
Let Twitter Be Twitter - hangars
http://around.com/let-twitter-be-twitter/
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chollida1
The problem with letting Twitter be Twitter is that Twitter took money on the
promise of being something other that just Twitter.

Or to put it in analogy form. You give me $500,000 to buy you a Ferrari and I
give you a Toyota Corolla.

You complain that I haven't held up my end of the bargain and I point out that
the Corolla is a perfectly fine car that can get you from point a to point b
and even has some strengths when compared to the Ferrari, so why are you
complaining?

That's the point Twitter is at right now. They took the money to be something
other than what they are right now. If Twitter wants to be just Twitter,
that's fine, but you'll need to cut their 20 Billion market cap down to
somewhere around a 3-4 Billion market cap, I don't have a model with me right
now.

having said that, Twitter has some good things going for it.

    
    
      - Mobile Advertising numbers are up Year over year
    
      - Data licensing revenue is up
    
      - monthly active users are up
    

IMHO, twitter just needs to shrink in size or find a way to really start
growing revenue.

 __EDIT __to the child comment, you are confusing revenue and earnings. There
is a huge difference between the two:)

~~~
Mimick
$569.2M of earnings on Q3, and you want it to be worth $3-4B?

Why everyone ignoring the financial facts?

I don't like or use Twitter/Vine/Medium. But those guys generate load of money
even that it look like they don't...

~~~
strictnein
Not trying to nitpick, but wasn't it $569.2M of revenue, not earnings? I
believe they lost $132M in Q3.

> "In the third quarter, the company lost $132m, equivalent to 20 cents a
> share."

[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/twitter-
st...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/twitter-stock-drops-
quarterly-results)

~~~
booruguru
> Not trying to nitpick...

It's not nitpicking when correcting a meaningful mistake.

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austenallred
Twitter, in its current state, is a platform for power users.

Twitter is a field you put some stuff in, and that stuff displays to everyone
who follows you. Disregarding scale, the premise is very, very simple.

The difficulty stems from knowing who or what to follow.

It takes a long time to figure out who you want to follow, and Twitter doesn't
have enough information about you to solve the cold start problem. I love
Twitter because I'm constantly pruning my feed (and lists), and it's pretty
great.

My mom joined Twitter, followed who Twitter recommended, got a bunch of
generic PR accounts and celebrities, and doesn't use it anymore. Conversely,
when she joined Facebook all of her friends and family started adding her. Her
feed was now full of the people she loves (the value was already there), and
she learned to become a fully participating user. That's why Facebook has 1.5B
monthly active users ( _holy shit!_ ).

She figured out how to use Facebook because the value was already there. She
doesn't use Twitter because it's not. It's really that simple.

So Twitter goes public saying, "Look, there are all these people using Twitter
already, we can fix this problem _for people_ , then we'll grow way quickly!"
They start curating for you, and it turns out it's not what you want, and no
one cares. Wall Street is pissed that it's not growing quickly enough, and
everyone starts freaking out.

What we're seeing is the freakout. Everyone trying to figure out how to "fix"
Twitter. Everybody coming up with solutions. But no one has figured out the
fundamental problem behind Twitter: You have to put a lot of effort in before
you get any value out. There are only so many people in the world willing to
do that. It will still grow, but it may not be rocketship growth. If you're
private that's OK, but if you're public and you're not growing quickly enough
you're going to get a lot of shit.

~~~
ducuboy
Yes! Twitter requires too much work to be useful!

Sorry for the plug, but this is exactly how
[http://svven.com](http://svven.com) can help. New user tweets a couple of
links - gets other people that tweeted same links - and also the other links
they tweeted. How's this for a solution?

~~~
austenallred
Didn't PG say he wanted something like that?

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ducuboy
Did he?

Well I applied for YC Fellowship and didn't make it. That was a pitty also
given the naming coincidence - "fellowship" is the core concept in Svven.

[http://youtu.be/iQx-e4KPNaE](http://youtu.be/iQx-e4KPNaE)

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bovermyer
This reminds me again of a problem I'm seeing on the Web. Every time a social
network springs up, it seeks to "connect users" and "build communities." And
every time it reaches critical mass, it tries to use its users as a product to
be sold to advertisers. The only exception is Wikipedia, which the author of
this article brings up, but as Wikipedia is more of a collaborative content
platform than a social network I'll just relegate that to a tangential
concern.

Is it not possible to create a social network where the product is the social
network? Perhaps not. App.net attempted this, and wasn't able to generate
enough money to both keep the lights on and pay its employees.

As someone who once founded a company that published game books, I'm acutely
aware of the fact that people are rarely willing to buy content in this age of
free information. So what, then, would make them willing to pay to be a part
of a social network?

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m52go
I don't understand why there can't be a social network that simply charges its
biggest beneficiaries.

That is, make it free for every user until that user reaches a certain level
of influence. That way, you can grow without charging anything and then charge
those who a) value it the most and b) have the money & reason to pay to
sustain their influence.

Why can't Twitter create a pricing model for everyone with over 1m followers?

Why can't Facebook keep its service free for consumers but charge
organizations?

The massive power of huge social followings (organic reach--without ads) is
worth so much but valued at ZERO by social networks. I think it's a huge
missed opportunity that is resulting in diminished value for everyone.

~~~
s73v3r
I don't think there's ever been a social network that has successfully charged
users to use it.

~~~
bmm6o
MetaFilter charges a membership fee, though they rely on ad revenue to keep it
running. And it has to be pointed out that it was pretty close to shutting
down last year (ad revenue was way down).

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roymurdock
Weird thought:

I've seen some people on HN commenting on how the "responsibility" of funding
R&D seems to be shifting (somewhat) from the public to the private sector.
Surely this varies by industry (aerospace and defense is still hugely gov't
funded) but it seems to be an increasing trend in the education, consumer
goods, and healthcare sectors at least.

Twitter is not very profitable, but it is useful. Try to make it profitable w/
ads and dumb changes to a service that was fine without it, and you'll make it
less useful. It's like taking a park and putting billboards on all the trees.

It would be interesting to see some sort of cost/benefit analysis from the gov
perspective on whether or not to subsidize a public service like Twitter. We
must do it for the large public energy companies we subsidize, why not for a
network that (ostensibly) adds value to people's lives in a more abstract sort
of way? If there was a compelling argument for putting our tax money towards
Twitter rather than the DoD/NSA budget, I would at least be interested in
hearing it.

Unless we start to think longer term about investing (50-100 years, not 5-10),
we will be missing out on a ton of great products and services that investors
shoot down with silly short-term monetization schemes.

~~~
s_dev
I'd prefer to see public money go to projects that are more "ethically pure"
than twitter like Wikipedia or a open source projects like Linux or one of the
BSDs. If twitter receives public support we're protecting inefficiency -- it
is already a profitable private company with a strong product -- if they can't
figure out how to make it more relevant to future proof their growth then it
deserves to fail -- another will take its place.

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kylestlb
I definitely understand the fact that it's probably disappointing (?) to
investors, but I'm confused when I hear it's dying. It's THE way to get
realtime news on just about anything. It's my first go-to for sports, news,
politics, even tech. The author hits it on the head; the 'vast confusion' of
the timeline is kind of why I use it (and maybe why others do too).

~~~
ducuboy
not sure that the 'vast confusion' is why people use it..

I think that this confusion is more the reason why adoption and retention are
not that great. Besides this, I think Twitter is the most valuable social
network to date, you just have to hack your way around it to make it useful.

~~~
kylestlb
What I mean is that I don't want it to be organized or filtered, like the
author says. Having just one timeline with everything is nice.

~~~
theseatoms
There's room for both a "raw" feed and a "filtered" feed.

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mrweasel
>The company’s revenue merely doubled last year, to $1.4 billion. Only 300
million people use Twitter every month. Apparently that isn’t enough.

Nope, because there no profit to be found. Twitter is to old a company to not
make any money. Investors either need to stock increase in value or be paid a
dividend, otherwise why invest?

Letting Twitter be Twitter clearly isn't making the investors any money, so of
cause there's going to be suggestions to changes. At this point I think they
should wait to see what Jack Dorsey does to be honest, and the article is
written before he became permanent CEO.

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empressplay
I know this is going to be an unpopular view, but Twitter is a zombie. They've
come, they've gone but they don't seem to know it yet.

It's a case of scaling too far, before your revenue model can catch up with
your size, I think.

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muzmath
It's unpopular because it's blatantly false.

> As of the third quarter of 2015, the microblogging service averaged at 307
> million monthly active users.

A zombie doesn't have 300 million active users.

~~~
maxlamb
MySpace did at one point, and it was indeed a walking dead.

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blakecallens
People forget that Facebook was 8 figures into the black before they even took
a Series A.

The problem with Twitter isn't that they're a social network on par with
Facebook, it's that they're not on par as a business, and never will be.

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jdlyga
Twitter is a fantastic tool for searching. If you want some information that's
immediate or location based, such as if there's a Verizon FiOS outage, or a
parade that you're trying to figure out the theme of (common in NYC), then
Twitter is your go-to resource.

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rconti
"I am 'on' Twitter (odd phrase). I’m not on Facebook; I don’t like the caged
environment, with marketers and algorithms absorbing my information and
distracting people with shiny objects."

I've got bad news for the author....

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codingdave
I don't think the problem is that Twitter needs to re-invent itself or change
what they are. It serves a purpose, some people use it well, and some people
find value in it. Almost everyone who does see that value says exactly the
same thing - curate your own feed, and it becomes a good tool.

But then those same people say it is about teaching everyone else to do it the
same way. But I am not sure that is true. Not everyone wants to see content in
the same way. Just like not everyone read newspapers or watched TV news when
they were dominant, people will have their own preferences. So the assumption
that the market for Twitter is "Everyone on the internet." is flawed.

It seems to me that Twitter has simply reached its market capacity. Their
growth curve has flattened. But they have significant revenue. They need to
stop trying to change the product to grow their market, and start simplifying
their internal processes and decreasing costs. They need to serve their
existing market even better, while spending less money.

If they can do that, then they will move into the black, and start operating
like a non-startup, which is not such a bad thing for a company that has been
around for almost 10 years.

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ballaa
Twitter would do itself and its users much good if it focused on making its
core service work better. Three example areas screaming for improvement:
Search, discovery, and alternatives to timeline-based views

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arbitrage314
Twitter has certainly carved out a nice niche--I love real-time information
from important people, news sources, etc. They will be around for a long time.

Even so, I can't imagine them becoming more profitable any time soon. Still a
short if I had to guess (which I typically try to avoid).

~~~
kuschku
They didn’t really carve out anything – they just took over the niche that was
RSS before.

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theseatoms
Has there been any speculation that they'll roll out a Premium (read, "ad-
free") monthly subscription format?

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golemotron
Maybe Twitter should recharter as a Public Benefit Corporation?

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criddell
Is there a way of doing that without gutting the company defending shareholder
lawsuits?

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falsestprophet
Yeah it doesn't really mean anything. Being a benefit corporation doesn't
obligate the company to do materially reduce profits and in any case the
company can choose to stop being a benefit corporation at any time.

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ducuboy
Besides the "Twitter as a business" discussion..

You guys here on Hacker News don't seem to fancy Twitter so much and I wonder
why..

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ducuboy
Did I say something wrong? Why the down vote here?

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doomspork
Likely because your original comment did not add value to the discussion and
you're asking about downvotes.

Both are mentioned in the Guidelines and FAQ.

~~~
ducuboy
Hey thanks, good to know.

That's true, bad wording from my part, I was just trying to discuss Twitter as
a service rather than Twitter as a business.

