

Twitter Cuts Off Employee Access to Its Metrics - danso
http://recode.net/2015/02/05/twitter-cuts-off-employee-access-to-its-metrics/

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mathattack
I'm amazed that it took this long, given that the # is material to how the
stock trades. (Look at their volatility on earnings day) Why give thousands of
people access to information whose inadvertent release could cause public
disclosure problems? (As a public company, material information needs to be
released to all investors at the same time) Even an accidental mistake could
cause big problems, let alone insider trading.

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guelo
Bullshit. The market would work more efficiently if this info was made public
in real time. That companies keep important data secret until earnings' big PR
effort is a huge market distortion as evidenced by the big corrections that
occur during the big reveal. The only benefit that this distortion provides to
the company is to allow insiders more opportunities for cooking the numbers
and insider trading.

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GolfyMcG
Are you suggesting these should be open to the marketplace? That alternative
puts all publicly traded companies at a disadvantage to privately held
businesses.

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mathattack
You've just highlighted the tradeoff. The question for public money is "How
much information to actually release?"

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Lur
I don't understand - can't one calculate MAU from firehose data? If so then
all companies who bought that data can access this elusive MAU metric.

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joosters
An 'active' user doesn't have to be tweeting, so they won't all show up in the
firehose.

MAU figures are pretty dubious anyway - see the other recode story about how 4
million 'active' users vanished because iOS no longer automatically fetches
tweets:

[http://recode.net/2015/02/05/how-twitter-lost-4-million-
user...](http://recode.net/2015/02/05/how-twitter-lost-4-million-users-
because-of-apples-ios-8/)

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dredmorbius
The data can still be correlated. Given a history of known actives and
corresponding tweets, the average tweets-per-active can be determined. That
may change over time but it's unlikely to do so in a capricious fashion
without good cause. Say, onboarding a large class of users for whom Twitter
and/or Tweets are of secondary interest. Not that, say, Google might have done
that with Google+ or anything.

Just because you cannot _directly_ see the number you're interested in doesn't
mean you cannot infer it by other means.

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t0mbstone
I don't understand how/why a publicly traded company like Twitter should be
allowed to hide such an important piece of data from the public and from
shareholders?

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oddevan
It's less to do with hiding data from the public and more along the lines of
controlling the data so that no one in the company gets it before the public
(and thus allowing said person inside the company to trade company stock on
insider information).

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mjmahone17
Isn't this solved with trading windows, which you only open up right after
earnings calls? Or am I missing something?

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eldavido
Those don't apply to the general public. The problem is insider gets info ->
calls his brother-in-law -> brother-in-law trades on early info. Illegal, but
lucrative.

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badusername
Does Facebook have similar policies? What's the level of transparency there?

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fishnchips
That sort of information is readily available to Facebook employees as well as
widely distributed. But for example engineering levels are secret.

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badusername
I was more interested in knowing the level of transparency on a day-to-day
basis on metrics such as usercount, revenue, etc. you know, stuff that could
get you in a bind for insider trading.

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fishnchips
User count - yes; revenue - I honestly don't know. There are quiet periods for
restricted stock units for when you might know more than the market. When then
quarterly numbers are out the blackout period ends and you can trade your
stock. It's been like that in every publicly traded US company I've ever
worked at.

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kenrikm
I understand the reason they did it, though I think they should have done this
way earlier. This seems to send a negative signal that you're not growing as
fast and want to keep your cards close.

