Twitter's userbase isn't "dwindling" (diminishing gradually in size, amount, or strength.) It's not growing as fast as shareholders might like, but its monthly active users are growing in number: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly...
I feel like while twitter user base may not be growing, it's effects on the average person's social life has diminished.
I feel like 5 years ago Twitter was really popular among st friends and we talked about things people tweeted, etc.
Since then I don't have a single friend who actively uses twitter, maybe it's that my preferences simply changed, but the overall visibility of twitter seems to be diminished.
Feel the same about every social network, and honestly the net has become "lonelier" for lack of a better word. Facebook is just people selling their junk, whether fingernail addons, kids clothing, or diet regimes. Twitter is really just people shouting into the ether, I enjoy it during college football games of collective "yay" or "nooo" moments with a few real life friends but otherwise its a high noise news feed. LinkedIn has a bizarre social aspect to it that confuses me.
I don't know, maybe its me getting older, but more digitally connected than ever and feel much less personally connected than ever except with the friends that I keep direct/group imessage conversations going with for months and years at a time.
I really feel this way too. People talk about using FB groups or Twitter or some niche social network to be connected to a community, but I haven't felt that way in ages. Not since being active on a few phpbb and vbulletin boards. More connected in a way, but it feels so impersonal or I just can't figure out how people are finding their communities in these huge networks.
Another personal example, IG direct messages aren't used that much from my experience (could be different for others or in the odd one). That few times I've been hit up or hit someone up on it, response or messages back and forth usually take forever. It kills the conversation. The only time a conversation has survived and a friendship began was when the convo quickly moved over to another medium (FBM in that case).
I honestly feel more at home commenting here than on FB. On FB, you're speaking to everyone that you know, and whatever you say will likely show up in their face. I don't want to be talking to my college buddies, great aunts, and girlfriend's friends at the same time.
I'm guessing you won't see this anymore. But your profile is empty here. I was talking about feeling like a community plus potentially making acquirances or friendships. I've never had any of that happen on HN. My profile is filled up. I'm guessing you haven't either. That doesn't really feel at home to me in the same way as the older days I'm describing.
I do get your point though of feeling at home in a general sense.
I can't imagine using Twitter as a regular person. It seems nice as a new aggregator or celebrity soap box but doesn't seem to provide much value to regular people.
I hear about announcements via twitter than then link to actual new stories and usually skip twitter entirely. Maybe I'm just not the right audience.
Definitely. But anecdotally I still see a new person join IG or become active again or for the first time pretty frequently. Maybe twice a month. I barely know anyone in real life who uses Twitter anymore.
Acceleration may be dwindling... And given population (of age that uses twitter) increase, the rate of increase in twitter usage may actually dwindle even if it goes up (which I doubt.)
And advertiser ROI - which was never good - is dropping. Twitter's market share of the advertising world is not enough to sustain it. Hence their attempts to move over into video, for better ROI. But it seems like it could be a move that is out of their depth. It's sort of like a fast food company that suddenly decides they can't make money on their burgers so they start selling insurance from their drive through.
"Square has taken aim at the much larger goal of providing a tech-savvy alternative to the big banks, expanding out from payments to lending and online deposits."
Note also that Square is not actively losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which is a point in favor of its value.
But Square's been "taking aim" at new markets for years: remember their Google Wallet competitor? Or what about Square Cash? I also remember them launching tons of new services (e.g. appointment scheduling) a few years ago, is there still momentum there?
Square's had a firm hold on hip small businesses for half a decade, I'm still not convinced they can use that as leverage to build profitable services.
Square Cash is currently #38 on the chart for top free apps in Apple's app store. No other financial apps above it. Might be good momentum with that product at least.
I'm curious what that actually means in real download numbers now. Remember in iOS 11, iOS games were split out into a seperate top chart, which I imagine means waaaaaaaaaaay less downloads are now needed to break the App Store's top 200 ranking for all other app types. Worth bearing in mind if using this as evidence of momentum.
I wonder if that momentum will last when Apple Pay Cash rolls out next month - why install a third party app to send money to friends when you can do it via iMessage?
'Venmo' itself has become a verb rather than just a service so I doubt either of them have the necessary momentum to take these services to anything more than nominal levels of volume relative to the market lead
My gut feeling is that whether you are familiar with the popular cash sharing apps really depends on your social circle. Among young people/students etc, not surprisingly I see a TON of Venmo users. Among adults with steady reasonable paying jobs, not so much. I've seen Venmo reguarly used as a Verb in social media too.
I know for me personally I'm far more likely to say "you get it next time" than bill my friends for some share of an outing. If it's sufficiently expensive that this doesn't make sense I'd just split the check. If I was younger and still a student I can absolutely see the appeal though.
Anecdote, but Cash is just as popular as Venmo among my friends/acquaintances/colleagues(mid-late 20s, pacific northwest). Everyone has both installed because you never know who's going to prefer which one or just happen to open that one first.
Venmo isn't obviously profitable either, last I read PayPal was still trying to sell it to B2B merchants. Seems like more of the same problem -- lots of momentum, little monetization.
Well, how do you monetize such a service without Google Wallet, Square Cash, and <insert new entrant of the week> eating you alive? Everybody is running away from Visa/Mastercard processing and toward ACH (Dwolla & Popmoney) or debit based systems (Google Wallet, Venmo), and any fees essentially force whatever volume you have to jump to a competitor.
Worst case, you'll see people using online bill pay to mail eachother's banks checks as that is free and low effort. People just don't want to pay to move money friend to friend, and the US is an anomaly with our extremely high credit card processing charges, where we're at 1.5% to 2% in interchange, the rest of the world is below 1%.
That's very interesting, among my social circle (low 20's Northeast New England Area) Venmo has an implicit monopoly on the service. I doubt any of my non-cs friends have even heard of Square's offering.
Venmo is definitely king in Seattle, but people really don't understand how risky Venmo is for Craigslist and Facebook transactions. Since its F2F, if the person who sent you money contacts Venmo, that money will be returned to them without the ability for the receiver to get a word in edgewise.
Contact your bank and reverse the debit transaction, like an errant check, you have rights when it comes to reversing a transaction. Most fraud is committed during the settlement period though, while Venmo holds the money: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/venm...
Some of the trendier merchents have Square in my neighborhood. I'm in NW Maine. I just bought some alpaca wool and the nice lady swiped my card through a Square device attached to her phone. The pie lady takes Square too. I think the new coffee shop, down in the village, now has a real merchant account, but they did use Square. I've never even seen Venmo.
Err... I'm old, but we have hip and trendy tourists?
That would absolutely explain why I've never seen it. In my generation, if I invite people out, I expect to pay the bill. There is no bill splitting. If I'm paying someone, I've probably got cash.
Yeah, I even have a landline. I did mention I'm old. ;-)
They must be popular in pockets of people here and there, because I've never used either of them or seen them in the wild. I had to look up what Venmo was a week ago when someone mentioned it here. As far as I can tell, it's a "hipper" version of PayPal except it's not supported by web stores or anywhere else I might buy something. So cool I guess--I'm probably just an out of touch old fogey--I don't use Snapchat either.
Venmo - which in my experience is ubiquitous - is for sending money to and from friends and acquaintances (often for things like dinners, drinks, tickets etc), not for e-commerce (although my landlord takes venmo). Using PayPal would definitely be an 'old guy' tell.
Every week I see more friends and local small businesses using Square Cash. Ever month I see more local shops using Square POS with the fancy iPad holders and readers, etc. The feature set for those of us who use it to send invoices continues to grow, too, making them really a great solution.
It's just a slight misunderstanding. Visa (or Amex/Mastercard/other card networks) don't take 3%, but payment processors take a slice which is in that ballpark. To a business, all that really matters is when you accept a credit card payment you kiss a few percentage points goodbye, so it's easy to misconstrue as the card network taking that cut.
The lions share is going back to whoever issued you a credit card. If its say an airline card, that'd be rewards 2 which ranges from 1.65% + $0.10 per transaction all the way up to 2.7% + $0.10. Then you add on network & platform fees (0.1% + $0.06 per transaction) and whatever minuscule profit margin your ISO/MSP can get and your at 1.5% to 2% on average.
Rarely will a business get the 2.3% rate, that is purely a temporary promotion for supermarkets that are new to American Express. Also, Amex acts as the bank, with the same rewards programs and incentives to retain customers.
If you look at Square or Stripe, for example, the fees are way south of 3%. Sure the banks, processors and gateways take a fee but it's nowhere near a total of 3% these days. That was more my point.
The same way any company becomes profitable; they spend less than they earn.
It doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd have to wonder about. Just like restaurants can be profitable in a low margin industry, it takes incredible awareness of the costs of your business, and the ability to give greater value to your customers than it costs you to produce. Most companies, specifically tech companies, way overspend. Stripe seems not to do that.
It's true that processing is low margin, but (1) you make a ton of money on a low margin as long as you have a lot of volume. Just ask Wal Mart, Amazon, Big Oil, etc. (2) Not quite the same, because verifone is not a processor. Compare to companies like WorldPay and TSys.
I'm not sure what proportion of square's revenue comes from processing vs services, but if I had to guess, I'd say most of the services are loss leaders for the processing. This is especially true with their rates so far above market. 2.75% is a fat chunk of change if they're processing 10 or 12 figures. (Working primarily with smaller clients, you get to charge that much, but it makes them less competitive with larger merchants who process more volume.)
They make it back from the smaller merchants that are paying the full 2.75%. Local stores need Visa a lot more than Visa needs any one of them, but when you get to the Walmarts of this world the dynamic is rather different; if Walmart stopped taking Visa it would hurt Visa almost as much as it hurt Walmart.
The "issuing bank," which issues your cash back or rewards credit card, has its cut protected by the payment networks. Part of the "interchange," the wholesale cost of processing a payment, is reserved for paying out the issuing bank. The interchange rates are set for the payment processors by the card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex). Whether you spend $100 at the locally owned boutique or Costco, they get paid the same amount. The middleman— the payment processor— gets squeezed by merchants like Walmart and Costco, competing to shrink the margin for the promise of massive volume. But Chase, Captial One, etc. don't have their consumer credit card divisions affected by who processes the card. (Unless you're Citi's processing side with Costco, and only accept Visa. Then your competitors get zero volume from Costco on their mastercards, discovers, and amex cards)
Most, yes, but with plenty left over. They charge this for all transactions, whereas the wholesale/processing rate depends on the type of card. Pin debit transactions clear interchange well under 1%. Visa and mastercard have a few different tiers. There's not much margin in an American Express transaction at that rate, but your average VISA/Mastercard wholesale costs will net out to ~1.5%, depending on the kind of merchant you are and what kinds of cards your customers tend to use. (It's more expensive to process a reward card like the Chase Sapphire Reserve than your local credit union's visa card.) Square covers lots of different merchants, with special prominence in low denomination restaurants / cafes. At scale, that's pretty lucrative.
Worldpay and Tsys are small fry, akin to Chase Paymentech or Elavon. First Data is the big monster in the room, with 70% of the market, and all the other processing networks I just mentioned and more make up the remainder.
True, but the big guys like First Data are out of reach to the size of shops that generally use square. (They can use them, but the fees don't get appreciably more competitive until you clear a certain scale.) I'd say Tsys and Worldpay are appropriate alternatives if you're the size of business who's considering square.
First you sign up X million businesses with the lowest possible processing fee, maybe you even loose money. Then you sell them SASS to manage their operations and sales.
Square makes most of it's money from offering small businesses loans secured off the credit card transactions they process for their merchants. They have sold billions of dollars in loans to merchants in the past two years with interest rates very favorable to Square.
Seriously, every time I read a story about how some company is hitting hard times, when the company is worth $billions and made their founders and investors $millions, I think to myself, boy, if only I could do that bad for myself!
He's doing an admittedly awful job at Twitter. See:
- Russian troll accounts/factories (he even retweeted one)
- Inability to clean up harassment/abuse/threats
- Stagnant product feature set
- Awful (truly awful) ad product
All a CEO does is set and push forward a certain culture and a handful of goals, but that is a full time job. Square isn't anything revolutionary or particularly special, the only trick they have is picking up customers who don't understand merchant processing and are willing to pay an extra 1% or so to avoid ever thinking about it.
Edit: I'm not referring to what a CEO is accountable for, just what they actually have control over. A CEO is not god, despite what some may believe!
Actually, a CEO is accountable for everything. Absolutely everything. The buck stops at the CEO, and anyone who thinks otherwise is misguided. Therefore, the issues at Twitter are Jack's fault, full stop.
Definitely, a CEO is accountable for everything, but a CEO's influence is quite limited overall, their biggest power is to shut down whole divisions of a company, but actually changing said division? That is a much more difficult task that a CEO cannot achieve on their own, no matter the effort put into said task.
The biggest power of a CEO is culture. Look at Uber and all the negativity their culture is getting, fed by the specific instances where that culture allowed terrible things to happen.
And yes, a CEO does not change the culture on their own. That's impossible by definition -- the culture is the sum result of all the actors within the company. But a CEO is expected to lead the culture of the entire company, typically by stating values and setting goals and incentives that actually match those values. If they cannot do this, then they are unable to do their primary internal-facing job. This is one of the reasons that Steve Jobs was so well regarded. For whatever flaws he had, there was no mistaking the culture he was leading, and the results matched.
A great example, from a development perspective, is unit tests. Everyone loves to talk about how much we need unit tests. How great unit tests are. How they will make our software better. This is stating values, but you also have to back that up, and that's where things fall apart. The moment any kind of crunch happens, unit tests are the first things thrown out the window. Despite the fact that when you're working quickly, you probably need those tests even more. And all this is because, even though everyone states the value of tests, it's not actually part of the culture. The goals and incentives aren't there; there's no penalty to not following the line.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, but it seems a bit simplistic. CEO's are also in the position to be thought leaders, public advocates, build hype, and internally, guide the company to specific results. Workplace culture is extremely important, but not everything.
Also, I'm not sure that enforcing unit tests is exactly a "cultural" issue. How many unit tests you write is a decision that weighs current development speed against future development speed and reliability. That is of course influenced by culture, but not exactly culture itself.
> I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, but it seems a bit simplistic. CEO's are also in the position to be thought leaders, public advocates, build hype, and internally, guide the company to specific results.
At least the first three of those are different ways of setting culture. The last one is so loosely defined that it could mean anything.
The sum of all actions of all actors within a company is its culture. If people act in an obsessive way about UX, then you have a culture of obsessive UX.
The CEO has the power to shift these cultures. There are many tools, as you point out, but the biggest one is setting appropriate goals, with the proper aligning (dis)incentive structure. These are set on his subordinates, who then filter it down and specify it for their subordinates, and so on down the entire chain.
> Also, I'm not sure that enforcing unit tests is exactly a "cultural" issue. How many unit tests you write is a decision that weighs current development speed against future development speed and reliability. That is of course influenced by culture, but not exactly culture itself.
If you supposedly have a culture that values writing unit tests, then that should be reflected in action. The idea of tossing unit tests should be met with disdain, the same way we value not murdering people and murder is meet with disdain. It's not about tradeoffs, it's about stated cultural values (talk) versus the actual culture (walk). If there's nothing holding you to the stated cultural values, that's a management failure.
Normally, I would consider culture to be work ethic and how employees treat each other beyond the purely transactional business sense. You're defining it to be something much broader, that's fine, but I think that broader undertanding is better captured by the word "leadership".
And as far as my last factor ("internally, guide the company to specific results"), I mean that CEOs make a lot of day-to-day tactical decisions. E.g., how many engineer/sales/marketing people do we add to that team, do we need a bigger office, do we sue someone or not, do we take VC money on the offered terms or hold out for something better.
These tactical decisions are less visible, but probably make up a good deal of a CEOs day.
Culture is both a tool and side-effect of leadership. I talk about culture being the sum of all the actions of all the participants, but the funny thing is that culture also informs all those actions. Basically, there's a self-reinforcing feedback loop here, and that's one of the reasons why changing negative cultural aspects is both hard and important. It's hard because you'll be working against the currently ingrained culture. And it's important because you must break that self-reinforcing loop in order to affect real change.
And yes, CEOs can make tactical decisions, or at the very least give final approval on them. I think in smaller companies they tend to be more involved in such decisions, and as the company grows it becomes impossible to keep up and it gets delegated out. But in my opinion, those tactical decisions like the ones you list don't exhibit leadership as much as they need a leader to make them. It's a reversal of the reasoning: People aren't leaders because they make those decisions; they make those decisions because they're leaders.
Also, developing big projects practically require tests. I haven't seen a large project without them. Not sure where you work, but if they are the first thing that is thrown out, there is something definitely wrong not just with the culture, but with the engineering.
Completely agree with you. Part of the big fight is getting people to understand that tests are an asset and not a liability to working quickly and safely. There's a huge visability problem, in that management doesn't have insight into all the times when a bug wasn't committed because of a unit test. Functional and integration testing doesn't have this problem as much, because those typically have much better visability.
I agree. I also think Twitter's in a rough place for one reason: 140 characters doesn't make sense anymore. But dropping it would be even scarier for them, as that's been their defining thing for so long.
When did 140 chars make sense? In the beginning of the social internet 10 years ago. For people new to sharing, it relieved pressure around saying something. For psychological reasons the false restriction made sharing on the internet frictionless. When the expectation is intentionally low, you don't have to worry if you're sharing enough or too little. And perhaps more subconsciously, such a low limit just kind of speaks to you, saying: "just say anything, and spit out."
But now, people are very accustomed to sharing. They don't need these training wheels.
It seems to me, regular people don't use twitter. Only various professional niches. That's just a problem, and will result in Twitter leaking users from their staple niches gradually over time, and probably has been going on for a long time now.
So in short, Jack's job and the decision he has to make is a very hard one. They've been too scared to make the hardest of decisions, and very naturally as a result have only rolled out these minor attempts. It seems like a very logical sequence of events to me.
They gotta do something bold, or die.
I'm not saying removing the limit is the answer on its own. I think it's more of a symbol of a willingness and capability to get back in the game. Do that along with something totally fresh front-and-center within the feed, and they would have a good recipe for success. Make a big moment out of dropping the restriction, and see what happens. Hell, try it for 30 days, and see what happens as a grand experiment.
The 140 characters make sense — if you do textual analysis, the average sentence turns out to be around that number of characters.
The issue is that Twitter is seen as a medium of expression, but I don’t think it’s suppose to be a platform where people go in-depth with their thoughts; more for momentarily formed opinions, ideas, or announcements.
For publishment, people should be using something like Medium.
Every new medium of communication effects the substance of that communication. I doubt they can change the 140 character limit without changing the substance of conversation, but that may be the point.
> picking up customers who don't understand merchant processing and are willing to pay an extra 1% or so to avoid ever thinking about it
I don't think that's particularly fair to Square, for three reasons:
- For much smaller merchants, it can be cheaper overall than traditional payment processing, as you don't have to buy expensive hardware.
- Not having to "think about it" is probably underrated, the cost structure of traditional payment processing is very complex and can make it more difficult to know how you need to mark up your products to maintain a target margin, whereas with Square you're guaranteed a flat rate which will make a lot of other decisions easier.
- They provide a lot of other services for small businesses, like point-of-sale (I think the software is free for that? Big saving for small merchants) and payroll software (again a time/cost saving).
I think it's entirely reasonable that a thinking person might decide to pay 1% for these things, rather than because they don't know any better.
He realizes the hysteria around policing online speech and content will be short-lived. He is trying to keep it neutral and not warp it to consist of only the things some people would like to see. Its a strong strategy in the long run.
And what about Twitter allowing the US intelligence agencies access to account information about potential overseas national security interests?
But of course, Trump is president so we need to get him out of office. Right? News flash: Trump is your president and will continue to be for years to come.
Only someone who hasn't been harassed could think this is hysteria. Interaction in communities of strangers (and even in face-to-face societies, like pre-industrial ones) has always required policing.
Its an online forum. Anyone being harassed is free to ignore it or block/mute their harassers.
There is no magic technology that can automatically detect and stop harassment. Its a social problem and must be dealt with as such - e.g by shunning trolls online. In that light I don't understand what people want Twitter to do about it. Blaming Twitter is not a productive response given their limited ability to stop it, just as blaming HN would not be a productive response to being flamed in a comment on HN.
> Anyone being harassed is free to ignore it or block/mute their harassers.
First of all, it's not so easy to block harassers when there are thousands. Seconds, victims of real-life harassment are also "free" to disconnect their phones and never leave the house. But doing so is letting the harassers win, and society has decided that harassment is unacceptable, and the harassers should be stopped.
> There is no magic technology that can automatically detect and stop harassment.
There is no magic technology that can automatically detect and stop crime, either, but that hasn't stopped every society in the world from establishing some sort of a justice system.
> Its a social problem and must be dealt with as such - e.g by shunning trolls online.
Yes, by an enforcement mechanism. In a strangers society, let alone one when people can have multiple identities, social sanctions don't work.
> In that light I don't understand what people want Twitter to do about it.
The same as anyone responsible over a public or semi-public space is expected to do -- establish an enforcement force. Just as office buildings, companies, and universities have security and often even a reporting and judgment apparatuses.
> just as blaming HN would not be a productive response to being flamed in a comment on HN.
If you think harassment on Twitter is on the same scale and of the same kind as unkind comments on HN, or that Twitter moderation is anywhere as effective as on HN, then you're unfamiliar with the problem. A mere hint of a threat of violence, or even strong verbal abuse gets you immediately banned from HN.
I don't particularly have a problem with most of your philosophical positions. But this:
>The same as anyone responsible over a public or semi-public space is expected to do -- establish an enforcement force
Its simply unrealistic... there are roughly 350,000 tweets per MINUTE on twitter. It would take a massive workforce, working around the clock to get even close to policing all tweets or even all reported tweets.
Its easier to police physical spaces/companies/universities because there is a LOT less to police.
And there are no real identities, so even after banning an account the offender may just come back.
As I said above, in that light I don't think Twitter can do a whole lot about it.
1. The question of can is entirely separate from the question of should. Sometimes someone should, or even absolutely must, do something even if they currently can't, and the inability to do it does not make the demand that they do unjustified.
2. While I don't think that Twitter can "solve" the problem (neither do justice systems "solve" crime), I don't believe that there is absolutely nothing they can do to effectively fight it and reduce it.
Well they already are doing something to fight it.. you want them to do more, but someone will always want more given they cannot solve the problem a 100% or even 50%. What they do will never be enough because the problem cannot be solved even close to 100%.
>1. The question of can is entirely separate from the question of should. Sometimes someone should, or even absolutely must, do something even if they currently can't, and the inability to do it does not make the demand that they do unjustified.
Wow... perhaps can/should are separate philosophically but frankly it makes no sense in the real world. We "should" all eat 200 calories a day so theres enough food to go around, we should all generate electricity out of thin air so theres less global warming, we should all be sure never to spread infectious diseases by force of willpower alone.. i mean what purpose does a demand that cannot be met serve? Thats insane.
BRB lemme go protest outside my barbershop demanding they solve the crisis in Chechnya.
Or maybe closer to home, I will be sure to demand that any software consultant I hire builds a system to handle 1M writes per second on an Arduino, and gets 1ms latencies across the world, real world be damned.
> i mean what purpose does a demand that cannot be met serve?
Even assuming that it cannot be met (that's your assumption, not mine), it serves to set a goal and a system of values. Most religions demand that there be no murder and theft even though they know there always will be. It makes sure that people do not fall into a naturalistic fallacy. The fact you can never make it to 100% doesn't mean you should be content at 40%.
> lemme go protest outside my barbershop demanding they solve the crisis in Chechnya.
What kind of power does your barber have in Chechnya?
> real world be damned.
I don't understand. Do you have some kind of scientific proof that Twitter cannot do any more than they're doing now to reduce the rampant harassment in the community they've built? Twitter is not some natural phenomenon. It is a community built by people.
>Even assuming that it cannot be met (that's your assumption, not mine)
With 350K tweets per minute I feel that is a much more likely assumption than the opposite.
>I don't understand. Do you have some kind of scientific proof that Twitter cannot do any more than they're doing now to reduce the rampant harassment in the community they've built? Twitter is not some natural phenomenon. It is a community built by people
I know they are taking some action already - with muting features and suspending certain accounts. I know whatever action they take manually cannot scale to stop most abuse. So there WILL be harassment. A lot of it. Ultimately its up to what people choose to do, and they have very little control in that.
Pretty much all online communities tend to become toxic without moderation, so when I see one of the biggest online communities in the world becoming toxic, and I know it cannot be effectively moderated... well my reaction is not to blame the people running the forum. The hate there is a reflection of hate in society.
I don't have proof that they cannot do any more, but I would ask if you have reasonable standards for how much they should do or proof that they are not meeting those standards. I just feel an online forum only reflects the views of its community, and as such it is not within their power or responsibility to change the people posting there. I feel the hate is better directed at the hateful people. This feels analogous to blaming paper manufacturers when people print hateful things on paper. They only create the medium, not the message.
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
>In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine.
Yeah, you are stretching those words a bit too much. It was designed for normal people to be able to get in touch with famous people or vice versa. Some people misuse it and harass famous people. There's plenty of good that has come because of it as well.
I’d say it’s even going backwards. Whoever made the decision to put other people’s likes in my timeline really increased the noise and showed a real lack of understanding between a like and retweet.
Probably Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Will they do better with a full time CEO? What if some talent leaves due to perceived instability? T-Mobile and HP both had this happen, and it took years to recover, as anyone who could jump ship did.
This also means "Twitter could be eclipsed by Square in value".
I'm sure they debated hard whether to go for this headline or the other one, and decided to go with "Square could pass twitter in value" because it would generate more page view.
My point is, it's Twitter that's doing bad. I don't understand why he doesn't just give up his CEO role and let someone else more dedicated take over.
It may make sense if the problem Twitter is facing can be solved by some creative vision, but it can't. These problems are ones that require a lot of care and effort and no matter how he spins it, he's pouring half the effort he can pour into Twitter.
Honestly I’m not surprised that Twitter is doing so poorly. I’ve been around Twitter and ex-Twitter folks a fair amount, and they all seem to take it eaaaaasyyyyyy. Things I’ve seen again and again include frequent sabbaticals, several months of time off a year, short days, 3 day workweek arrangements... and these are often combined.
To be clear, most of them come across as sharp. But it seems like a very lax, unfocused work environment, and knowing these things I’m not surprised that their only meaningful product changes happen once or twice a year and are minor tweaks and features (round profile pictures! hearts instead of stars!)
If I were looking for a job to just go hang out and get good benefits and pay, Twitter would be on top of my list.
Wut. Time off does not correlate to dev quality. I, and many others, do their best work outside of the normal parameters.
It sounds like you think if Twitter engineers worked harder Twitter would be doing better. Besides your anecdotal observation about laid back engineers, is it not plausable that the company doesn't have a vision that contributes to monster growth?
It certainly does have a level of correlation. The less time you spend "at work" (for whatever definition you care, including work from home/the moon) the less work you get done. Now, no, that doesn't translate to a perfect linear growth rate where working 20 hours a day is twice as good as 10 hours a day, there is a limit you can push people. People need vacation and time away. However, it's a rock star who can be as/more productive in three days a week than a similar guy working 5 days a week most weeks. I'll even grant some people can cram for three days a week and be as productive as a 5d/8h guy, but in the end you still need to put in the hours.
Note, this comment doesn't allow for absurd comparisons such as "Forrest Gump coding 8 days a week will never match Donald Knuth coding 1 hour a month" or whatever. Ass comparisons should use reasonable definitions.
Not sure what an "ass comparison" is. I didn't argue that there isn't a correlation (never used that word) but correlation != causation.
In case it's not clear, I really doubt that Twitter being an also ran has to do with a culture of laziness. If anything my impression was that they overengineered without making any real product changes.
I think the breakeven point is much earlier than you suggest. I'd guess something like 28 hours/week is peak productivity; more than that and you're spending more effort on looking productive and being in the office and getting less done.
Using anecdote against unsubstantiated claims on productivity to support a post hoc conclusion (Twitter is doing poorly right now) feels like a poor strategy to me.
Jack screwed over Noah Glass with Twitter really badly. His behavior in that is really troubling. I can't get past that even with him doing great things with Square after Twitter.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadI'm shocked, utterly shocked.
Twitter's userbase isn't "dwindling" (diminishing gradually in size, amount, or strength.) It's not growing as fast as shareholders might like, but its monthly active users are growing in number: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly...
I feel like 5 years ago Twitter was really popular among st friends and we talked about things people tweeted, etc.
Since then I don't have a single friend who actively uses twitter, maybe it's that my preferences simply changed, but the overall visibility of twitter seems to be diminished.
I don't know, maybe its me getting older, but more digitally connected than ever and feel much less personally connected than ever except with the friends that I keep direct/group imessage conversations going with for months and years at a time.
Another personal example, IG direct messages aren't used that much from my experience (could be different for others or in the odd one). That few times I've been hit up or hit someone up on it, response or messages back and forth usually take forever. It kills the conversation. The only time a conversation has survived and a friendship began was when the convo quickly moved over to another medium (FBM in that case).
I do get your point though of feeling at home in a general sense.
I hear about announcements via twitter than then link to actual new stories and usually skip twitter entirely. Maybe I'm just not the right audience.
I am very impressed with Square constantly. It's really amazing to see what they accomplished.
Does Square make that much money off services?
Note also that Square is not actively losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which is a point in favor of its value.
Square's had a firm hold on hip small businesses for half a decade, I'm still not convinced they can use that as leverage to build profitable services.
I've literally never heard of Venmo before now
I know for me personally I'm far more likely to say "you get it next time" than bill my friends for some share of an outing. If it's sufficiently expensive that this doesn't make sense I'd just split the check. If I was younger and still a student I can absolutely see the appeal though.
https://www.zellepay.com/partners
While I think Square has some momentum, I believe the financial services industry as a whole is going to overshadow their Cash offering.
Worst case, you'll see people using online bill pay to mail eachother's banks checks as that is free and low effort. People just don't want to pay to move money friend to friend, and the US is an anomaly with our extremely high credit card processing charges, where we're at 1.5% to 2% in interchange, the rest of the world is below 1%.
Err... I'm old, but we have hip and trendy tourists?
Ah well... Another anecdote for ya.
Square, meanwhile, is offering both business and peer-to-peer options.
It might be a generational thing, but it does seem like Venmo has cornered the p2p market.
Yeah, I even have a landline. I did mention I'm old. ;-)
The banks get it. It's the interchange fee
Visa Interchange Rates: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/documents...
[0] https://www.cardfellow.com/american-express-discount-rate/#P...
It doesn't seem like the kind of thing you'd have to wonder about. Just like restaurants can be profitable in a low margin industry, it takes incredible awareness of the costs of your business, and the ability to give greater value to your customers than it costs you to produce. Most companies, specifically tech companies, way overspend. Stripe seems not to do that.
Edit: the parent comment was originally just its first sentence. Kinda not nice to do that without saying so.
Sorry for not indicating it was editted, I'll be sure to do so in the future.
I'm not sure what proportion of square's revenue comes from processing vs services, but if I had to guess, I'd say most of the services are loss leaders for the processing. This is especially true with their rates so far above market. 2.75% is a fat chunk of change if they're processing 10 or 12 figures. (Working primarily with smaller clients, you get to charge that much, but it makes them less competitive with larger merchants who process more volume.)
Most of that goes straight to the credit card companies/bank, no?
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20141201/TECHNOLOGY/141...
Also confirmed by a friend who works at Square. Internally they're pretty open about the business.
[1] http://fortune.com/2016/11/07/square-capital-1-billion/
- Russian troll accounts/factories (he even retweeted one) - Inability to clean up harassment/abuse/threats - Stagnant product feature set - Awful (truly awful) ad product
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: I'm not referring to what a CEO is accountable for, just what they actually have control over. A CEO is not god, despite what some may believe!
And yes, a CEO does not change the culture on their own. That's impossible by definition -- the culture is the sum result of all the actors within the company. But a CEO is expected to lead the culture of the entire company, typically by stating values and setting goals and incentives that actually match those values. If they cannot do this, then they are unable to do their primary internal-facing job. This is one of the reasons that Steve Jobs was so well regarded. For whatever flaws he had, there was no mistaking the culture he was leading, and the results matched.
A great example, from a development perspective, is unit tests. Everyone loves to talk about how much we need unit tests. How great unit tests are. How they will make our software better. This is stating values, but you also have to back that up, and that's where things fall apart. The moment any kind of crunch happens, unit tests are the first things thrown out the window. Despite the fact that when you're working quickly, you probably need those tests even more. And all this is because, even though everyone states the value of tests, it's not actually part of the culture. The goals and incentives aren't there; there's no penalty to not following the line.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, but it seems a bit simplistic. CEO's are also in the position to be thought leaders, public advocates, build hype, and internally, guide the company to specific results. Workplace culture is extremely important, but not everything.
Also, I'm not sure that enforcing unit tests is exactly a "cultural" issue. How many unit tests you write is a decision that weighs current development speed against future development speed and reliability. That is of course influenced by culture, but not exactly culture itself.
At least the first three of those are different ways of setting culture. The last one is so loosely defined that it could mean anything.
The sum of all actions of all actors within a company is its culture. If people act in an obsessive way about UX, then you have a culture of obsessive UX.
The CEO has the power to shift these cultures. There are many tools, as you point out, but the biggest one is setting appropriate goals, with the proper aligning (dis)incentive structure. These are set on his subordinates, who then filter it down and specify it for their subordinates, and so on down the entire chain.
> Also, I'm not sure that enforcing unit tests is exactly a "cultural" issue. How many unit tests you write is a decision that weighs current development speed against future development speed and reliability. That is of course influenced by culture, but not exactly culture itself.
If you supposedly have a culture that values writing unit tests, then that should be reflected in action. The idea of tossing unit tests should be met with disdain, the same way we value not murdering people and murder is meet with disdain. It's not about tradeoffs, it's about stated cultural values (talk) versus the actual culture (walk). If there's nothing holding you to the stated cultural values, that's a management failure.
And as far as my last factor ("internally, guide the company to specific results"), I mean that CEOs make a lot of day-to-day tactical decisions. E.g., how many engineer/sales/marketing people do we add to that team, do we need a bigger office, do we sue someone or not, do we take VC money on the offered terms or hold out for something better.
These tactical decisions are less visible, but probably make up a good deal of a CEOs day.
And yes, CEOs can make tactical decisions, or at the very least give final approval on them. I think in smaller companies they tend to be more involved in such decisions, and as the company grows it becomes impossible to keep up and it gets delegated out. But in my opinion, those tactical decisions like the ones you list don't exhibit leadership as much as they need a leader to make them. It's a reversal of the reasoning: People aren't leaders because they make those decisions; they make those decisions because they're leaders.
When did 140 chars make sense? In the beginning of the social internet 10 years ago. For people new to sharing, it relieved pressure around saying something. For psychological reasons the false restriction made sharing on the internet frictionless. When the expectation is intentionally low, you don't have to worry if you're sharing enough or too little. And perhaps more subconsciously, such a low limit just kind of speaks to you, saying: "just say anything, and spit out."
But now, people are very accustomed to sharing. They don't need these training wheels.
It seems to me, regular people don't use twitter. Only various professional niches. That's just a problem, and will result in Twitter leaking users from their staple niches gradually over time, and probably has been going on for a long time now.
So in short, Jack's job and the decision he has to make is a very hard one. They've been too scared to make the hardest of decisions, and very naturally as a result have only rolled out these minor attempts. It seems like a very logical sequence of events to me.
They gotta do something bold, or die.
I'm not saying removing the limit is the answer on its own. I think it's more of a symbol of a willingness and capability to get back in the game. Do that along with something totally fresh front-and-center within the feed, and they would have a good recipe for success. Make a big moment out of dropping the restriction, and see what happens. Hell, try it for 30 days, and see what happens as a grand experiment.
The issue is that Twitter is seen as a medium of expression, but I don’t think it’s suppose to be a platform where people go in-depth with their thoughts; more for momentarily formed opinions, ideas, or announcements.
For publishment, people should be using something like Medium.
I don't think that's particularly fair to Square, for three reasons:
- For much smaller merchants, it can be cheaper overall than traditional payment processing, as you don't have to buy expensive hardware.
- Not having to "think about it" is probably underrated, the cost structure of traditional payment processing is very complex and can make it more difficult to know how you need to mark up your products to maintain a target margin, whereas with Square you're guaranteed a flat rate which will make a lot of other decisions easier.
- They provide a lot of other services for small businesses, like point-of-sale (I think the software is free for that? Big saving for small merchants) and payroll software (again a time/cost saving).
I think it's entirely reasonable that a thinking person might decide to pay 1% for these things, rather than because they don't know any better.
But of course, Trump is president so we need to get him out of office. Right? News flash: Trump is your president and will continue to be for years to come.
There is no magic technology that can automatically detect and stop harassment. Its a social problem and must be dealt with as such - e.g by shunning trolls online. In that light I don't understand what people want Twitter to do about it. Blaming Twitter is not a productive response given their limited ability to stop it, just as blaming HN would not be a productive response to being flamed in a comment on HN.
First of all, it's not so easy to block harassers when there are thousands. Seconds, victims of real-life harassment are also "free" to disconnect their phones and never leave the house. But doing so is letting the harassers win, and society has decided that harassment is unacceptable, and the harassers should be stopped.
> There is no magic technology that can automatically detect and stop harassment.
There is no magic technology that can automatically detect and stop crime, either, but that hasn't stopped every society in the world from establishing some sort of a justice system.
> Its a social problem and must be dealt with as such - e.g by shunning trolls online.
Yes, by an enforcement mechanism. In a strangers society, let alone one when people can have multiple identities, social sanctions don't work.
> In that light I don't understand what people want Twitter to do about it.
The same as anyone responsible over a public or semi-public space is expected to do -- establish an enforcement force. Just as office buildings, companies, and universities have security and often even a reporting and judgment apparatuses.
> just as blaming HN would not be a productive response to being flamed in a comment on HN.
If you think harassment on Twitter is on the same scale and of the same kind as unkind comments on HN, or that Twitter moderation is anywhere as effective as on HN, then you're unfamiliar with the problem. A mere hint of a threat of violence, or even strong verbal abuse gets you immediately banned from HN.
>The same as anyone responsible over a public or semi-public space is expected to do -- establish an enforcement force
Its simply unrealistic... there are roughly 350,000 tweets per MINUTE on twitter. It would take a massive workforce, working around the clock to get even close to policing all tweets or even all reported tweets.
Its easier to police physical spaces/companies/universities because there is a LOT less to police.
And there are no real identities, so even after banning an account the offender may just come back.
As I said above, in that light I don't think Twitter can do a whole lot about it.
2. While I don't think that Twitter can "solve" the problem (neither do justice systems "solve" crime), I don't believe that there is absolutely nothing they can do to effectively fight it and reduce it.
>1. The question of can is entirely separate from the question of should. Sometimes someone should, or even absolutely must, do something even if they currently can't, and the inability to do it does not make the demand that they do unjustified.
Wow... perhaps can/should are separate philosophically but frankly it makes no sense in the real world. We "should" all eat 200 calories a day so theres enough food to go around, we should all generate electricity out of thin air so theres less global warming, we should all be sure never to spread infectious diseases by force of willpower alone.. i mean what purpose does a demand that cannot be met serve? Thats insane.
BRB lemme go protest outside my barbershop demanding they solve the crisis in Chechnya.
Or maybe closer to home, I will be sure to demand that any software consultant I hire builds a system to handle 1M writes per second on an Arduino, and gets 1ms latencies across the world, real world be damned.
Even assuming that it cannot be met (that's your assumption, not mine), it serves to set a goal and a system of values. Most religions demand that there be no murder and theft even though they know there always will be. It makes sure that people do not fall into a naturalistic fallacy. The fact you can never make it to 100% doesn't mean you should be content at 40%.
> lemme go protest outside my barbershop demanding they solve the crisis in Chechnya.
What kind of power does your barber have in Chechnya?
> real world be damned.
I don't understand. Do you have some kind of scientific proof that Twitter cannot do any more than they're doing now to reduce the rampant harassment in the community they've built? Twitter is not some natural phenomenon. It is a community built by people.
With 350K tweets per minute I feel that is a much more likely assumption than the opposite.
>I don't understand. Do you have some kind of scientific proof that Twitter cannot do any more than they're doing now to reduce the rampant harassment in the community they've built? Twitter is not some natural phenomenon. It is a community built by people
I know they are taking some action already - with muting features and suspending certain accounts. I know whatever action they take manually cannot scale to stop most abuse. So there WILL be harassment. A lot of it. Ultimately its up to what people choose to do, and they have very little control in that.
Pretty much all online communities tend to become toxic without moderation, so when I see one of the biggest online communities in the world becoming toxic, and I know it cannot be effectively moderated... well my reaction is not to blame the people running the forum. The hate there is a reflection of hate in society.
I don't have proof that they cannot do any more, but I would ask if you have reasonable standards for how much they should do or proof that they are not meeting those standards. I just feel an online forum only reflects the views of its community, and as such it is not within their power or responsibility to change the people posting there. I feel the hate is better directed at the hateful people. This feels analogous to blaming paper manufacturers when people print hateful things on paper. They only create the medium, not the message.
That's a feature, not a bug:
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/04/how-i-deal-with-haras...
Yeah, you are stretching those words a bit too much. It was designed for normal people to be able to get in touch with famous people or vice versa. Some people misuse it and harass famous people. There's plenty of good that has come because of it as well.
I recommend considering the idea within the context of the entire blog post, which is the other reason I shared the link.
Not so sure about this. Wasn't it just designed to broadcast messages among people who knew each other. The celeb focus came later.
I'd also say it doesn't help that your onboarding focuses greatly on what celebs you're going to engage with on the service.
Easy to win elections when you get to pick the electors
I'm sure they debated hard whether to go for this headline or the other one, and decided to go with "Square could pass twitter in value" because it would generate more page view.
My point is, it's Twitter that's doing bad. I don't understand why he doesn't just give up his CEO role and let someone else more dedicated take over.
It may make sense if the problem Twitter is facing can be solved by some creative vision, but it can't. These problems are ones that require a lot of care and effort and no matter how he spins it, he's pouring half the effort he can pour into Twitter.
To be clear, most of them come across as sharp. But it seems like a very lax, unfocused work environment, and knowing these things I’m not surprised that their only meaningful product changes happen once or twice a year and are minor tweaks and features (round profile pictures! hearts instead of stars!)
If I were looking for a job to just go hang out and get good benefits and pay, Twitter would be on top of my list.
It sounds like you think if Twitter engineers worked harder Twitter would be doing better. Besides your anecdotal observation about laid back engineers, is it not plausable that the company doesn't have a vision that contributes to monster growth?
Note, this comment doesn't allow for absurd comparisons such as "Forrest Gump coding 8 days a week will never match Donald Knuth coding 1 hour a month" or whatever. Ass comparisons should use reasonable definitions.
In case it's not clear, I really doubt that Twitter being an also ran has to do with a culture of laziness. If anything my impression was that they overengineered without making any real product changes.
Who said "engineers"?