It looks like an activist position. The shares were acquired with the view of making them more valuable through direct action. This is a validated hedge fund strategy.
It's an activist position, not a takeover. The shares are acquired for (a) shareholder rights, which can be accomplished with a single share and (b) economic upside.
When a hedge fund pursues this strategy, it typically purchases advertising to make its case. (The case isn't just made to current shareholders. Shares owned by a sympathizer who bought on your activism vote the same as shares held by longtime holders.) That puts a lower bound on the deal size.
Galloway has his own channels. That reduces his costs and thus minimum transaction size.
An activist shareholder owns part of the company and has additional ability to effect change through voting shares. An activist without any shares cannot attend the shareholder meetings, etc. for example.
Man, why does a simple blog need so much JavaScript? (Sorry, I know this is not the most productive of comments, but I am genuinely curious to know. Also, if not me, someone else is inevitably going to say it, I suspect).
Maybe all the author cares about is writing and content?
I don't think this is an issue at all for the majority of people.
Remember that you (and people visit/comment on articles on this orange site) are the 0.01% of people in the world that care about JavaScript being an issue.
Yes, really. Browsing HN comments feels like I'm good friends with a generally friendly elderly construction worker who for some reason has a real stick in his ass about grouting. Everywhere we go together, houses, bars, museums, whatever, he never stops complaining about the grouting, pointing out places here and there where "that's not gonna hold up in twenty years" and "that poor grouting is why we get the occasional gust of cold air in here" etc etc. And while I appreciate he knows what he's talking about and yes maybe we would all be better if builders the world over got their act together and did the grouting better, I just wish for once he wouldn't bring the damn subject up and talk about something else, something more interesting, something new when we visit a place.
That brings to mind Bonzi Buddy proving people literally would take a dancing monkey over security.
People generally may not understand enough to know JavaScript as a culprit but they do notice bloat and complain about the slowness.
I find difficult to think of metaphors which encapsulate a sense of proportion to the issue but ignoring a root cause as not an issue is a very good way to wind up with one.
Perhaps Scott didn't focus on that (although he brings it up a number of times) simply because the board is obvious ok with that. I think he captures it in the title though... "Enough Already". It's like saying "Ok you let him be a part time CEO, but moving to Africa is too much."
It's using some mixture of Wordpress, React "styled components", Core.js, and other libraries. WP is the backend and returns the post as JSON so the JS is needed to turn it into HTML.
It's poor website design, but JS is turning into the new Flash. People want glitzy websites and don't care about load times.
> Chances of that happening are approximately nil, in my estimation
The author has put money behind their estimation. Given Twitter's performance and Galloway's mouthpiece, I wouldn't put organizing its shareholders beyond the realm of plausibility. (Or the Board compromising to take a thorn out of their side.)
The battle is really getting the question of a part-time CEO on the agenda, which requires replacing a few Board members. Given how unusual Twitter's Board dynamics are, there's a good chance proxy advisers would recommend voting for reforms.
Replacing with _who_ though? Twitter is not going to be another Facebook or Google no matter who runs it - there's really no meat on the bones there, Jack knows that. And it could get much, much worse if motivated entirely by profit.
That's a separate question. Note, too, that activist victories can take many forms. It could be Jack retreating to a Chairmanship, it could be him committing more hours to Twitter, it could be him hiring a President.
> there's really no meat on the bones there
Weibo has effectively bootstrapped a separate platform on its Twitter clone. And ByteDance outvalues Twitter on what is essentially a re-jiggered Vine.
This is oversimplifying. But Twitter's only options aren't more ads or languishing with distracted leadership.
Citation needed. Best I can tell the only thing people "enjoy" there is shitting on each other, and this seems to be the platform's raison d'être. It's kind of hard to enjoy being on the receiving end of that though.
Hope he loses even more money, but yea Jack should do something about all the Nazis on Twitter. He's keeping them there to drive engagement numbers at the expense of having a society.
I think it makes total sense to question if a CEO can be part-time and be effective (I agree with the author of this post, they can't). That being said, this post is all over the place.
> Greatness is in the agency of others, and many talented executives have left the firm.
Uh huh. Twitter has always succeeded in spite of itself. There's never been any innovation and execution has been middling at best. I don't think there were ever "great" executives on board, and if there was, they didn't accomplish anything.
The rest of the post is just a stereotypical political rant about Russian bots and Trump. If there's a problem with the culture of Twitter's user base, much of the blame must lie on those with blue checkmarks. It's a toxic community.
It belies an ugly truth - the global community is pretty tragic even if things are on the rise - let alone the real world with its mixed metrics and setbacks.
Jack Dorsey didnt want the job in the first place, they had to beg him to come back. Twitter was even more of a dumpster fire back then. No one wanted to buy the company and no one wanted to take the helm. The only thing that saved the company (which the article mentions as well) is Trump used it during his 2016 campaign and helped revive a company that should have died then.
> Political scandals happen daily under this administration. The president has tweeted about nuclear war. He becomes more erratic under pressure. How will the next bout of nuclear war tweets be handled? Whom, if not the CEO, are those delegated to?
Beyond nearly everything else, this sums up my deep concern with Twitter/Trump.
Twitter hiring Anthony Noto was one of the worst. They need to replace the board which essentially means someone needs to acquire them in order to unlock the potentials.
Problem is that nobody wants them. Two or three years ago there was regular talk about Twitter selling the company, but every potential buyer (e.g. Google) said no in the end. Twitter is just not a very good business, but it does attract a lot of scrutiny due to its size and impact. It has pretty much all the risks of Facebook with none of the cash flow.
But didn't Twitter turn off the firehose of data to Google awhile ago? Therefore Google could benefit from the increase in data access to the thoughts/feelings of 300 million DAU.
What's wrong with Anthony Noto? Honest question as I am not American and I don't know him at all. His article on Wikipedia doesn't seem to show any controversies.
I like listening to Scott Galloway but I think his perspectives on this issue are biased. He regularly advocates for progressive positions and is, for example, an outspoken fan of Elizabeth Warren. The bits about Twitter's financial performance are fair grounds for critique but the unfocused parts of this rant (for example asking Twitter to "protect journalists, especially women") seem nonsensical/alarmist in order to drum up support.
What Galloway is ultimately looking for here is for some views to be allowed and others disallowed. I do not think that is okay on a platform that is as big and pervasive as Twitter (or Facebook). They are, for all intents and purposes, a public digital square. And figuring out what is a "conspiracy" or "junk science" should ultimately be left to the reader, with algorithms otherwise ranking content as neutrally/objectively as possible. After all, we trust Twitter users with the ability to vote.
> And figuring out what is a "conspiracy" or "junk science" should ultimately be left to the reader, with algorithms otherwise ranking content as neutrally/objectively as possible.
I think the vast majority of the users would prefer this as well. Just give me a chronological timeline and gtfo.
There's a small extremely vocal minority of users that want to censor any and all thoughts they don't approve of. This group has tons of journalists in it and for one reason or another, Twitter has paid outsized attention to it and let it shape the product and company policy, to nearly everyone's loss, including Twitter.
In fact one of the very best things about Twitter is it gives regular people a way to refute journalists, bad journalism and media agenda. It gave the audience a voice and they use it. "Protect journalists" seems like code for "protect the narrative".
This group has tons of journalists in it and for one reason or another, Twitter has paid outsized attention to it and let it shape the product and company policy, to nearly everyone's loss, including Twitter.
It's a simple competitive issue. Every click that goes to Twitter is one that doesn't go to newyorktimes.com, washingtonpost.com, or (yes) foxnews.com... and it's one that isn't likely to lead to any of those sites, for that matter.
Regardless of their political alignment, journalists have no reason to support disintermediation between news makers and news consumers. It threatens their livelihoods. Say what you will about Trump (just not here, please), but he does understand that much. Twitter is worth a lot to people like him, which I'd think would make it worth a lot to investors as well. Arguably it would have been a better investment for Jeff Bezos than WaPo was.
Heck, just the ability to front-run Tweets by five seconds might be worth a lot on Wall Street.
What's curious to me is how Twitter made so few improvements so slowly during the past few years, when its Chinese counterpart, Weibo, could release waves of new features in fast pace. Not that all the new features are good in users' eyes, of course, but isn't fast iteration a motto in the Bay Area?
I don't blame them. I signed up in 2009 and I deleted my account a few years ago because, well... Twitter now is not what I signed up for. But I guess they have to move on. Things change, but that does not mean I have to like the changes.
Drivel. Nothing directly actionable. If a CEO has to be physically in his office to successfully run the company, he has done a poor job in building leadership under him/her. Jack is doing what he should be, finding new growth opportunities. Milking the users with more Ads will just piss off users for short term gains.
Are you kidding? Twitter is a tech company with a great brand and a monopoly platform that has a stock that performs like a mall chain. The rate of product change is so slow. There are so many opportunities for growth that are not advertising.
Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.
That is also true.
I did agree with the author's position that Dorsey should not be the chief executive of both Square and Twitter. That's probably his strongest case towards removal.
But your point about Twitter's uniqueness is also valid, and something I hadn't seriously thought of before. Around the time of their IPO, I think the general analyst consensus was that Twitter would not make money and their stock was not a buy. It makes sense because their product is wholly different from the suites offered by Facebook or Google, the companies this article and the commenter compare it to.
Perhaps the other stakeholders understood this aspect of Twitter and didn't expect large returns from day 1.
I am not sure I agree with the author on how many companies a person should be able to run. Depends on the success of the companies themselves. Look at Musk.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. "Better" is subjective anyway. Any change with make some people mad, and no change will make others mad. If your product is stable, that's about the best you can hope for. No need to keep tweaking it out of boredom.
Its like a car, you don't keep pressing the accelerator further and further to travel down the road. You find the optimum location to maintain a safe speed. If something changes, like the road turns, you adjust the accelerator until you are once again safe. If you stayed static, you'd probably fly into a ditch. If you are unnecessarily pumping the pedal, your speed would oscillate unpredictably, and any number of consequences would occur.
The rate of product change at twitter is something every company should learn from!
Devs like new features a lot more than users do. Users feel disrupted by new features. Users don't open up their favorite app and say "gee whiz,I wonder what new feature there is today". Users don't even think about twitter, they think about tweets,replies,likes and other users. You focus on what matters to users, not what matters to devs and everyone else who does not get the user base.
Imagine feature-creep at their scale! Twitter is the most tolerable mainstream social media network I know of for many reasons -- all centered around their resistance to change and refusal to follow the trends at fb,instagram,snapchat,linkedin,etc...
Repeat with me: you don't need more growth if everyone is happy and you already have a steady and growing profit. You want more growth of course but you don't need it. You focus on what you have and need first then you consider your wants and features...very slowly.
One example of a feature that I (a user) would love to see get a little love is Lists.
I use them frequently, but Lists are not well-designed at the moment. I can't see if I've already added a user to a list, the "update" is weirdly different from that of the main timeline, there are no aggregations/stats/summaries and AFAIK, there is no interaction with push notifications. They do nothing on the platform to draw anyone's attention to the feature.
But Lists are great! I can pare down my feed to a curated set of users who are all talking about the same thing -- I have an NLP list, and ML list, a "politics" list, etc. I can follow other people's curated lists too. Twitter is huge, it's awesome to have some path to a smaller cohesive community.
It's really weird to me that they would have a feature "above the fold" on the main menu of the platform that seems so dusty and under-utilized. What's the deal? Do they not have enough engineers over there or something?
sure you can pull a digg and expect more money, but actually lose your users to a competitor. i 'd definitely quit twitter if it starts doing things like what facebook did to FB-page owners by holding their audience hostage for ransom. I think twitter, like reddit, inherently don't have high monetization potential because their format doesn't appeal to the massive audiences which flock to fb / instagram
With respect, what you're saying doesn't address the main thrust of the letter. The nine hour time zone difference between Dorsey and Twitter HQ is only one component of the "drivel", as you put it. Frankly it's just the rhetorical opener to the main point.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether Dorsey should be CEO. But I think the author's concerns are more varied and more cogent than your rebuttal would make them seem.
What are your thoughts on Dorsey leading two tech companies at the same time, Twitter's share performance over the past several years, and the political waters Twitter has to navigate?
With that attitude why even have CEOs? Company’s been built, it should just run itself. Let’s just have CEOs step down as part of the IPO process. Literally nothing could go wrong. I’m proud of how Apple was able to dig itself out in the 1990s all by itself through the will power of the board and executive team. I mean what with Steve’s many South American getaways.
Jack spends half days at two companies and as such isn’t able to meaningfully administer either. And from that platform he’s going on vacation to Africa for 6 months. The line about the real issue being not that he’s going away but rather that he’s coming back is devastating but not far from the mark.
No, I didn't say they aren't involved at all, but they don't need to be involved with day to day operations once they have consistent flow of revenue coming in. They should be finding ways to unlock the next growth multiplier not sitting at a desk in SF worrying about operations.
If in 6 months he has found that next growth multiplier, people won't care where he was, but in 6 months if there is no meaningful strategy derived from the exercise, there will be cause to rethink his role and he himself will see it.
Could moving to Africa be a signal from Dorsey that he'd like to move on from both of his positions? One could imagine that e.g. Morocco could be a tenable location for CEOs of some Western firms, but much further south could make travel and communication much more difficult.
Why dont u make your own twitter then? it's really easy to start (hard to scale, but if you get to that point u re up for sucecss)
incidentally these:
> Fake accounts, GRU-sponsored trolls, algorithms that promote conspiracies and junk science
i know they exist and i see them in responses to tweets but i dont follow any of those, and havent seen any of them being followed a lot. they seem like typical harmless spam like the stuff i remove from signups all the time. Twitter is pretty great for me at this time, and i m glad they re not trying to become facebook. there's a reason why facebook can't be the fun , witty platform that twitter is.
Galloway founded the digital intelligence firm L2 Inc, which was acquired in March 2017 by Gartner for $155 million, and the now defunct Firebrand Partners (founded in 2005), an activist hedge fund that has invested over $1 billion in U.S. consumer and media companies.
Why does Twitter need to have a huge market capitalization and return for investors? Can't it just be the "global heartbeat of the information age", as the author so humbly (/s) puts it?
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. They are profitable; they exceeded expectations by a lot Q2. Not sure what the problem is.
This happened to Yahoo too. They were quite happily tooling along, making profits, building cool stuff, and employing people with remote-work policies, small-biz tools for folks, and what-not. Then along came an activist investor who turned it into a royal shit-show.
He finally convince Verizon to buy it, but man it was a wild ride. I don't know if it made the investors money, but it made a lot of people sad.
I have a serious question about your question, understood under the current regime rules: How does one build and maintain a "global heartbeat of the information age" without return to the funders?
Even if I was an inventor that wanted to build one of these things for no personal benefit, until it was profitable (under some business model), it could not sustain without the goodwill of grant-givers or the greed of investors that knew their money would be returned to them under some sort of risk-adjusted time-based return calculation.
In other words - who can afford to do something like this for free? (Now - I am not a fan of Twitter, so if the answer was "no one", it wouldn't hurt my feelings, but I guess some people think that it is important somehow?)
I'm naive about business but I just don't understand what Twitter even needs a LOT of money for. Yes, they need some funds to run servers, update apps, and the usual internet company maintenance...but it's not like FAANG companies, which have a lot of ancillary products and services, many of which are big and expensive risks...but that's what investors signed up for, an ambitious innovative mission.
Couldn't/shouldn't Twitter's mission be to distribute 140 characters from one person to many others...what do they need huge revenue and profits for?
Why does Twitter need to perform as well as Facebook or Google?
Facebook is dying down and being replaced with Instagram. Instagram is littered with ads and doesn't feel irreplaceable.
Google's core product (search engine) is nearly unusable these days thanks to all the ads and the push for e-commerce related results.
Sure, they're profitable. But the products are garbage.
Twitter feels like something that's harder to replace. It feels more like an utility. The core product has changed little over the years and that's why it's good and people keep coming back to it. If someone doesn't ruin it, I wouldn't be surprised if it outlives both Facebook and Google.
I already find the ads annoying. If they add even more, plus a bunch of useless features, and try to censor the discourse on the platform to top it off, it will be the death of twitter.
118 comments
[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadWell, that's your problem.
It looks like an activist position. The shares were acquired with the view of making them more valuable through direct action. This is a validated hedge fund strategy.
It's an activist position, not a takeover. The shares are acquired for (a) shareholder rights, which can be accomplished with a single share and (b) economic upside.
When a hedge fund pursues this strategy, it typically purchases advertising to make its case. (The case isn't just made to current shareholders. Shares owned by a sympathizer who bought on your activism vote the same as shares held by longtime holders.) That puts a lower bound on the deal size.
Galloway has his own channels. That reduces his costs and thus minimum transaction size.
I don't think this is an issue at all for the majority of people.
Remember that you (and people visit/comment on articles on this orange site) are the 0.01% of people in the world that care about JavaScript being an issue.
People generally may not understand enough to know JavaScript as a culprit but they do notice bloat and complain about the slowness.
I find difficult to think of metaphors which encapsulate a sense of proportion to the issue but ignoring a root cause as not an issue is a very good way to wind up with one.
Im not sure I am persuaded that "moving to Africa" is a worthy point to lean so hard on. Maybe focus on him being a part-time CEO.
It's poor website design, but JS is turning into the new Flash. People want glitzy websites and don't care about load times.
The author has put money behind their estimation. Given Twitter's performance and Galloway's mouthpiece, I wouldn't put organizing its shareholders beyond the realm of plausibility. (Or the Board compromising to take a thorn out of their side.)
The battle is really getting the question of a part-time CEO on the agenda, which requires replacing a few Board members. Given how unusual Twitter's Board dynamics are, there's a good chance proxy advisers would recommend voting for reforms.
That's a separate question. Note, too, that activist victories can take many forms. It could be Jack retreating to a Chairmanship, it could be him committing more hours to Twitter, it could be him hiring a President.
> there's really no meat on the bones there
Weibo has effectively bootstrapped a separate platform on its Twitter clone. And ByteDance outvalues Twitter on what is essentially a re-jiggered Vine.
This is oversimplifying. But Twitter's only options aren't more ads or languishing with distracted leadership.
That's Galloway's position.
Citation needed. Best I can tell the only thing people "enjoy" there is shitting on each other, and this seems to be the platform's raison d'être. It's kind of hard to enjoy being on the receiving end of that though.
> Greatness is in the agency of others, and many talented executives have left the firm.
Uh huh. Twitter has always succeeded in spite of itself. There's never been any innovation and execution has been middling at best. I don't think there were ever "great" executives on board, and if there was, they didn't accomplish anything.
The rest of the post is just a stereotypical political rant about Russian bots and Trump. If there's a problem with the culture of Twitter's user base, much of the blame must lie on those with blue checkmarks. It's a toxic community.
Beyond nearly everything else, this sums up my deep concern with Twitter/Trump.
Twitter's operations threw off about a billion in cash for the first nine months of 2019 and 2018 [1].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001...
Jack Dorsey is an honorable, earnest man imo that wants to do the right thing overall. He has all my confidence.
What Galloway is ultimately looking for here is for some views to be allowed and others disallowed. I do not think that is okay on a platform that is as big and pervasive as Twitter (or Facebook). They are, for all intents and purposes, a public digital square. And figuring out what is a "conspiracy" or "junk science" should ultimately be left to the reader, with algorithms otherwise ranking content as neutrally/objectively as possible. After all, we trust Twitter users with the ability to vote.
I think the vast majority of the users would prefer this as well. Just give me a chronological timeline and gtfo.
There's a small extremely vocal minority of users that want to censor any and all thoughts they don't approve of. This group has tons of journalists in it and for one reason or another, Twitter has paid outsized attention to it and let it shape the product and company policy, to nearly everyone's loss, including Twitter.
In fact one of the very best things about Twitter is it gives regular people a way to refute journalists, bad journalism and media agenda. It gave the audience a voice and they use it. "Protect journalists" seems like code for "protect the narrative".
It also gives those same journalists easy to use tools to dunk on people who criticize them, to a huge audience. So you know, swings and roundabouts.
It's a simple competitive issue. Every click that goes to Twitter is one that doesn't go to newyorktimes.com, washingtonpost.com, or (yes) foxnews.com... and it's one that isn't likely to lead to any of those sites, for that matter.
Regardless of their political alignment, journalists have no reason to support disintermediation between news makers and news consumers. It threatens their livelihoods. Say what you will about Trump (just not here, please), but he does understand that much. Twitter is worth a lot to people like him, which I'd think would make it worth a lot to investors as well. Arguably it would have been a better investment for Jeff Bezos than WaPo was.
Heck, just the ability to front-run Tweets by five seconds might be worth a lot on Wall Street.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly...
Twitter could add features until it reaches feature parity with Facebook. But then it's no longer Twitter.
What defines a platform is its feature set. And by changing that you risk changing the platform.
And here is a fine example of how to dribble (via twitter): https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/120241814211214540...
Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.
But your point about Twitter's uniqueness is also valid, and something I hadn't seriously thought of before. Around the time of their IPO, I think the general analyst consensus was that Twitter would not make money and their stock was not a buy. It makes sense because their product is wholly different from the suites offered by Facebook or Google, the companies this article and the commenter compare it to. Perhaps the other stakeholders understood this aspect of Twitter and didn't expect large returns from day 1.
Have you ever used other twitter clients? Why shouldn't the official client have at least some of the features they offer?
Let me ask the HN community! Can anybody here suggest a feature that they would like added to Twitter?
Its like a car, you don't keep pressing the accelerator further and further to travel down the road. You find the optimum location to maintain a safe speed. If something changes, like the road turns, you adjust the accelerator until you are once again safe. If you stayed static, you'd probably fly into a ditch. If you are unnecessarily pumping the pedal, your speed would oscillate unpredictably, and any number of consequences would occur.
Devs like new features a lot more than users do. Users feel disrupted by new features. Users don't open up their favorite app and say "gee whiz,I wonder what new feature there is today". Users don't even think about twitter, they think about tweets,replies,likes and other users. You focus on what matters to users, not what matters to devs and everyone else who does not get the user base.
Imagine feature-creep at their scale! Twitter is the most tolerable mainstream social media network I know of for many reasons -- all centered around their resistance to change and refusal to follow the trends at fb,instagram,snapchat,linkedin,etc...
Repeat with me: you don't need more growth if everyone is happy and you already have a steady and growing profit. You want more growth of course but you don't need it. You focus on what you have and need first then you consider your wants and features...very slowly.
I use them frequently, but Lists are not well-designed at the moment. I can't see if I've already added a user to a list, the "update" is weirdly different from that of the main timeline, there are no aggregations/stats/summaries and AFAIK, there is no interaction with push notifications. They do nothing on the platform to draw anyone's attention to the feature.
But Lists are great! I can pare down my feed to a curated set of users who are all talking about the same thing -- I have an NLP list, and ML list, a "politics" list, etc. I can follow other people's curated lists too. Twitter is huge, it's awesome to have some path to a smaller cohesive community.
It's really weird to me that they would have a feature "above the fold" on the main menu of the platform that seems so dusty and under-utilized. What's the deal? Do they not have enough engineers over there or something?
Twitter would be incredibly hard to supplant at this point.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether Dorsey should be CEO. But I think the author's concerns are more varied and more cogent than your rebuttal would make them seem.
What are your thoughts on Dorsey leading two tech companies at the same time, Twitter's share performance over the past several years, and the political waters Twitter has to navigate?
Jack spends half days at two companies and as such isn’t able to meaningfully administer either. And from that platform he’s going on vacation to Africa for 6 months. The line about the real issue being not that he’s going away but rather that he’s coming back is devastating but not far from the mark.
What a thought bleeder
incidentally these:
> Fake accounts, GRU-sponsored trolls, algorithms that promote conspiracies and junk science
i know they exist and i see them in responses to tweets but i dont follow any of those, and havent seen any of them being followed a lot. they seem like typical harmless spam like the stuff i remove from signups all the time. Twitter is pretty great for me at this time, and i m glad they re not trying to become facebook. there's a reason why facebook can't be the fun , witty platform that twitter is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)
This happened to Yahoo too. They were quite happily tooling along, making profits, building cool stuff, and employing people with remote-work policies, small-biz tools for folks, and what-not. Then along came an activist investor who turned it into a royal shit-show.
He finally convince Verizon to buy it, but man it was a wild ride. I don't know if it made the investors money, but it made a lot of people sad.
Even if I was an inventor that wanted to build one of these things for no personal benefit, until it was profitable (under some business model), it could not sustain without the goodwill of grant-givers or the greed of investors that knew their money would be returned to them under some sort of risk-adjusted time-based return calculation.
In other words - who can afford to do something like this for free? (Now - I am not a fan of Twitter, so if the answer was "no one", it wouldn't hurt my feelings, but I guess some people think that it is important somehow?)
Couldn't/shouldn't Twitter's mission be to distribute 140 characters from one person to many others...what do they need huge revenue and profits for?
Facebook is dying down and being replaced with Instagram. Instagram is littered with ads and doesn't feel irreplaceable.
Google's core product (search engine) is nearly unusable these days thanks to all the ads and the push for e-commerce related results.
Sure, they're profitable. But the products are garbage.
Twitter feels like something that's harder to replace. It feels more like an utility. The core product has changed little over the years and that's why it's good and people keep coming back to it. If someone doesn't ruin it, I wouldn't be surprised if it outlives both Facebook and Google.
I already find the ads annoying. If they add even more, plus a bunch of useless features, and try to censor the discourse on the platform to top it off, it will be the death of twitter.