
Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company - bootload
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/technology/twitters-chief-technology-officer-to-leave-company.html
======
aresant
Bigger to me is the VP of Product - Josh McFarland - just bailed out 30
minutes ago too:

[https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800](https://twitter.com/crazyfoo/status/811331557608652800)

AKA outside of Dorsey, who is a split / shared CEO, who is in charge of
Twitter?

~~~
johns
I hope using a tweetstorm to announce his departure was a subtle shot at the
company's inability to ship a product the way people want to use it.

~~~
madeofpalk
I know I might sound like a vim user, but tweetstorms are honestly one of my
favourite parts of twitter. Maybe there could be a better UI for authoring and
displaying them, but there's something I really enjoy about reading a story
140 characters at a time.

~~~
md224
I've been saying this for a little while now: Twitter should really try to
capitalize on Tweetstorms. What they don't seem to realize is that Tweetstorms
enable Twitter to be a kind of inverse annotation platform. Most annotation
platforms enable large chunks of text to be dissected by readers, but a
Tweetstorm is the opposite: the author specifies the exact segmentation of the
text as they release it, and each segment can be individually commented on or
shared. It forces authors to present their ideas as a sequence of small
interlocking arguments. The medium enforces rhetorical granularity, for better
or worse.

I can't be the only person who sees this potential. Come on, Twitter, build
this out... I'll even let you hire me to work on it. :)

~~~
paulgb
(Shameless plug) I've been working on an open-source tool to visualize twitter
conversations and I've come to appreciate tweetstorms a bit more.

Here's this tweetstorm visualized with the tool:
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-website-
staticfiles-25g9k/tvp.h...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-website-
staticfiles-25g9k/tvp.html)

~~~
mullsork
Wow that's cool! Making it obvious which branch is part of the actual storm
rather than someone replying would be nice. Once zoomed in my avatar
recognition doesn't work as well.

Or maybe the tweet storm is always the left most branch and I just didn't
realise that? :)

In any case super cool stuff!

------
chollida1
I think its valid to ask if Jack Dorsey is the next executive to leave.

The moment Anthony Noto went to Twitter, all wall street could talk about was
that he was brought in to sell the company.

Who ever the next CTO is, they're going to have some tough decisions to make.
Twitter already has to pay out an extreme amount of compensation in stock
options just to get and retain talent.

I don't want this to seem inflammatory to people as twitter obviously has some
serious engineering talent, but does anyone consider them to be a big name in
tech anymore? They seem to be in the range of say PayPal in that they have a
decent reputation but they aren't really a name that gets you any resume
recognition anymore.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitters...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitters-
steep-premium-the-cost-of-employee-stock-grants.html)

> By way of comparison, the company reported $2.2 billion in revenue for 2015
> — meaning that it paid out 31 cents in stock-based compensation for every
> dollar of sales it collected.

You're going to be fighting several battles that aren't really engineering
related,

\- how to finally fix harassment that seems to be much more pronounced on your
platform than pretty much any other mainstream social media site.

\- how to get alot more advertising dollars on your site to an audience that
short of reddit, seems to dislike advertising more than most social media
sites.

And on top of all of this, you're probably going to have to shrink your
engineering head count to make yourself look more appetizing to potential
acquirers.

Yikes......

~~~
slg
Was Twitter ever really about tech excellence? My perspective as an outsider
who doesn't live or work in Silicon Valley, it always seemed more of a
communications and media company founded on a tech backbone. Beyond their
early scaling problems, which they spent a long, long time fighting, what
really exciting tech has emerged from Twitter? Google, Apple, Amazon, and
Facebook all have much more impressive technology to show for themselves over
the last several years.

~~~
blackaspen
Twitter's Github: [https://github.com/twitter](https://github.com/twitter)

Apache Aurora, Bootstrap, Storm, Heron, Pants, ThriftMux, DistributedLog,
Apache Cotton, Iago, just to name a few.

~~~
vdnkh
Your post implies they made the libraries you listed, but they certainly
didn't make Mesos or most of those things.

~~~
nerfhammer
I think Mesos is the only one from that list they didn't make, they were just
an early adopter on that one

~~~
blackaspen
You're right, they didn't make it and open source it. But they did work
closely on it's creation, as far as I know.

(edited above post to remove Mesos mention).

~~~
rodrickbrown
You're actually right Benjamin Hindman now CEO of Mesosphere Inc. started what
became the Apache Mesos project while a PHD student at Berkeley, He later left
Berkeley, interned at Google, then took a full time role at Twitter where he
built out Mesos at scale.

His linkedIn bio: Member of the Technical Staff Twitter March 2010 – May 2013
(3 years 3 months) Built out Apache Mesos
([http://mesos.apache.org](http://mesos.apache.org)).

------
throwaw12ay
Twitter can make money, all it has to do is reduce its operational costs
first. Then launch new products to grow. Twitter isn't going to become the new
ad-sense or Facebook if it isn't a platform at first place. And you don't
become a platform if your product isn't relevant to a lot of people.

People use Google for search. People use Facebook to connect with friends and
family. Who needs a Twitter account aside from journalists and attention-
seekers? my grand mother doesn't need a twitter account. Nobody cares about
her cooking a chicken or planting cucumbers in the garden BUT her closest
relatives. And there is already Facebook for that.

~~~
tw04
What twitter SHOULD have done, and should probably re-consider, is leave the
API _open_ , but charge a fee to utilize it at scale. Let startups come up
with creative new uses for your platform, and if they get traction - acquire
them. You print money and find an easy target for growth.

Twitter's problem is their continued refusal to recognize themselves as a
platform. It's probably too late at this point, but I don't think they have
anything to lose.

~~~
mgkimsal
Similar to aws? micro-pricing, or some free level? paying, say, 1c per 100
tweets for my app(s) would probably be doable. Or perhaps giving more metrics
for paid accounts, or prioritized delivery?

------
firebones
No one is asking my opinion, but here it is:

Trifurcate Twitter into three distinct parts:

* The social--what users actually use it for. * The ad platform. * The realtime gestalt/search platform.

The latter is what is inadequately funded and considered.

Twitter has a latency advantage on the pulse of thought across the user base.
The user base is already high-value for this relative to the morass of
Facebook users. This is the key differentiator. This is what you base the
platform and the value of search upon. You don't bury it by restricting the
API, or trying to shift it into the realm of the social platform with
"Moments"\--you build dependency upon it, and monetize that unique value by
those who need to keep the pulse. This creates value for the other two parts.
It is also woefully underfunded.

Someone mentioned an AWS-like model. That is thinking along the right track.
Make the gestalt a utility that people will pay for.

Yes, you still have all the spam/hate issues on the social platform, and those
need to be solved. But those only become a corporate imperative if Twitter is
resigned to merely being a social network rather than a platform.

Maybe it's actually 4 parts--I forgot about the live event deals (e.g., NFL
games). There's a raw, traditional media part, but I'd align that with the
advertising part.

~~~
nyxtom
Didn't they buy out Gnip precisely for this reason?

~~~
hnthroooow
I have no way to verify this is true, but I was told that they bought GNIP
because (this sounds too ridiculous to type) they forgot to invoice them for
two years for firehose access...when they remembered, GNIP couldn't afford the
invoice, so buyout!

Like I say, it's a rumor that may have shades of truth, but that's what I
heard.

~~~
pmorelli
As someone who worked on that acquisition, that rumor is total horseshit.

~~~
idm
I love apocryphal tales like this.

There's a kernel of logic to the original assertion. It has a "gee whiz"
irony, coded as a moral story: the biggest brains in the world forgot to get
paid. Twitter's perceived revenue problems are juxtaposed with the obviousness
of just taking the money they were owed, as if the answer to Twitter's Big
Question were there the whole time. Finally, it explains a really major
acquisition in Twitter history; it answers an outstanding question in
everybody's minds. That little vignette has all the fixings for a great
Silicon Valley tall tale.

The fact that it's totally false, by public refutation, seals the deal. I love
it!

------
BinaryIdiot
I'm sure it's simply arm chair quarter backing but I feel like Twitter could
be turned around and I think almost anyone could do it as long as they can
force them to take action and quickly.

Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and
half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do
and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of any of
my ideas.

Twitter should:

\- Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. Seriously Twitter is way, way, way over
staffed. I mean I don't _want_ to see this happen but Twitter is so employee
heavy I don't understand how they can sustain themselves _without_ losing a
large amount of employees.

\- Longer forms of communication. Yeah yeah I know "Twitter is short it makes
people be concise" yadda yadda yadda; look a lot of the top Twitter users
_constantly_ do tweet storms. Many post photos of long form content. Sure
maybe you keep the same limits but allow a way to stitch together multiple
tweets should you want to do something long form. Right now the dialog gets
ruined because comments get spliced during the user posting their thoughts.

This __has __to be addressed somehow. They 're losing out on too much
conversation and context when people post things like photos of text.

\- Need some focus around various types of media. Video is especially
important. Look at Instagram, they copied Snap's stories and BOOM, big
success. Twitter is positioned to be a messaging pipe for the internet. Let's
get more types of media flowing through it! Make Live even faster to start
(dedicated button). Make image taking native, too. Single button, type text,
posted. Done.

\- Better ways of handling discussions. Something threaded, not counting
usernames in limits (to a degree; can't have someone spamming hundreds at
once). In a similar vein create groups so conversations / discussions can
rapidly happen inside of groups.

\- More tools for filtering, maybe creating separate views for different types
of people you follow (like it would be great to see what my friends are saying
versus what news sources are saying etc without going through the cumbersome
list UX).

\- Verification so if someone wants to use their real name they can have it
verified and can even filter by verified so they can filter out the noise if
they want. Facebook is pretty damn successful at real names but you can also
create alternate personalities via Pages. I think Twitter should mimic this
functionality to a degree.

~~~
throwaway420
It might be too late for devs to trust them again, but they had an ideal
situation maybe like 5-6 years ago where every developer out there was
thinking about and experimenting with the Twitter API and you'd see a cool new
project released basically every day. That all stopped when the suits wanted
to grab control of Twitter and started discouraging and forcing out lots of
companies that were trying to invest on that and build actually innovative
software.

As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and
promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me
was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for
Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.

~~~
throwaw12ay
> It might be too late for devs to trust them again,

Stupid mistake from Twitter.

Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any
product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being
unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't
realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on
Twitter. That was stupid.

------
usaphp
While it's a topic about twitter I'd like to ask a question that always
puzzles me. Twitter has 3900+ employees and good portion of those are
developers, I just don't understand how can such a basic product that almost
never pushes any updates or radical changes/improvements require so many
employees. What the hell are they doing except for burning investors cash?
Just curious...

~~~
djfm
It's probably harder than we think because of the scale of it.

~~~
markcerqueira
Yeah, but that only really applies to specific engineering teams like backend
services and ops right? Web (frontend), iOS, Android, etc. don't really care
about scale.

~~~
was_boring
Seriously. The amount of people on the android team can't be more than 5
people devs, right? Maybe allocate 10 so you have some redundancy when people
get sick.

------
benmarks
Tweet from the CTO:
[https://twitter.com/adam_messinger/status/811326653339025408](https://twitter.com/adam_messinger/status/811326653339025408)

------
danso
I hope the best for Twitter, as it's probably been the most beneficial of the
social media network services (unless you count GMail) for me. I wish I could
devote more of my programming class curriculum to teaching the Twitter API, as
it has so many rich use-cases and students really enjoy it, but I expect that
if Twitter survives for the long-haul, its API probably won't. At least, I
expect it to be constrained in the same way Facebook has constrained its
previously liberal (in the sense of data scope, not political) data endpoints.

edit: grammar

~~~
minimaxir
Interestingly, Facebook is surprisingly liberal with their public data
endpoints, with no apparent rate limiting for API retrieval from public
Facebook Pages and Groups (source: I develop a scraper and have not been
yelled at by FB, yet: [https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-
scraper](https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper) )

Twitter, meanwhile, still has that stupid 3200 most-recent tweet limit on
historical data, which is apparently a "technical limitation."

~~~
danso
It's been awhile since I've used the FB API, but one thing that's nice about
Twitter is that you have a lot of room to crawl networks of users; for
example, I always like getting the list of accounts that U.S. congressmembers
follow (based on the Twitter account list maintained by the unitedstates
project [0]), as a proxy for such things as perceived political bent of media
organizations.

An example of the FB limitations I'm thinking about is how you can't query the
graph API by username, e.g.
[http://graph.facebook.com/mark.zuckerberg](http://graph.facebook.com/mark.zuckerberg)

There were other changes made before that, that's just one I remember in my
latter days of using their API. Granted, I've always been impressed with the
analyses you've done with FB data and have put it on my list someday to learn
through your examples :).

[0] [https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-
legislators](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators)

~~~
sambe
I tried to use the FB API, expecting a mature API with bindings and libraries
all over the place, lots of simplifying modules etc. I was left with the
impression that I wasn't really allowed to use it all, because I wasn't
writing an "App" (or perhaps because it wasn't running on a "Device"). Totally
confusing experience, where – even if I'm not particularly accustomed to
walled garden situations – the terminology and workflow just doesn't seem to
match expectations at all.

------
josh_carterPDX
Twitter is a business model that will be studied for years IMHO. No clear path
to revenue, viral adoption, and very little product development away from its
core competencies. I use Twitter often, but it has always seemed like a
platform most useful if you have something to promote. One big flaw has been
trying to find value to ordinary users who want to do something beyond typing
into an echo chamber. If Twitter goes away it would be interested to figure
out what would take its place.

~~~
criddell
> No clear path to revenue

I don't know about that. They have $2.2 billion in revenue last year. Get the
employee count down to 300 people and you have a great business.

~~~
josh_carterPDX
No you're right. However, aside from having ad revenue I don't see anything
they can do to accelerate their revenue growth. But yeah, cut spending, get
employee count way down, and they could break even sooner than later.

~~~
basch
bull. twitters growth stalled because its way to hard to join and sort
through. look how long you can be part of reddit before you make an account.
you can even bookmark
[http://reddit.com/r/tech+askhistorians+bestof+askscience](http://reddit.com/r/tech+askhistorians+bestof+askscience)
and have a custom mix without having an account. their logged out front page
is a pile of shit. imgur.com is better at what twitter is trying to be,
twitter should chase digg/medium not lowest common denominator memegrabs.

~~~
criddell
> twitters growth stalled

I think maybe Twitter's growth stalled because it's mostly done growing. Do
they need more users? They can already generate billions of dollars every year
and maybe that's enough.

------
throwyawa62134
A lot of Twitter's management in product/engineering seems to be from a very
particular demographic. Graduated Stanford in early 2000s and quickly rose up
the ladder in Google -- Alex Roetter, Josh McFarland, Keith Coleman.

Aside from being what I assume to be exceptionally talented individuals, what
do you guys think separates these people from their peers to make it to the VP
level so quickly?

As someone just getting started in my career, what steps can I take to put
myself in a position to grow so quickly?

~~~
marcinzm
The first question is what you want out of life, do you want to be manager,
and executive, a technical lead or do you want to be purely technical? All
four offer promotion paths at large and (increasingly) small companies
although staying technical will hit an age issue eventually. They are also
very different tracks.

That said, it sounds like you want to be an executive and let's say one at a
larger company (ie: not a paper executive but an actual one). The skills you
need for that are going to be leadership, management, charisma, politics, and
networking. Since you're not going the technical track your technical skills
are secondary at best.

You want a nice title on your resume so pick a top company and join there.
Find a manager who is not afraid of your ambition (a career middle manager
will likely be, find someone with ambition), act like a leader and get
promoted. This will give you pedigree while also teaching you about politics
and management. You will eventually hit diminishing returns.

Then, like the people you mentioned, jump to a startup as one of the founders
or the person running it. This will teach you how to be a standalone leader,
build up a network, and give you some executive-ish experience. It's vital you
have the skills at this point to impress people at first impressions and
maintain a networking relationship with them.

Then either get acquired by a larger company or switch after a while using
your network to find the new position.

------
baccheion
Twitter's Senior Management rating on Glassdoor is a 3.0/5 (where the goal is
4.0/5 or higher), one of the lowest among Bay Area companies. It's down there
with eBay (3.0), HP (2.7), PayPal (3.1), etc. That is, they clearly need to
replace their entire management structure.

For reference: Facebook (4.3), Google (3.9), Uber (3.9), Snapchat (3.8),
AirBnB (3.7), Quora (3.7), Dropbox (3.6), Abobe (3.6), Apple (3.5), Pinterest
(3.5), and Microsoft (3.4).

------
cekvenich3
Jack is now doing political activism. Against the administration.

~~~
AlwaysBCoding
Twitter's book burning of conservative accounts was horrific. One of the
grossest displays from a tech company that I can remember. I have no idea how
employees at Twitter aren't up in arms over it.

~~~
legodt
Bold of you to refer to a Holocaust event when the banned accounts were filled
with hate speech, harassment, and neonazi views

------
argonaut
I don't think this is as big a deal as the Twitter departures earlier this
year. Several years ago Adam Messinger was already more or less sidelined from
the engineering organization when Chris Fry was made VP of Engineering (CTO
does not imply the VP of Engineering reports to the CTO). Later Chris Fry
would be replaced by Alex Roetter (thanks commenter below).

After Roetter left, Messinger was put back in charge of the engineering
organization. But given he had been removed from it (and passed over) in the
past, it's not surprising he would leave, voluntarily or involuntarily.

~~~
sulam
It's a bigger deal than that because he was put back in charge of the
engineering organization for real. That means that from when I started there
to now, the engineering leadership has been:

Mike Abbott

Dick Costolo -> (Chris Fry, Adam Messinger, Mazen Rawashdeh)

Chris Fry

Alex Roetter

Adam Messinger

???

Not as bad as product, but illustrative, and there were far more VP/Director
changes in there along the way. In general you knew you were in for a re-org
that affected you in a material way every 6 months. I had 10 managers in well
under 5 years. It's not surprising many people just crawl in a hole and hope
they get ignored while they vest and get stuff done.

~~~
throwawaybird9
Those guys may have had the fancy titles but the real engineering leadership
at Twitter was Raffi.

~~~
sulam
Depends on your org. Alex had just as much pull as Raffi, arguably more since
he got the org he wanted eventually. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of
Raffi and Alex has the empathy of a gnat, but in terms of sheer influence it
was Alex/Raffi and then everyone else).

------
pritianka
I think it's sad that Twitter is facing so many departures. It's unclear what
is really happening but I do hope this service doesn't collapse. It's mind
boggling to me that something so useful is struggling to stick around.

------
sheraz
I acknowledge that CEO is not an easy job, but in light of all the departures
and drama, I honestly wonder if @jack really is the right person for the job?

Seems that the problems with product, PR, and investor relations got worse
when he came back. How much rope will the board give him before he hangs
himself?

~~~
mathattack
It seems like the model of "Strong Investment Banker elbows everyone else out"
is winning over "Charismatic founder surrounding himself with talent."

[http://www.recode.net/2016/12/6/13814264/twitter-anthony-
not...](http://www.recode.net/2016/12/6/13814264/twitter-anthony-noto-growth-
promotion-jack-dorsey)

------
riffic
Twitter's failure is a failure to embrace an open web. The next CTO at Twitter
should take a deep hard look at decentralization, protocols such as OStatus,
and how to provide an open platform (like email) not a walled garden.

Say one manages a government agency or any other large organization -- Why the
heck would they put all eggs into a provider's basket rather than set up their
own GNU social infrastructure? Does anyone not realize the power of
controlling their own namespace?

~~~
sulam
I'd love to hear how you think they make money in this world.

~~~
riffic
advertising, same as any other company.

edit: oh are you talking status quo, or an idealized business model?

~~~
throwanem
Oh neat. So, in order to avoid having ads filtered at federation boundaries,
thus delivering zero value to ad buyers and zero revenue to themselves, they
now have a very strong incentive to come up with advertising only
imperceptibly different from everything that is not advertising.

~~~
riffic
see edit, I assumed the question was referring to the status quo. A better
model than advertising would be to charge those broadcasting their message to
a large number of recipients (your CNNs and Trumps should be the ones paying
to play).

~~~
sulam
So you drive away your biggest draw? In the media-centric view of the world,
those people would be asking for a cut of revenues. There's clearly a major
disconnect from reality on one side or the other here. Any examples of
successful businesses that do it the way you describe?

~~~
riffic
> Any examples of successful businesses that do it the way you describe?

Billboard owners

~~~
sulam
Billboards work because it's captive traffic. Very few if any sites on the net
have captive traffic. Twitter certainly doesn't even in the current model and
I think the model you're describing would be even harder to manage in terms of
spam and abuse, not to mention coordinating with law enforcement. So likely
even less captive.

------
rb808
It feels like Twitter the company should be imploding, but it must be a secure
business if its the next president's primary communication channel.

~~~
danso
Frankly, I wouldn't mind if we saw an end to Trump's tweets. Not because of
their content, but because of their impulsiveness, which is a behavior that
Twitter's design encourages. Which is cool when it comes to celebrities and
such in which it's fun to see what they think about sans filter.

But the president of the United States speaks with the executive authority for
an entire nation. It's questionable enough when a company's stock falls
because Trump lashes out at them, and means it [0]. But what about the times
he makes a typo, or just doesn't have all the info he needs at that moment
when his emotions arise? Even asking that he types something to be sent
through a Wordpress-powered system would give him the same megaphone, but
adding a little more friction so that things that deserved to be
trashed/called-out in his voice actually deserve so.

For those who say this amounts to making Trump less "real" of a man...sure.
But he's no longer just a man, he's the chief executive of the world's
greatest power. He gave up the privilege of "just sayin what I think" for the
privilege of being able to unilaterally launch a nuclear war. Keep in mind
that there _are no checks and balances_ against this power -- it is utterly
unilateral: [http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-
and-...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-the-
bomb/)

Giving up frictionless communication in 140-character-sized comments seems
like a reasonable thing to pass on, given the many extra responsibilities he
has, and the extra weight each of his words have.

[0] [http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-
threaten...](http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-threatens-
cancel-air-force-one-order-boeing-stock-slips-n692511)

~~~
angry-hacker
You do realize he's not the one posting there? Neither was Obama. These
accounts are ran by teams...

~~~
danso
That would go against most public accounts of how Trump has been using his
phone for tweeting.

For one thing, Obama's personal account (i.e. not @POTUS, but @BarackObama)
explicitly says in its profile: "This account is run by Organizing for Action
staff. Tweets from the President are signed -bo. [0]

No such disclaimer has been made about Trump's account, which tweets with the
same characteristics and tone as it did well before his current presidential
campaign [1]. You're right, though, that Trump's team does tweet for him on
occasion. Either that, or Trump, who is famously not a computer user, has
mastered the art of using two different mobile operating systems [2]

[0] [http://imgur.com/a/ZGyzo](http://imgur.com/a/ZGyzo)

[1] [https://github.com/sashaperigo/Trump-
Tweets](https://github.com/sashaperigo/Trump-Tweets)

[2] [http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-
tweets/](http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/)

------
sna1l
It is disappointing because I personally still believe Twitter has a lot of
potential, and it seems like they can't catch a break.

I don't work at Twitter, so it is hard for me to tell how much this exec drain
has had an effect on delivery and execution, but I'd imagine a good amount.

The NFL Thursday Twitter has been super disappointing. I wish there was a way
to get the video screen mostly full, and have a live feed of MY timeline on
the feed. I definitely am tweeting a ton during sporting events, and feel like
I never see targeted ads or well thought out products surrounding that.

------
sidcool
I won't be surprised by this activity. Exodus of employees sometimes points
towards a possible impending discounted acquisition.

~~~
yellowbeard
Why? Do you have historical examples?

------
sherifmansour
Can someone please tell me why the press hate Twitter so much?! It seems that
every Twitter story these days is spun so negatively...

------
jorblumesea
Is it just me or do people feel that images/video are the future of digital
interaction?

Looking at IG/Snapchat and I feel like I'm viewing the future world of
interactive social media being born. It's not that text based media is
incorrect, it just feels like the communication form of the past.

I want to be shown experience, not just read about them.

~~~
beagle3
> Is it just me or do people feel that images/video are the future of digital
> interaction?

I feel images/video are the future of digital interaction in the same way that
candy is the future of food. It is nice to have in moderation, but try to
replace the basics completely and you'll have cavities and bad health.

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djfm
I have mixed feelings about twitter. On the one hand I see it as a nice way to
make interesting conversations surface and reach a wide audience. On the other
hand I see it as a constant stream of ads. I don't know if I'd be happy if it
all goes down, or if something better comes along. Which problem is twitter
actually trying to solve?

~~~
dmix
> Which problem is twitter actually trying to solve?

Somewhere between a real time news platform and wasting time ala social
entertainment?

~~~
djfm
Yeah, can it really do both properly?

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dboreham
Same old story: Making it up on volume...

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brilliantcode
when will we see the same for Facebook? If Twitter falls then it's a shift in
investor's attitude towards "should make lots of money at unknown time down
the road".

Money today is more valuable than money tomorrow. Tech seems to have been a
curious exception as it was in the 2000 bubble.

~~~
kin
I don't see it happening any time soon if at all. Companies spend an insane
amount of money advertising on Facebook platforms. If you're at all familiar
with how companies buy ads in digital marketing, you'll realize how Facebook's
targeting is super valuable and companies pay a pretty penny to target
specific users.

Not to mention, Facebook is quite the pioneer in tech. React is one of the
most used front end libraries and the community around it is super positive.

Then there's VR and their progress in 360 video. The list really goes on with
Facebook.

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known
Twitter need CIO, not CTO.

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wattt
I heart this

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ensiferum
And why is this newsworthy?

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samstave
ELI5 why this is important?

(tell me the future of twitter)

