
Jack Dorsey Needs to Step Down - JumpCrisscross
https://www.profgalloway.com/twtr-enough-already
======
itronitron
>> As of 12/6 I am the direct and beneficial owner of approximately 334,000
shares in Twitter.

Well, that's your problem.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Well, 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.

~~~
anaphor
That seems pretty likely to fail. How often does that actually result in
positive gains?

~~~
tguedes
All the time if its a good activist investor, just look up that term.

~~~
jdck1326
Not all of the time. Way too much chance involved. But enough to make a profit
on average.

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hintymad
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?

~~~
robbyt
Don't you think that scaling to handle global growth is a feature?

~~~
giarc
Except twitters DAU has been pretty steady at around 300-315 million since
2015.

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-
monthly...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/282087/number-of-monthly-
active-twitter-users/)

~~~
hintymad
Yeah, and Twitter’s user base has not increased much. Scalability is not
really that much of problem.

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carrozo
Woah. Galloway bought $10m worth of Twitter shares and is demanding Dorsey's
ouster by board!

~~~
paulgb
Roughly 0.04% of the company, for those curious what the math works out to.

~~~
bhupy
It's actually 0.04%.

~~~
buboard
he could build a new twitter for less

~~~
jdck1326
He could set up a twitter clone for almost nothing because there are already
fully working free software alternatives.

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patelh
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.

~~~
georgeecollins
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.

~~~
badrabbit
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.

~~~
_k8si
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?

------
rahuldottech
In case anyone else didn't know who he is:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_\(professor\))

------
WhompingWindows
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?

~~~
ci5er
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?)

~~~
dhimes
They're public. The funders' "payout" ship has sailed. They've also been
profitable this year, according to Yahoo finance.

~~~
ci5er
Yes, now. But I don't know how one would finance the build-out of a public
utility like this.

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throwawaysea
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.

~~~
malvosenior
> _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".

~~~
CamperBob2
_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.

------
rmsaksida
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.

------
bitxbit
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.

~~~
this_user
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.

~~~
sp332
Twitter wasn't profitable two years ago. Eight straight quarters of positive
net income can do wonders for attracting a buyer.

------
paggle
How did this professor get his hands on $10m of Twitter stock?

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_(professor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Galloway_\(professor\))

------
mark_l_watson
I question one of Twitter’s strategy’s: not having a paid plan

There are several web properties that I use and cheerfully pay about $5/month
to support.

I get value from Twitter because I follow some awesome people whose tweets
helps me efficiently keep up with interesting new papers, tech, github repos,
etc.

It baffles me that there is not an option to pay $5/month for an ad-free
premium account.

------
jessaustin
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.

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mherdeg
Whatever happened to Red Envelope? I used to read that name a lot and then it
just kind of vanished.

~~~
ci5er
Hongbao is still huge and getting bigger. AND on Chinese Single's day, Alibabi
did about $30B, which is about 4x the total ecommerce volume in the US.

------
buboard
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.

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adamiscool8
Galloway with his $10M activist position and pedagogic theology forgets the
most important stakeholders in Twitter are the DAU.

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jdkee
Well said but little sympathy for the author.

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robsinatra
Galloway is trying to cash in on his cred from having a pulse and noticing the
huge gaping goatse financial wreckage that is WeWork

What a thought bleeder

------
malvosenior
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.

~~~
josh2600
I’m pretty convinced that any community with a global broadcast layer trends
towards tragedy.

~~~
Nasrudith
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.

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pnathan
> 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.

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ProAm
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.

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m0zg
$10M position in what is essentially the leaking sewer of the Internet? I
thought he was smarter than that.

~~~
onion2k
One of the many sewers, where hundreds of millions of people enjoy swimming.
Imagine if you could clean it up. What would that be worth?

That's Galloway's position.

~~~
m0zg
>> "enjoy"

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.

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TurkishPoptart
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).

~~~
kgraves
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.

~~~
larnmar
Why doesn’t he just serve some nice plain text then?

