
Measuring how bad Twitter is - nikcub
http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2016/10/measuring-how-bad-twitter-is.html
======
emdowling
This (and the original post[0]) sum up how I feel about Twitter. Every few
months (since joining in 2009), I jump on and attempt to curate my feed to
only get stuff I care about. I stick around for a few weeks, then get
overwhelmed by the deluge. So I constantly curate and trim and it all becomes
very tiresome.

I want Twitter to be a feed of news and opinions from organisations and people
I care about, but it is far too hard to jump in and see how a conversation
started or evolved. It is far too hard to filter out the noise.

Honestly, my RSS feeds give me everything I need and they've been going strong
for over 10 years. Sprinkle in a bit of Apple News to fill in the blanks and
Twitter quickly finds itself in the "too hard" basket.

The financial state of Twitter highlighted by this article is mind-blowing.
How on earth have costs crept up so much with no meaningful improvement in
product? As a very astute tech-savvy person, I cannot see anything that
Twitter has done in _years_ that have made it better. That stands in stark
contrast to Facebook.

I'm sad about this because Twitter has been such an integral part of the
modern internet, in democratising information. It's role in the Arab Spring
alone was world-changing. It's a pity it hasn't been able to harness this.

[0][http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-
twi...](http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-
buyout-rumours.html)

~~~
digi_owl
The Arab Spring thing is hyperbole to the hilt.

If anything, Facebook and Twitter acted as pacifiers. While people could use
them, they stayed inside rather than get involved in the streets.

Only when the authorities cut the connection did shit hit the fan, as the
masses ventured outside to keep up what was happening.

Thinking about it, i suspect Twitter was an artifact of the US mobile market.
It provided a way to do mass texts at a low cost.

But as people moved to smartphones and push IM platforms, twitter's reason to
exist kinda evaporated.

On top of that they had basically handed the task of innovating over to third
parties via their APIs.

I still recall seeing people use Tweetdeck on desktop Windows with multiple
columns set up on different topics, hashtags, and people during large events.
This to allow them to track the full breath of what was happening at a glance.

Crazy thing is that Twitter did integrate the "column" concept into their
service, via lists. But neither their site nor their apps allow us to access
those lists in any way similar to Tweetdeck. In contrast, most third party
clients will support a column view these days.

~~~
paulcole
>But as people moved to smartphones and push IM platforms, twitter's reason to
exist kinda evaporated.

Huh? Did you read the articles? Can you explain how this jives with the
massive increases in revenue?

~~~
imagist
The revenue comes from investors. A lot of those investors are saying the same
thing you are: "Look at all this revenue, they must be doing well!" For those
people it's a closed cycle: investors see revenue increase and invest because
they see revenue increase, other investors see revenue increase and invest
because they see revenue increase.

But this isn't a sustainable business, it's basically an unintentional pyramid
scam. Businesses need to make a profit in order for people to receive a return
on investment, and Twitter has never, not once, ever made a profit.

~~~
drakonandor
What the heck? The only thing accurate in this post is that Twitter has not
yet made a quarterly profit... The rest is pure nonsense, most of it being
quite malicious, and some being uneducated misconceptions.

Investment is not revenue. Their revenue comes from advertising.

Businesses do not need to make a profit in order for people to receive a
return on investment. People will always be willing to invest in a company
that shows that it may have good growth in the future. Costs can be cut at any
time, resulting in an easy profit. The investors care more about growth than
profit, as it is a young company.

It's really not ok to accuse people of scams without any evidence just because
you don't understand how businesses work.

------
twblalock
I suspect the lack of management focus is causing all of the waste. All of
this investment in video, the various API services Twitter created and then
discontinued, working on various Scala frameworks, probably a lot of internal
data analysis tools, tweaks to the timeline format that nobody seemed to
want...

I just don't think a lot of what Twitter is doing is necessary to running a
core business. The problem is that they don't have a core business -- they
have several factions pushing competing visions of a core business and none of
them can gain the upper hand. They need to decide what their core business is
and focus on it.

If you look at their list of active users, it's really something a lot of
companies would kill for: almost every major politician, journalist, and
celebrity in the US, and a similar presence in several other countries. It's
just amazing that they can't figure out how to make a profit serving that kind
of user base.

I should add that aside from the exceptional success of Steve Jobs at Apple,
bringing a founder back to run the company is not a very good sign.

~~~
calinet6
I think that their focus has been on the experience for advertisers, which are
less visible or feel negative to the end user (such as tweaks to the
timeline—100% for advertisers and brands). However, those choices are probably
highly influential to their revenue, and arguably they need to be working more
on those things—which means even fewer visible changes that benefit end users.

Either they're working on the wrong thing, or they're not working hard enough
on the right thing. I don't see too much of a split focus—they know the base
they have and they need to extract value while keeping the essence of the
experience they have.

------
shawnee_
Twitter is the classic example of waiting too long to IPO. I understand
there's a sort of cultish wisdom to delay an IPO for as long as (legally)
possible; however, the underlying sustainability of a business either "just
works" or it doesn't. The problems that plague Twitter today could and
probably should have been caught at least a couple years before it IPO'ed at
the very end of 2013. IPO'ing in the public exchange basically teases out
sustainability problems. And regardless of what you think of American
capitalism, the public markets are the best available detectives we have to
investigate sustainability problems.

When sustainability is iffy, owners of the company get their _vote_ , and then
they get to implement leadership that does care about and pay attention to the
numbers. Absent IPOs, a lot of startups are nothing more than glorified boys'
clubs, partying on the dime of oblivious investors. It's lousy that the
culture of so many companies in startupland hate the bean counters. The little
numbers can usually tell a lot.

~~~
mdorazio
I don't quite understand your point in the context of twitter. It went public
in 2013 and has been under investor scrutiny for the last 3 years. Even so,
the sustainability problems have persisted despite the glaringly obvious
balance sheets and steadily declining share price. This is a problem of
investors (public and private) letting the board get away with hemorrhaging
money for too long.

------
arama471
For anyone as confused as I was as to why the conclusion is 'inescapable', he
seems to actually explain things in the previous blog post[1] and this one
appears to just be an additional tidbit on top of that.

[1][http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-
twi...](http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-
buyout-rumours.html)

~~~
martin_bech
That article is spot on. It highlights the problems of the experience, and how
insane the burn rate is, for something thats no doing anything new for users.

------
raverbashing
800Mi in R&D for Twitter? Almost the same figure for sales & marketing?

Really, what are they doing? This makes no sense

OK, Apple is @ 10Bi per year approximately
[http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/27/apple-rd-
spending-...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/04/27/apple-rd-spending-
jumps-to-25b-in-q2-accounted-for-5-of-total-revenue) (but developing hardware
and silicon is not cheap

~~~
jondubois
Yes it's crazy; if you add up R&D + Sales, the total is $1.6B; their revenue
is only $2.2B... And that's without factoring in the costs of simply keeping
the business running - They still need to pay datacenter costs and salaries
related to the ongoing maintenance of the site.

When you look at the billions of R&D dollars which were spent over the past
few years, you have to wonder where all the money went. I can't remember the
last time Twitter released an innovative product... If ever.

It's not like they were spending their R&D on high-risk ventures like finding
a cure for cancer or building a quantum computer. With the kind of R&D they
do, you expect to see results at reasonable intervals...

I wouldn't be surprised if there is some kind of fraud going on.

------
justinlardinois
Anyone else get tripped up when the underlined "He simply does not deserve the
job" turned out to not be a link?

~~~
staticelf
Yes, I didn't understand the article so this was the only thing I thought
about.

------
AndrewHampton
Jack Dorsey became CEO of Twitter in October 2015. The numbers in the article
are for all of 2015. Should he have been able to fix the financials in the
first three months back as CEO? I feel like I'm missing something.

~~~
elmin
The general consensus is people need to be laid off to cut costs. He hasn't
done that.

~~~
coev
He did exactly that last year [https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/13/twitter-is-
laying-off-8-pe...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/13/twitter-is-laying-
off-8-percent-of-the-company/)

~~~
orsenthil
And then hired more number than that. Otherwise, the 4K number in twitter
employee population would never come.

------
eldavido
I couldn't agree more and I'm glad someone is talking about this. I also read
SEC reports (Ks and Qs) and I'm appalled at what I'm seeing.

I actually think it's bigger, though. Look at the original ethos of Silicon
Valley: two mid-career guys in a garage working off-hours to get something
going. There was a culture of cost-consciousness, a scrappy resourcefulness,
built into these companies from day 1. Hell, they could've set up shop in San
Francisco, but they opted for the suburbs instead, because _they wanted to
make it work_. Quoting Paul Graham, in 2005: "For most startups the model
should be grad student, not law firm. Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive
and impressive." [2]

Fast forward 10-20 years. Have you been to the Twitter office? It's next to
NEMA [1], an apartment complex where a cool $4000/month will get you 1-2
bedrooms. A juice from "The Market" underneath their office will run you $8,
to go with your $15 sandwich. Everyone there seems to be OK wearing $100
shirts and expensive shoes. The office itself is impeccably painted and they
have art all over the walls.

I don't care about the money per se; the issue is focus. If all the energy
dedicated to all this flashiness was dedicated into _getting actual business
results_ , Twitter might be in a different place today.

Now, the standard argument against this is, we need to be in SF, and spend all
this money, in the name of attracting the best talent. Perhaps, but, you have
to wonder, when companies are climbing all over each other to get developers
at $150-180K base plus cash bonuses, stock, etc., the case for being in SF
gets more difficult.

What I'm really saying is two things: (1) Tech has changed...a lot. Gone are
the founding myths of Amazon's door-desks and Bill Gates, whose famous
restaurant was a _burger place_. Now we all eat at two-star Michelin
restaurants at $150/plate.

(2) I wonder what this says about SF long-term. Sure, the good people are
here, and sure, maybe it'll just be a slight correction. But I really think
the case for locating a company elsewhere grows stronger each day given how
expensive and difficult it is to run a company from here.

[1]
[http://www.rentnema.com/floorplans.php](http://www.rentnema.com/floorplans.php)

[2] [http://paulgraham.com/start.html](http://paulgraham.com/start.html)

~~~
Balgair
On your points about grad-student vs. law-firm: Yeah, all the 'real' hackers
are out now. Just look at Google Maps, that thing was better 10 years ago than
it is today. Complain all you want about the proliferation in devices, but the
fact remains that it was better a decade ago. I say that to mean that the
actual hackers and the neck-beards that care about the product are gone and
have been replaced by bullshit artists. Reasonable people, people that have
mortgages and get other people to change their oil. Let me repeat that: Google
is full of BSAs now. Just look at the Burn, it's all cigarettes and blow now,
not pot and LSD. It's a networking event! How in the heck did nepotism, sorry,
I mean networking, get out to Gerlach? Where have the real hackers gone off
to? Somewhere cheap, aka not the Bay Area. Look at Knoxville or Tallahassee,
other Southern cities, Albuquerque and Reno, or Albany. Places with some sort
of grad school (not just comp-sci, look at all that CRISPR-CAS9 stuff, oh
man!) that does not have crazy rents nearby. A place where you can't tell if
they are a grad student or a homeless dude. The 'real' hackers are out there
being busy building things, thankyouverymuch, and not giving a damn about
juices that someone else makes for them. It's not that Tech has changed, those
toothy basement dwellers are a part of the human genetic code, it's that SF
has changed. It's mature now, there are firms and suits and spouses that need
to be kept. SF will continue along this path, it is not what it once was and
really, all things evolve.

------
alex_hitchins
Have they ever tried to charge to follow certain accounts? Say someone popular
has 1m followers, all new followers would need to pay a subscription fee to
receive all their tweets. It's a bit like the old CelebIndex. The more
followers someone has they more the tweets cost. I'm thinking something like 1
or 2 pence per tweet.

This is probably a terrible idea.

~~~
coev
A celeb/politician/etc's popularity is what brings regular people to twitter.
To charge the celeb would be counterproductive and probably move them over to
a competitor for good.

~~~
alex_hitchins
Sorry - I meant that it would cost general users say 50P a month to receive
tweets from say a major A-lister, but 25p to recieve the tweets of a C-lister.
People could get them for free, just delayed by say 30 minutes.

------
0xmohit
Not being a Twitter user myself, it's hard to comment on how it is. However, a
number of their open source projects [0] are really really good.

[0] [https://github.com/twitter/](https://github.com/twitter/)

------
tboyd47
Question: what happened in 2013 that made Twitter's operating costs increase
8x?

~~~
gjolund
IPO

------
sushid
Why does he believe that only one in three employees will be keeping a job
post-acquisition? Not that the engineers will have to worry.

They have a very talented engineering team that will be sought out by every
headhunter if that's the case but it all seems baseless.

~~~
intoverflow2
>They have a very talented engineering team

Do they? What have they been doing all these years? As a user the product just
seems to get worse and worse for me and despite the massive dev team they
actually outsourced the mac client...

~~~
talmand
It's possible; a very talented engineering team with horrible management that
holds them back is still a very talented engineering team.

------
throw2016
The 'arab spring' is nothing but the US and other vested interests stirring up
trouble in these countries. Revolution does not happen by itself. It takes
money, effort and organization to get otherwise passive citizens to raise
their head above the parapet and more often than not it's to futher the
organizers interests.

Libya before and Libya now is a perfect example of a complete disaster for the
people and another crime against humanity.

Saudi Arabia, the most repressive regime in the region and chief promoter of
terrorist ideology and the one place that requires a 'spring' is the western
world's best friend in the region and remains 'strangely' but predictably
untouched by the 'arab spring'. This is just unadulterated propaganda.

We have far too many of these 'springs' repeated over and over again in the
last 100 years to know what's happening and the modus-operandi and yet every
story on facebook and twitter naively persist in rehashing this propaganda.

These interventions under the cover of 'human rights' are always to further
some agenda and given the massive upheaval and suffering they cause to
populations its difficult to see how any believer in humanity can't continue
to support these blatantly self serving actions.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Revolution does not happen by itself_

I actually think revolution _needs_ to happen by itself. The overlap between
the skills needed to organise armed insurrection and to govern are similar.

Issues come up when still-formentig revolutions are prematurely encouraged.
They may succeed in toppling the prior regime, but they never forged a shared
identity and set of norms fit for rallying, organising and deploying force and
order - the bread and butter of nascent governance.

------
jondubois
According to Google, Twitter has 4000 employees.

The total cost of R&D and sales is $1.6B per year.

Do the math:

1.6B/4000 = 400K per employee!

^ And that's assuming that all 4000 employees are working on R&D or sales.

That number tells me that there is something REALLY wrong with the company.

What kinds of people get paid $400K per year?

~~~
drakonandor
Does that include employee costs that the company covers, such as health
insurance, retirement accounts, etc etc?

------
Tomrn
favourite line from the article -

"the plural of anecdote is data"

nice.

~~~
afandian
I was going to reply "you realise that 'the plural of anecdote is not data' is
the usual phrasing" so I spent a few seconds searching.

According to this blog, the original doesn't include the 'not':
[http://quotesjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-plural-of-
an...](http://quotesjournal.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-
not-data.html)

Funny how subverted phrases can supplant the original.

------
Mao_Zedang
Twitters manipulation of this election cycle will cost them large swathes of
users in the long run. You cant set yourself up as a communication utility and
then get so involved in politics, it is bad for business.

~~~
ihsw
That would be the result of the Trust and Safety Council.

[https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-
trust-s...](https://blog.twitter.com/2016/announcing-the-twitter-trust-safety-
council)

[https://about.twitter.com/safety/council](https://about.twitter.com/safety/council)

The roster of members is notably liberal-leaning and partisan across the
board.

But you are correct, it's clear they make no effort to maintain an impartial
and fair platform.

------
nailer
> When Facebook had $1.974 billion of revenue it had $1.008 billion of income
> before taxes.

> Twitter is kind of different.

> When Twitter had $450 million of operating losses and $533 million of losses
> before tax.

For a UK based site, the English here is incredibly poor. The first sentence
implies a comparison to when Twitter had a similar level of revenue.

Making sense of it:

> Facebook had $1.974 billion of revenue and $1.008 billion of income before
> taxes.

> Twitter is kind of different.

> Twitter had $450 million of operating losses and $533 million of losses
> before tax.

~~~
davidivadavid
If you want to keep the parallel structure you would want to compare Twitter's
revenue and their income (loss) before tax, just like he did for Facebook.
That tripped me up too.

------
gjolund
Been watching this train wreck in slow motion for years.

This has been a long time coming and I am positioned to profit from it.

~~~
max_
Are you shorting or going long? Cause stuff is unpredictable!

~~~
gjolund
Shorting.

~~~
happyslobro
Plot twist: he's actually hoping everyone else shorts, so that he can buy and
go long ;)

~~~
gjolund
And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids!

