions and thoughts even if they are "mean."
Renaming Twitter to "United States Department of Truth" would be pretty cool though.
Fact is, Twitter has banned people selectively not only in the US but also across the world when tweets fall outside an ideological boundary or the views of the local government. As a private company, it's their right to do so but the world would be better served by a platform that guaranteed freedom of speech.
- Twitter's user experience is a disaster. It changed very little for years, but there are many frustrations if you use it daily (small image popups, inconsistent behavior, scroll problems ...).
- Twitter do not kick trolls out or give you tools to do it yourself. It does not make any difference if you report them or not.
- News are plenty, but Twitter do nothing to ease the consumption. You can only unfollow to control the firehose, no other tools.
- Recommendations are graph based, not content based, although they have the data.
- Hashtags are not enough to access filtered content, either too much noise or too little signal.
... and many others.
Obviously the Twitter I use didn't change for the last 5 years. So clearly they don't have sense of urgency.
I propose the following steps:
1. Fire Jack. 2. Put it up for sale 3. Bring the costs down to be able to have at least a 200 million dollar profit in year 2. 4. Don't tell anyone :)