
Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion - burritofanatic
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/technology/twitter-expected-to-begin-layoffs-and-stop-headquarters-expansion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
======
amix
I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people
powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different
platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system
works very well.

I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day
long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

~~~
petercooper
I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is _very_
different.

Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it.
Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost
always one-to-very-many.

If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000
messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each
are likely to result in 10000-20000 messages (sometimes people have group
conversations).

~~~
x1024
Perhaps _that_ is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits...
scales?

If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody _really_ has 40 000
friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by
advertising companies?

~~~
petercooper
I don't think the final question is realistic. I have 20K followers (not huge,
but far beyond who I could realistically ever "know") and get huge value from
it as an individual, not as a business. It would be so boring (to me) to only
be able to talk to people one knows closely.

There are numerous non-company non-celebs-in-the-Hollywood-sense-of-the-word
people who have huge followings on Twitter who get a lot of value from that
and who their followers also appreciate: people like DHH, John Carmack, Marco,
Sam Altman, Scoble..

There is a definite space between "people you know personally" and "blast ads
to 2 million customers" in social and Twitter fills it really well.

~~~
jalfresi
Soooo... RSS? Isn't that what you've just described? You could run that on a
pretty small web server....

~~~
mnutt
Scale RSS up to Twitter's size, interleave a user's subscribed feeds together,
centralize it, and you have Twitter's scaling challenges.

~~~
dllthomas
_" centralize it"_

So... don't?

------
TheBlueDot
Well, there goes my weekend/week.

As someone who joined Twitter recently this sucks. I left a great job to come
work at Twitter because I believe in what they're building and now a few
months in I might be looking again. :-(

To be fair, the first week I was asking myself what all of these people do. I
wish the company had been more transparent with this but I understand why they
can't start telling people there will be layoffs, people panic and worry like
all 4000+ employees are doing now.

Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will
see it. :-/

~~~
scottu
Is there enough demand in the San Francisco area to absorb say 20% of Twitter
employees? It always feels like everyone is hiring out there.

~~~
rconti
Absolutely. And _if_ this is a sign of a few unicorns starting to drop, you're
better off being one of the first ones to go than the last.

This is probably a very wise move. _4000_ employees is just insane for what
they do. Grow wisely.

~~~
jedc
> 4000 employees is just insane for what they do.

Yes and no. Twitter will make ~$2 Billion in revenue this year (and it's their
massive revenue growth that's kept the stock price where it's at). That takes
a LOT of sales and marketing people to achieve.

------
calcsam
This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What _is_ out of the ordinary
is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading.

Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature
companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market
situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop
assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adjust expectations accordingly --
usually resulting in a significant drop in stock price.

Remember, back in July, Twitter announced earnings beating market estimates.
This was at 4pm, its stock surged 4%. About half an hour later, CFO Anthony
Noto said Twitter would not see "sustained, meaningful" user growth for a
"considerable period of time." TWTR promptly plunged 10%.

[http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-
per-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-per-share-vs-
expected-eps-of-4-cents.html)

~~~
rdtsc
> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction?

But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for
a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people
that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to
use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising).

Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search,
calendar, docs, photo storage, directions + many other things I forgot about).

Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very
cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was
in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.

~~~
jacobwcarlson
> Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is
> very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as
> it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool.

I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a
bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians,
dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchists all interact.
Its a place of record quoted in headline news briefs and long-form journalism.
It is used to organize rebellion and restricting access to it is viewed by
many as a human rights violation.

Twitter as a business has problems, but being a fad isn't one of them.

~~~
exstudent2
They no longer allow sign ups via Tor, so I don't think it's as dissident
friendly as it used to be.

~~~
mschuster91
That's more due to stupid retards abusing tor for spamming... with tor you
have to draw the line somewhere.

------
Tinyyy
There's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product". I
think an exception is " or they're just not making any money".

~~~
beagle3
Note that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be
tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay
or not.

Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing
you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole
new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream.

Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been
showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.

~~~
eggie
And now, thanks to the hobby of one developer, my phone blocks ads in
/etc/hosts, preventing even in-app ads from appearing. My web browser on my
laptop does just as well with a plugin.

All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to
maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at
the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope
they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.

The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work
and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can
stand up against the bullshit.

> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been
> showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.

The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just
as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and _still_
get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that
we decide to.

Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac
disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research
papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing
ourselves to psychological bombardment.

~~~
woah
How do you block in app adds?

~~~
Renevith
Most apps use 3rd-party libraries and servers to show those ads, so they can
be blocked at the network connection level (e.g. the hosts file) if you have
control over your phone's OS. Having Android helps with that.

The apps need to handle it gracefully because they can't tell whether the ad
server is legitimately down or just blocked. I've never had an app work any
worse with blocked ads.

------
nosuchthing
"Moments" tab gives a good indication that Twitter has no idea where to go and
is the sum of boring meetings with marketing consultants.

Twitter had potential, but it appears stagnate as all they've done is created
a new version of an AOL instant messenger chatroom with hashtags and 128char
limit. Limiting the API tokens for 3rd party developers was a really foolish
move.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Completely agree. "Moments" just has that damn indicator showing stuff is
unread on it and it drives me nuts but NOTHING is EVER relevant to any of my
interests or even the people I follow. I don't even understand what the point
of it is; shouldn't it just be displaying things it thinks I want to look at?
At least that makes the most sense to me...

Oh well, I don't think Twitter is going away any time soon but I don't really
understand some of the steps they've been taking...and 4,100 employees? Yikes!

~~~
volaski
it's because you're not their target. Their goal with these features is not to
retain existing users but to acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used
Twitter.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> it's because you're not their target

Fair enough. That probably goes for almost everyone on HN as well I would
think but obviously we're an edge case.

> Their goal with these features is not to retain existing users but to
> acquire ones who wouldn't have otherwise used Twitter.

Hmm, how would this attract new folks? Like Facebook tries to show you things
you care about but this I'm not sure how it's really sold to perspective
users. Since it's a social network I'm guessing much will be word of mouth but
that requires support from existing users.

I wonder if things like increasing the character amount and offering a better,
maybe threaded conversational way of interacting with folks would bring in
more people. Granted those may not be the best choices philosophically but I
wonder if they've done any A/B testing where certain areas got different
features like more character counts and how it turned out.

------
beefman
This sort of thing can happen when society insists on building multi-billion-
dollar businesses around stuff that should have been an RFC.

On the plus side, shorting TWTR has been rewarding. Won't be doing it any more
with a founder at the helm, of course.

------
swingbridge
A sad day for Twitter, but a dose of reality for a lot of the fluffiness in
the market at the moment.

Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a
valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and
ultimately this is what happens.

~~~
wyclif
Yes, it's sad for employees being let go, but it's good news for Twitter. I
don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of
people think of it as a branch of the internet. By cutting surgically
(removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jack might very well be able to
bring some fighting spirit back.

~~~
hugh4
>I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of
people think of it as a branch of the internet.

It's not going anywhere in the next year or two. But in five years? Ten years?

Twitter's main problem is that it has one product, and it's possible to get
bored with that product. It's not really possible to get bored of googling
things or buying things off amazon, but it's entirely possible to get bored of
twitter.

Remember when every man and his dog had a blog? (Or possibly a livejournal?)
Remember when the word "blogosphere" was all over the news? What happened to
all the blogs?

~~~
rtpg
That analogy doesn't hold up as well to tools. I mean we're still using E-mail
right? Twitter is basically a format in its own right at this point

~~~
imron
No it's not, and unlike email, it's a proprietary system under the control of
a single company.

~~~
Axsuul
A format like Twitter requires major infrastructure to work well so being
under one company makes complete and necessary sense. This doesn't detract
from the fact that it's become a format that a lot of the Internet now depends
on for communication and news. Simply saying "no, it's not" doesn't prove
anything.

------
simonswords82
Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble
and some big changes need to be made.

Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously
showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the
incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what
they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that
provides value.

Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who
love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their
stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion
that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in
Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and
Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting
information.

If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and
new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.

~~~
eggie
I find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN
usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no
way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is
permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party
interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a
solution to this.

~~~
PuffinBlue
You're right and by extension you have to put together a search in order to
see exactly what someone has tweeted to someone else, by which I mean you have
to pro-actively search in order to truly follow someone.

For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was
saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that
without doing a search for their username.

Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is
virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no
quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them.

This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to
actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know
what you want to see.

They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and
take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from
the constant stream of data.

------
lolive
I used to be a Google Reader/Google Buzz addict. And was interacting with a
very living community through those tools. I now use twitter as my exclusive
medium for both mainstream and "niche" news. I appreciate the wide
availability of content, but still think they are much too conservative with
their user experience. The inability to browse tweets by topic is sometimes a
pain. The inability to connect with the right people and build a discussion
about topics you discover and find interesting. Basically twitter should have
a chatroom. And propose you conversations about (your) trending topics.

~~~
toomuchtodo
So a more public/global Slack with recommendations and intelligently
aggregating channels by hash tag?

~~~
LoSboccacc
the limitation of which is that most content on a user stream is pulled
passively by the users or is a paid advertisement.

as a discovery/exploration tool sucks.

if it had interesting suggestion based on hashtags and followers beyond
'follow this three more person' daily mail it could be a nice networking/news
tool, but so far it cannot really help me navigate in the millions streams
that might be interesting but are accessible only knowing that exact hashtag

I followed a couple news outlet, I guess there are many more that may interest
me but I can't be assed to search them and if I discover them myself they go
by preference into feedly, not twitter.

on the other hand, it had been great to follow this and that indie game
developer :D

------
mvc
Has someone told their recruiting team? My twitter feed today was about 30%
"join the flock" tweets.

~~~
twistedpair
I got an email from a Twtr recruiter two days ago and now am trying to word my
polite reply that now doesn't look like the best time to be quitting a good
job to join a company that's in the middle of layoffs. I guess they didn't get
the word.

------
mrmondo
I see this as a good sign (other than for those laid off of course), Twitter
is fantastic but they don't need half as many people as they currently employ
for their product. As companies get larger their agility and ability to change
decreases. What's important is if they're laying off the right people.

------
3dfan
Is it true that they will - to further cut down costs - also limit the number
of characters per tweet to 72?

------
1dayitwillmake
...I heard they're gonna fire 140 characters

------
DrFunke
Oh god. My roommate was literally offered a position at their Boulder office
last week. I wonder how systemic cuts will be?

------
allsystemsgo
I'm sad for my friends at Twitter but, this shouldn't come as much of a
surprise.

~~~
gcampos
Is indeed sad for the people that are let go, but at least the market is hot
and they will probably find new jobs soon.

~~~
muzz
That is true if the layoff is specific to Twitter and not a harbinger of a
general downturn

~~~
thrownaway2424
There is another bloated company with an unclear growth story right across the
street from Twitter, and it happens share same CEO. How long can Square keep
up its act?

~~~
kkhire
What makes you say that? Last I saw they had great revenue/were filing for
IPO. Just wondering.

~~~
beagle3
Twitter has great revenue too. It's the profit that's problematic.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Profit is not a problem as long as you have growth. Twitter doesn't have that,
and neither does Square.

------
lkrubner
When Twitter got going, RSS was marred by political infighting:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-
damaged-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by-
in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it)

And that is part of the reason why walled-gardens like Twitter sometimes do
well. Sometimes open technologies are crippled by politics. Sometimes
centralized decision making is faster, and can get more innovative stuff out
the door. It took many years for specifications like Atom to mature. Meanwhile
Twitter developed a huge eco-system of 3rd party apps.

But there is a counter-argument. Twitter later killed off much of the eco-
system of 3rd party apps. And that suggests the weakness of central decision
making. No one has the authority to kill RSS. And that suggests the strength
of decentralized decision making.

But it seems clear, when an idea is young and immature, centralized decision
making often has a speed advantage over what committees the industry sets up
to try to work out a specification.

~~~
thom
Twitter may be worse for developers (more's the pity, I was at Chirp in 2010),
but it's a vastly better platform in terms of content discovery, curation and
consumption. I fail to see how any amount of cohesion from the RSS community
could have overcome that, even in a world of simple, ubiquitous pub-sub, or
whatever ideal one might imagine for syndication technology. I'd be really
happy to hear how that battle could have been won, though.

~~~
lkrubner
Content discovery and curation for RSS were the issues that startups like
Technorati focused on. Their failures were partly failures of management. My
startup wanted to build its business using Technorati data, circa 2006, but
their sales strategy was bizarre. The API was supposedly pay-for-use, and I
was happy to pay, but instead of offering an automated system for creating an
api account, they asked that you write to their sales team. I wrote to their
sales team at least a dozen times, and I tracked down the personal email
address of the CEO, but no one ever responded to me. I was convinced then that
they could have made a lot of money if they had made it easier for developers
like me to give them money. But they made it impossible. And now it seems they
gave up on RSS aggregation. They seem to be in a different business now:

[http://technorati.com/](http://technorati.com/)

~~~
thom
Ha, similar stories - I'm aware of Technorati, they really should have been
the firehose of their day (I guess Wordpress.com is the closest thing now). I
was building a feed reader that would cluster conversations around the
blogosphere so you'd get a better sense of the daily zeitgeist than just
following quotes or trackbacks. Which brings me to the more direct comparison
- comments and trackbacks to replies and retweets. Finding new content
branching from what you're already reading, and frankly the experience was
just clunky and terrible compared to Twitter. And that's assuming you've even
_found_ a feed reader and subscribed to some feeds. And even if _that_ was
easy, where are you yourself publishing? Every task was harder, and only
Tumblr has really come close to replicating Twitter's level of integration on
a blog-like platform.

Tons of Twitter's best features were stumbled upon by accident, but a lot of
their decisions, especially around limiting third-party clients, were
justified in their minds by their user testing that showed just how confusing
it was to locate and install a useful Twitter client and sign up for an
account. The control they had allowed them to reduce friction to nearly zero.
For anyone like Technorati to replicate that with open standards, they would
have just exercised the same level of ownership.

This is all a shame, I'm sure there's some alternative universe in which
longform content has been saved from invasive advertising by a frictionless,
open system. And I certainly don't think Twitter is going to come up with a
particularly interesting or successful business model. But I open my Twitter
app more than my feed reader, and I think I'm happier for it.

------
pmontra
Non paywalled article at [http://recode.net/2015/10/09/twitter-is-planning-
company-wid...](http://recode.net/2015/10/09/twitter-is-planning-company-wide-
layoffs-for-next-week/)

------
antirez
So it is possible the ceo switch happened now since the board was willing to
reduce company size, instead of the other way around? I can imagine markets to
take it better if this appears to be the first wise move of a very capable
ceo.

------
werber
I don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or
is it super niche now?

~~~
stephengoodwin
Considering Twitter is still the first go-to social platform for reactions to
news, I doubt it.

Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use
Twitter.

~~~
werber
Do you get mostly opinions and reactions on Twitter or 140char reporting on
breaking stories? I tried using it to follow the Arab spring and just
couldn't.

~~~
xienze
Wish I could find it, but a couple weeks ago I saw someone posting a 20-ish
part message on Twitter. At some point you've gotta think maybe this isn't the
appropriate way to use the service.

~~~
servercobra
@pmarca is famous for his multipart "tweet storms". Lots of others have
followed suit (not sure if he started the trend, but was the first one I saw
doing it).

------
tajano
I predicted Twitter would be the next unicorn to cut staff and offices ten
days ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002)).
To be honest, I didn't think it would happen quite this fast.

But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a
rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But
rapid growth is over.

~~~
twistedpair
But how many engineers if they were still on Ruby? Perhaps they can drop Scala
for Erlang and get down to 100 engineers?

------
iamleppert
Honestly, this is really bad news for Twitter. A tech company is all about
finding and retaining top technical talent. That's what enables you to "build
fast teams that learn even faster".

As far as I'm concerned, I would not want to go to work for Twitter. Whenever
I hear about layoffs, I think of mismanagement. When the managers have run the
ship aground to the extent that capable engineers that were hired to build
product are now going to loose their jobs, there have been some huge errors
and missteps. Getting back from that is going to be very difficult, and
imagine now trying to attract technical talent to a company that has just cut
technical staff; the best and brightest are going to have better options so
Twitter is going to be at a disadvantage in the general labor market. This
means they will have a harder time finding people, keeping people, staffing
projects. And they will have a harder time completing the projects they do
have and with enough speed, creativity and quality to compete against startups
and other companies with more agility, motivation and access to better
workers.

~~~
loceng
When the creators of Bootstrap framework left Twitter, I took that as a bad
sign. Creative people easily get bored and need to challenges.

With Jack coming back as CEO, I don't necessarily agree with layoffs overall
being bad. He could have a solid plan and reorganizing and prune workers who
perhaps have atrophy from lack of excitement or whatnot can be healthy - even
though surely disappointing and upsetting to some.

------
anjc
I wonder if this will have an effect on private equity for startups
immediately, and have an effect on what some see as a VC bubble. Twitter was
often hailed as an example of a company that didn't need - not just profit -
even a monetisation strategy, because growth! Ads! User data! You're the
product! It's becoming more obvious that this may be a hollow way to speculate
about returns.

------
whitenoice
Genuine question - why do recruiters hire new people when the company is
laying off?

~~~
tikhonj
They don't always, but I can think of a few reasons why they would:

\- they're hiring for different specialties and departments than what's being
cut

\- at least in theory, they're hiring people who would be above-average
workers while laying off those below average

\- they still need to compensate for normal churn, which is probably
exacerbated by the layoffs

\- they can try giving new candidates weaker compensation to save costs

Ultimately, workers are not fungible and it requires active effort to maintain
a team as people come and go. This doesn't change during layoffs.

~~~
finance-geek
This is a good list. Two more reasons: \- Corporations are inefficient,
sometimes the HR department is not even aware layoffs are coming \-
Corporations are sometimes unethical, they don't care about the unfairness of
hiring a new worker rather than trying to re-place a worker about to be laid
off

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
One more reason - new hires can be cheaper.

Or can appear cheaper to bean counters, at least.

------
irascible
Oh.. Twitter who lobbied the crooked mayor of SF, Ed Lee, to kick the Chess
Players out of Market and Powell?

HOW THE WORM TURNS.

~~~
kelseydh
They kicked chess players out of Market and Powell? As a chess fan this
interests me. Please link me to more info.

------
pinaceae
finally.

completely incomprehensible why they needed such a large headcount. ten times
more than whatsapp would be ok - but not this behemoth.

all these designers do what exactly? ignore ipads, macs, etc.

i love twitter, use it constantly to follow journalists, vcs, basically to get
faster news than any site. i hope twitter can be cut back to the bone.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted; their head count was absolutely
insane. Yes Twitter has some insane needs for scaling but 4,100 employees for
a 140 character service with some basic ads? Absolutely far too many.

~~~
biggest_lou
Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much,
much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed
computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle,
Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount
may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.

~~~
beagle3
Those 4,100 people are not just facebooking all day. The question isn't
whether they produced anything - it's whether it is actually needed to run
twitter. And personally, I believe the answer is "not really".

As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing
Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools)
instead of doing Pants.

If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome.
But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L
summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in
recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".

------
hlfcoding
That's truly surprising. I don't recall Facebook ever resorting to layoffs?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Yet.

~~~
addicted
Facebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook,
Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and
has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion
user mark.

And they are already reporting profits.

I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Nothing lasts forever in tech. How will they monetize Instagram and WhatsApp?
Don't show me users. Show me _profits_ from those users if you want to count
them.

~~~
kelseydh
If you think profits are still the driving force of what matters, then you
will never build an Instagram or WhatsApp at the exit values they achieved.

This sounds like 90's bubble talk, but "eyeballs" do matter. Investors and the
market care about the current social value of a product in terms of the value
/ growth of their user base.

Ask many millenials/teens and they say they more meaningfully interact with
Instagram than Facebook. That fact about social trends is worth its weight in
gold in terms of its user base.

~~~
i386
That is the exact cargo cult bullshit thinking that got Twitter and many other
companies into this situation in the first place.

~~~
kelseydh
Was Google cargo culting by turning down efforts by its early investors to
have them show banner ads like Yahoo?

Their willingness to hold off for many many years without revenue was now
brilliant in hindsight, given they found a much better way to make money on
advertising than how Yahoo ever imagined it. But they wouldn't have got there
if they caved into short-term thinking obsessed investors who think you need
to post immediate revenue.

Twitter's issues are more to do with a lack of product innovation or
evolution, not that it has gotten too large. Its problem is that it has gotten
too large without expanding its product base to support or justify that
growth.

------
meeper16
In the public markets, you announce your bad news after the market closes on a
Friday. If this were good news, it would have been announced on a Monday,
Tuesday or Wenesday and before the market opens.

------
csense
> costs and expenses totaled $633 million

WTF do they spend that much money on?

------
dghughes
> A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

That made me giggle. Their entire existence is communication.

~~~
nyolfen
i wonder if you think there is another kind of existence?

~~~
dghughes
OK then "the Twitter Corp. business model" to be more accommodating to the
pedant.

------
andhofmt
I'm surprised it took so long. Hopefully the other social-networking giants
follow suite and we start getting more companies that have actual sustainable
business models.

------
ilaksh
Its not about Twitter. The whole economy is shrinking because people have
taken the idea of sustainability to heart.

Our economic system needs revision to be able to handle a non-growth mode.

------
paulomartins
I think it's a good moment for Twitter to get back in track, Moment is a great
feature and it shows that more good stuff is coming.

------
jimmayyy
And yet no one avail to fix the mobile Twitter website. It just does not work.
Get enraged everytime I click on a tweet from Safari.

------
ehudla
Do they have 20% time?

~~~
roguecoder
Nope.

------
xienze
4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character
messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.

~~~
yid
> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character
> messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.

Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and
broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata
appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice
distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple of indices for
the hashtags and mentions, and the follows/follower graph. Throw in another
few tables for handling API permissions, managing schema migrations while
ensuring that data from day 1 is still as transparent as yesterday's logs, a
highly replicated ad server hooked up to a realtime recommendation engine that
analyzes an active user's current stream and recommends the most relevant ad
(to maximize revenue of course), set up a few staffed policy teams to comply
with the differences in global regulations, handle lawsuits and legal
requests, and of course keep competing for more revenue with the likes of
Facebook and Google.

It's pretty trivial.

~~~
xienze
OK, I'm hearing a lot about hardware there but not seeing where thousands of
people are needed to keep it all up. Again, WhatsApp -- 50 employees.

~~~
yid
In 2014, WhatsApp reportedly made $14 million in revenue. By comparison,
Twitter made $479 in revenue in just Q4 2014. I think company size generally
scales super-linearly with revenue, so a total staff in the thousands seems
reasonable for a post-IPO company.

Are you suggesting that WhatsApp's model of organization is the norm for a
sustainable organization? I think it's a clear outlier in many respects.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16
BILLION payout.

Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?

~~~
untog
> Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16
> BILLION payout.

Silicon Valley mentality at its finest.

~~~
jsprogrammer
What do you mean? This is just a fact.

The company existed to make a return for the owners. The owners exited with
$16 billion. That was the motivation of the owners/employees, not $14 million
in annual revenue.

~~~
thomasfoster96
The $14 million is what justifies the $16 billion.

~~~
meerita
No, it doesn't. I strongly believe there are many other important factors like
user base, growth ratio and active users than define the real value.

~~~
thomasfoster96
Sure, lots of other factors are important, but ultimately factors like user
base growth and active users are just showing WhatsApp gaining a larger
revenue stream.

------
curiousjorge
Scaling twitter is fucking overrated if you look at the work engineers at
WhatsApp did. There's a reason why a whatsapp engineer is worth 100 more than
the average twitter engineer.

The twitter tears are flowing in this thread

~~~
dang
You've posted many uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN. We ban
accounts that do this. Please read the site guidelines and follow them from
now on:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

------
dmritard96
rise of cockroaches was the techcrunch headline, arguably this is a bit of a
nod to that.

~~~
pavornyoh
@dmritard96, care to elaborate a bit on your post?

~~~
dmritard96
sure. There was what seems to be a correction in the PE market where funding
become a bit more difficult to get a hold of. As such, an article came out
suggesting that unicorns would have problems but cockroaches would survive.
While the unicorn portion is a bit silly, the cockroach part is reasonable.
Essentially, the companies with low burn rates and actual, real, cashflow will
be more likely to survive.

~~~
pavornyoh
@Dmritard96, thanks for clarifying:).

------
mckiddy
The second dotcom boom is coming to an end. Have fun everyone

~~~
bdcravens
Not necessarily. They have 4000 employees, which probably has a number of non-
revenue-generating positions that many SV companies are wont to have. Like
Python API WebSockets Diversity Developer Envangelists with full travel
budgets to go to 49 conferences a year. (I just made that up, but you get the
idea)

~~~
goodcjw2
Maybe judging a boom by twitter layoff is a bit too soon. However, the
underneath mindset rings a bell: people starts to realize winter is coming,
but not sure when...

~~~
bdcravens
Definitely. Now, if you're an evangelist who hasn't written production code in
years, then maybe you should start brushing up on your skills :-)

------
ForHackernews
Maybe it's finally dawning on investors that nobody wants to pay money for
#sarcastic #selfpromoting #hottakes #mixingcontentandmetadata

~~~
finance-geek
I would not go that far, but I can certainly say -- seems like half the
accounts are re-tweet bots and random products I have no interest in trying to
follow me.

------
on_
Twitter is undervalued, Jack Doresey can't run two stagnating companies in
parrallel. Cut jobs, merge the companies (because Square's IPO isn't going to
be successful and combine core competencies.

Square has been __focusing on invoicing, cash advances, appointment
scheduling, marketing features, and slicing and dicing business data, among
others __[0]

Strip these companies down to core competencies:

* Communications

* Real time information broadcasting

* Financial infrastructure

* Global penetration

* Advertisers/Brands/Companies

Not PG's _What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of? ", but "What Apple is
this the Ipod of?"_* I don't know, but as someone who never got into twitter,
I'm interested to see Jack take a shot with:

* both sides of the market in one place

* financial infrastructure

* customer tracking

* brand participation.

Likely result is a Merger of equals with no power struggle at the top levels.
Everyone expecting this anyway so expect it to happen soon.

[0][http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-
dorsey/](http://fortune.com/2015/08/02/square-reinvention-ipo-dorsey/)

