
Vine isn’t growing and most of its top executives have left - prostoalex
http://www.recode.net/2016/7/12/12150660/vine-growth-departures-hannah-donovan-app-future
======
niftich
It's such a shame, really; arguably Twitter, much more so than their
competitors, tries to stick as close to the original form of their product as
they can. I admire that.

Facebook (and Instagram) and Snapchat have both transformed from their
original incarnations, in ways that have improved the companies' valuation,
but have not always improved the experience of users. It seems every single
social network is trending towards feature parity with each other -- Facebook
now has streaming video, Snapchat now has a decent text chat with messages
that need not disappear, Instagram has an algorithmic no-longer-timeline wall
and private messaging, they all have ads, even Tumblr now has IM and
livestreaming. Some (important) differences remain, but from an observer time-
travelling forward from 2012, the social networks of today would appear nearly
interchangeable.

But there's Twitter. All these years, it has stayed remarkably close to the
original concept of microblogging. Instead, it developed (or acquired) other
formats and cultivated them as separate services, separate communities. It's
unfortunate that not even wide societal impact can make a service profitable,
or at least quell the pressure to feature-creep outside of your original
scope.

~~~
beagle3
Twitter just doesn't have an idea about where to evolve. They've tried small
changes, and nothing helped their bottom line. Rumors are that part of the
reason is that they are not sure what their "secret sauce" is, so they are
reluctant to change anything in fear of harming it.

Also, they are dying. They have never turned a profit. Facebook or Google or
Microsoft will eventually buy them, because of the users - but they have so
far given no indication they can survive independently. And they have had a
few billion dollars in funding and ten years to give that indication.

~~~
niftich
Twitter (the service, not the company's) secret sauce is:

You can have a public platform, using an identity you choose for yourself, to
broadcast snippets of information.

Where do you evolve this? Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium,
they're all in this same space, except they focus on traditional, long-form
content. I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's
okay). I see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.

But _if_ you see Twitter as a social network, you're subject to a different
set of pressures than a blogging platform.

Also, Twitter holds no value to FB, Google, MS, or Yahoo. They all have
subsumed parts of its core functionality into their offerings. If they ever
get acquired, it's by some 'outsider' that wants to enter this space, like
Verizon or Yandex.

~~~
valgaze
>> I don't see Twitter as a social network (although many do, that's okay). I
see it as a broadcast medium, a soapbox, a blogging platform.

A few years back Peter Kafka wrote an article [1] about how joe/joan-shmoe
twitter user will probably never have their tweets read by anybody at all. It
was astonishingly small number of folks who broke 500 followers (writing 3/4
years ago)

ex. “The median Twitter account has a single follower. Among the much smaller
subset of accounts that have posted in the last 30 days, the median account
has just 61 followers.”

It is from a few years ago, maybe things have changed but if that's the
experience of the average person why invest time in it?

[1] [http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-
your...](http://allthingsd.com/20131223/almost-no-one-is-reading-your-tweets/)

~~~
warcher
This is such an important point, lost in the punditry.

Twitter gets a lot of love from journalists and people with a profile, who
write the articles about twitter and control public perception. They have an
interest in maintaining a personal brand and have enough visibility that
Twitter works for them.

If you listened to those people, Twitter's biggest problem would be trolls
writing mean (and often abusive) tweets about them.

Most twitterers would be lucky to be threatened with the rape and murder of
their families, frankly.

Which is why Twitter is dying-- there are so, so, so many news curation and
aggregation sources. Twitter isn't even _all that_ good, frankly. Reddit does
the job way better. (Still a lot of folks that want to fuck my mom though.)

As a social network, it's crap, has been crap and likely will remain crap. The
time-based feed tends towards livelock from professional content producers.
Their curation mostly suggests people I can follow who would generally prefer
I do not engage with them beyond promotion of their brands and gentle
applause.

~~~
fao_
Twitter is better than Reddit because it is decentralizes the information from
single, topic-related feeds people can post to, to one feed per person that
you can subscribe to. This makes it much faster and more convenient than
Reddit for getting status posts on things you like, i.e. an independent game
developer's latest WIP.

Some people have split accounts that you can choose to follow to receive
different kind of status updates from them, so an example of this is a person
with a 'oh look this interesting thing happened in my life' account, and a
separate account for 'oh jeez I'm really angry and need to vent about this to
a subset of people I know in relative privacy'. Because of the nature of
twitter it feels easier to throw away or make lots of accounts than, say,
facebok.

The real connection comes not when you follow celebrities, but when you're a
creator (Or a budding creator), and you interact with other people who are
creating things for support or advice; or you have an interest in what your
friends are posting and doing, and like viewing their traveling posts and
their reactions to things. If you have those sorts of relationships twitter
helps facilitate them extremely well, and if you don't, or the people you
interact with in that way don't use twitter, then it won't have that value for
you.

~~~
warcher
I suppose all I can say to that is, I do not believe this level of
gamesmanship to extract Twitter's value proposition is going to work out. I
think they're asking too much of their users, and if they can't figure it out,
they're gonna fail.

------
pxlpshr
The founders departed very early after the acquisition, like Rus and Dom. None
of the 'top executives' were ever the original visionaries that created the
product to begin with.

It's sort of shocking that after Jack left but hailed back to save Twitter,
that the board didn't have more wherewithal to retain the founding team of
Vine. Textbook post-acquisition problem.

I agree with other commenters that they should integrate Vine into Twitter.
Like Instagram and video (or Facebook and Facebook Live), there's really no
reason for it to be separate. Twitter needs better content generation tools at
it's core. It's really starting to feel like a washed up RSS aggregator and
nothing more.

~~~
intoverflow2
> they should integrate Vine into Twitter

Twitter already does video better than vine though, whats the point?

~~~
pxlpshr
I guess you made my point. I care very little about Twitter now because their
2016 innovation was turning a star into a heart.

------
imsofuture
That thing every time a 'startup' that never actually had a monetizable
product makes headlines for not doing super awesome.

~~~
matt_wulfeck
Twitter's firehose is extremely valuable data, just not at the lofty
valuations the company was given.

~~~
dkarapetyan
What exactly is valuable about it? I keep hearing this but it is just a jumble
of collective stream of consciousness. Has anyone that has read Ulysses
actually made any sense of it? Twitter is the collective analog of Ulysses.

~~~
spydum
It can be pretty useful for sentiment analysis across large populations - for
a lot of different purposes/clients

~~~
JonnieCache
Do we have sentiment analysis techniques that actually work now? Last I
checked they weren't so great.

~~~
VLM
It is insightful to point out the widely held belief that Google Reader would
never be cancelled because its an incredibly tightly curated data set of what
real humans actively seek out and hard working devoted humans actively
filtered the wheat from the chaff. All for free, for google to monetize.

Everyone knows, that everyone knows, that its a very valuable dataset. But
nobody is apparently interested in paying for it or otherwise monetizing it.
Shades of "emperor has no clothes". The end result is Google Reader got
cancelled.

If twitter was not standalone and was a mere subproject of a real company, it
would likewise be long gone. They have no plan B so they'll have to keep doing
what they're doing until they run out of money or are purchased, pretty much a
Yahoo situation. Its like a decades old portapottie at a concert venue,
everyone goes there does not mean its worth anything to anyone.

It would be a nice, cool world to live in where sentiment analysis is a thing.
Its such an obvious and tasty idea, that unfortunately is completely wrong.

------
julianz
How on earth does Vine need all those people with inflated job titles to
deliver tiny videos over the internet?

~~~
timcederman
This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the
size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running
something at the scale of Vine, 50 people makes a lot of sense, and if
anything that seems somewhat lean.

~~~
PeCaN
You still didn't explain _why_ they need that many people.

What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes,
they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require
a large staff to manage.

~~~
timcederman
I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people, and for
folks who work in the industry this should seem like a reasonable number just
from their own experience.

However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I
would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough
ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data
science, head of BD, editorial lead, and head of engineering who all just
left. We're up to 26 people already. Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a
recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data
science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over
40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, help centre and
customer support, a DBA, ops, or IT support.

Does that all make sense now? It's a company within Twitter and there are a
lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a
month running smoothly. I'm not then going to go into what each person does
each day, but with a product that you're trying to drive growth and new
features for, while supporting existing customers, and just generally running
a company, that takes a lot of bodies if you want to do it effectively and not
cut corners.

~~~
PeCaN
> I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people

Good thing I didn't ask you to.

> It says they had 3 product managers

Seems like a lot of product managers for a company with one product which
isn't especially complicated. Smells like a sign of hiring really fast to try
to grow.

> I would guess this means 8-10 engineers

The fuck do they even do? You don't need that many people to make something
like Vine. Unless I'm missing something and there's more to the service than
the video-related social CRUD app?

> You've then got a [bunch of dept heads]

Eh, I can see those I guess.

> Now we've got […snip handwaving about team sizes and numbers…] over 40
> people easily.

OK.

> help centre and customer support

Yeah pretty sure Vine doesn't have a custom support team.

> ops [and] IT support

If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I
suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's
not a whole lot of staff there.

> Does that all make sense now?

No.

> there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million
> active users a month running smoothly

I think it takes more people to work out a revenue model for Vine than to
sustain 25-30 million active users.

\---

Basically, bullshit. In Vine's case, you really don't need a big engineering
team, which means you don't need a lot of people to manage your engineering
team. I find it much more likely that Vine hired a bunch of people (engineers
and otherwise) with VC money when they were growing fast.

~~~
timcederman
If you think you can come run a team more leanly and successfully, I invite
you to come do it - clearly, if there is a market inefficiency here you could
reap the rewards.

~~~
bmon
This kind of reply isn't really that constructive, the guy raised some fair
points... A lot of smaller companies and startups seem to do incredibly well
with not even 10 employees, let alone 50. I understand there's more to running
a company than meets the eye, but I really do wonder if all 50 people spend
their days at vine being productive.

~~~
somebehemoth
Please name a company of 10 people that manages a user base in the tens of
millions with similar technical requirements as Vine (bandwidth, storage,
etc). If such a company exists I believe it would be an outlier.

------
dkarapetyan
I've seen this cycle a few times now. Just give it a merciful death (vine and
twitter). Some things are meant to be ephemeral. I think vine and twitter are
in that category. Just like a forest needs fires to be a healthy ecosystem.
People should be more willing to let go of business ideas that see explosive
growth but lack the business fundamentals to be sustainable.

Instead what's gonna happen is that it is going to be a slow and steady march
of attrition until only the husk is left and people just feel sad every time
either twitter and vine are mentioned.

~~~
ajmurmann
As a Twitter user I wouldn't like to see that happen. What other platform do
you suggest I use instead?

~~~
niftich
Most power users who command an engaged audience ('influencers' or 'VIPs' or
'celebrities' or 'streamers' or insert-your-noun-here) already cross-post on
every single service. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr,
Twitch...

Staying exclusive to a particular platform only pays if the platform literally
pays you for your content. Otherwise you want to reach as wide of an audience
as possible.

~~~
ajmurmann
I'm certainly not a power user. I mainly use Twitter to keep up with friends
and acquaintances in the tech community. None of the other platforms seem
appropriate for that.

~~~
niftich
Tumblr is another blog/social hybrid, but in your particular case you're
subject to network effect (or the lack thereof) in your community of interest.
Also, Tumblr is similarly faltering in engagement and owned by a corporate
parent that is trying to leverage it as part of a wider strategy to turn its
fortunes around.

------
ohitsdom
I loved Vine, it's a really interesting medium/format. But the userbase killed
it for me. Young teenagers posting stupid clips with music edits about some
boy band, TV show, or anime. I'm not interested in any of that. I liked the
artsy clips, sports highlights, and comedy but it became increasingly
difficult to find when using the app. I felt like an old man being somewhere
he didn't belong. I still enjoy a funny Vine now and then, but I only see it
when it pops up on my Twitter feed.

------
stephenyeargin
I knew things were getting bad when I got like three push notifications in a
week to pretty please open the app to see what my friends were not posting
anymore.

------
knowaveragejoe
Makes sense, Instagram has essentially beat them at their own game.

~~~
beedogs
What game is that? "Collecting zero revenue until you're somehow bought by
Facebook"?

~~~
awad
Well, despite the fact that both companies were acquired by larger social
companies...

"Instagram will surpass Google, Twitter in US mobile display ad revenues by
2017" [http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Instagram-Mobile-Ad-
Revenue...](http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Instagram-Mobile-Ad-Revenues-
Reach-281-Billion-Worldwide-2017/1012774#sthash.hhuGqYyb.dpuf)

------
fernandosoteras
A "6-seconds video" app had organigram with executives? really?

~~~
draw_down
"Why is 140 characters worth billions?" Et cetera, et cetera, as nauseam

------
chejazi
The part that has impressed me about Twitter/Vine/etc over the past few years
is their content embeds in other sites/services. Their main apps are so
riddled with junk that I hardly use them. The real estate in their feeds
devotes more to ad space than micro-blogging, and everyone knows that
followers (/follow-for-followers) are a marketing cesspool.

Twitter et al. should really become the _blockquote_ service for the internet.

------
ceejayoz
I have no idea why it wasn't just a minor product feature in the main Twitter
app.

~~~
dasil003
Because it had the potential to create a community around it. If they just
wanted the feature they could easily have built it into Twitter for less than
$30M. What made Vine work is the same thing that made Instagram work: a killer
app. If Viners had to compete with everyone else on Twitter their work would
have been too diluted to get traction, and you wouldn't have seen the same
creativity and commitment.

~~~
philsnow
Critically, the vine community is a younger demographic. Maybe Twitter wanted
to keep them separate because they didn't want an eternal September killing
the "bird in the hand" Twitter community.

~~~
Kadin
That Vine's userbase consisted largely of younger people probably should have
given Twitter pause, and in retrospect might have made them rethink that $30M
valuation. Those are the same users who are most likely to drop your service
overnight when it becomes uncool, for reasons that may never be clear or make
sense. (See also: Myspace.)

------
qwertyuiop924
Thank god. While vine may have some significance, it's a wasteland of content,
full of stupid crap, and unfunny memes that even /b/ would hate. I think that
Thomas Sanders is one of the very few people on Vine actually producing
interesting content. And most things on vine could be recreated as gifs with
subtitles without missing much.

------
kevindeasis
I've seen people moving to different platforms. There seems to be always a
platform replacing another platform. I have yet to see this with Facebook. It
seems like the new Google Hangouts and their new messaging app (allo?) might
be in the radar. But, at this point is it even possible to have a facebook
replacement withing the next 3 years?

------
intruder
Such a shame, I love Vine. Integrating it into the twitter feed just means
videos will not be seen as they have to compete with all the other stuff
that's taking space on your feed.

------
partycoder
i think snapchat covers pretty much the same demographic and the product has a
lot of overlap.

------
BilalBudhani
Instead of launching Vine a 6 seconds micro vlogging service. Twitter should
have integrated that as a feature in their own app. That would have made so
much sense. Every social media company for e.g SnapChat, Facebook etc. are
closely integrating video content within the core of their app and Twitter had
a huge opportunity and the managed to below it away.

------
jfranken
Vine is the least of twitter's problem

------
abrongersma
The content creators are running for the hills. Almost all of the popular
folks I followed no longer post content on a regular basis. It's usually
posted as an afterthought. I really enjoyed the comedy section and the time
constraints on the video length was great to show off creativity.

------
abpavel
The key to scaling video content is automatic production, like Wochit, not
shortened duration, like Vine.

------
ilaksh
Why would you need multiple executives to handle a business that is mainly
silly 6-second video clips and could never be more than that without changing
the name in which case it becomes an unknown brand?

What do top executives do for these types of companies. It seems like a joke.

------
decayy
Twitter should just combine all of their video apps into the main twitter app.

------
joelrunyon
Does vine load terribly for anyone else? Always amazed that it's considered a
"production-ready" level product when ti doesn't even play videos consistently
across multiple sites.

------
clw8
I'm not surprised. Using livestream apps (or in Vine's case short videos) I've
noticed that broadcasters are incredibly addicted for a month or so, and then
they disappear forever.

------
hackaflocka
Twitter is very very broken.

"Retweet with Comment" are not showing up as Retweets:
[https://medium.com/@Maver1ck/is-twitter-unreasonably-
broken-...](https://medium.com/@Maver1ck/is-twitter-unreasonably-
broken-9ff4df0b93a8#.7n3zl9vd9)

