
Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week - bentlegen
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/twitter-said-to-plan-hundreds-more-job-cuts-as-soon-as-this-week
======
artursapek
I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm
not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to
grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its
limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money,
more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on
every business; it's all bound to come crashing down eventually if you don't
stop somewhere. Either you do it gracefully or hundreds of folks have to
eventually lose their job unexpectedly (very sad).

Is the answer simply that earlier VCs put pressure on the executives to keep
growing so they can multiply their investment?

Personally I dream of making a living establishing a patio11-type software
business. Something where I can do a high quality job and own all of the
decision-making. The ceiling doesn't have to be very high for one guy to
sustain himself, and software is appealing because you can automate away
nearly all of the "work".

~~~
Analemma_
People have answered this before, and what it boils down to is: because they
took VC money, and then went public. If you bootstrap a business from nothing
and grow it on its own, then sustainable growth and stable profit is fine. But
Twitter got VC and IPO money with a promise that it would have Facebook-like
growth in return. I think the analogy I saw used was that they promised
investors a Porsche and instead delivered a Toyota Corolla- it might be solid
and reliable, and perfectly fit for purpose, but it's not what they promised
when they took that money.

~~~
laluser
Are they liable for those promises though? I am legitimately curious to know
if they are contractually obligated to grow at a certain rate or be at certain
valuation at this point in time.

~~~
hibikir
Companies stop growing all the time: it happens all the time, and no company
grows forever. A stock price is not just the value of a company's business
today: It has future growth and risk priced in. What the stock market has been
saying to Twitter is that the public believes that Twitter's ceiling is far
lower than we thought in 2014.

In practice, this says that all the bets on hypergrowth were wrong, and the
company must adapt: The stock grants that looked competitive before don't look
competitive today, so top engineers leave. Staffing plans designed to keep a
system operable at 10x of Twitter's current volume stop making sense, so
projects change, and people are laid off.

So this has nothing to do with liability to promises (they've already IPO'd),
but with the pain of becoming a less promising company. Twitter is too
important to disappear in the near term; all you have to do is look at how big
they are for journalists and presidential candidates to figure that out. There
is, however, an opportunity for someone to make a competing product that fits
the same needs and is easier to monetize.

~~~
kmonsen
If they are staying stable, do they really need those top engineers? The
probably need a different set of engineers who can find a cheaper way of doing
what they are already doing.

~~~
yeukhon
Staying stable finanically is okay, but staying stable and no optimization
(better algorithms) might hurt. Hiring good engineers is surprisingly
expensive and hard.

------
xenadu02
I still maintain that screwing over client developers had something to do with
it. At the very least it didn't help them "control the twitter experience".
Every time I see one of their new ads about how much Twitter loves developers
I laugh out loud. There is zero chance I'll ever integrate Twitter into
anything I do, period. I'll fight against it anywhere I work and encourage all
my peers to do the same.

Did everyone forget they didn't even invent the word "Tweet"? Nor did they
write their mobile clients. They had no idea what they were doing and stumbled
into success. Then the MBAs turned around and stabbed us in the back.

Twitter can fuck right off.

~~~
teej
They didn't invent the hashtag either.

~~~
k__
Yes, Twitter should become a non-profit. They just were spitballing around,
then the users came and made them what they are today. All their good ideas,
besides starting a micro-blogging platform, came from outside the company.

And how did they thank them? Cutting of 3rd party clients and shadowbanning
users?

~~~
aikah
> Yes, Twitter should become a non-profit.

And what do you tell Twitter's investors ? "Thanks for the money, we are now
going non profit!". A public company just can't do that, that's not how it
work, investors want return on their investments and they didn't invest in a
"non-profit".

~~~
k__
yes, I know they won't do this. But one can dream.

------
nikcub
No offense to the people I know working at Twitter, but these cuts aren't deep
enough to stem the losses.

While Twitter revenue grew $664M, $1,403M to $2,218M over the past three
years, it is going to be a lot flatter than that at the end of this year - and
despite that growth they've consistently been losing about $500M p.a ($645M,
$577M and $521M respectively)

3,800 people work there - and equivalent cuts last year can barely be noticed
on the financials.

The good times are over - they've spent billions over the last few years and
not done anything to save them from flat user growth. They really need a
wholesale shakeup and doing it over time, like Yahoo did, will just make it
worse.

edit: here's a more brutal analysis [0][1]:

> PS. Twitter staff - I am not exaggerating. Look at the young man on your
> left and the young woman on your right. Only one of you three will keep your
> job.

[0] part 1 - [http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/some-comment-
on...](http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/some-comment-on-twitter-
buyout-rumours.html)

[1] part 2 - [http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/measuring-
how-b...](http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/measuring-how-bad-
twitter-is.html)

~~~
rattray
Woah, they only have 3800 employees and spend 2.7Bn/yr? That's 700k per
employee. What's all that money for?

~~~
nikcub
Stock options. It starts at the top:

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cuplqd1XEAEre6n.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cuplqd1XEAEre6n.jpg:large)

Being paid $72M p.a to oversee ~$500M p.a in losses. Great job if you can get
it.

~~~
nikcub
more info from their filing[0]:

> During the twelve months ended December 31, 2015 and 2014, we recognized
> $682.1 million and $631.6 million of expense related to stock-based
> compensation, respectively. As of December 31, 2015, we had unrecognized
> stock-based compensation expense of approximately $1.25 billion related to
> outstanding equity awards

[0] see page 47
[https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=15645...](https://investor.twitterinc.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1564590-16-13646&CIK=1418091)

------
madengr
You'd think they would have figured out targeted ads by now. If I follow
people who post about RF/Microwave, antennas, SDR, and ham radio, one would
think I'd see ads from Keysight and Tektronix, but no, it's garbage like
football and pop music. FAIL!

I also don't like that I don't see all the tweets from a person. They are
pruning the timeline.

Good riddance to twitter.

~~~
nameisu
Is there a third party app which would not show promoted tweets? they are so
annoying and un related

~~~
groby_b
IIRC, that'd get the apps API access cut off.

But if you want to have fun, keep blocking promoted tweets. After a month or
two, things get... "interesting" in terms of what you see. Well, at least
entertaining.

~~~
x5315
Please see my comment here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12789001](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12789001)

Only one third party app receives Promoted Tweets, and no third party apps are
required to display them.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Says the frog to the scorpion: "Why have you stung me? We will both die." and
the scorpion answers "I'm a VC and I will always aim for the 10x exit, this is
my nature"

------
josep2
Twitter is by far the #1 service I use everyday. It's been the most valuable
to me from a networking perspective where I've made friends and professional
connections. I also happen to be a shareholder. It's been disappointing to
watch Twitter try to become a business and completely falling flat.

The acquisition of Vine and Periscope haven't led to much and the user growth
from Live video is still t be seen.

The product is immensely complicated compared to something like Instagram or
Snapchat. It manages to be everything and nothing at the same time. I've been
a fan of Jack Dorsey's work at Square but monetization is a complete different
animal in that industry.

To summarize I just don't know what the future of Twitter as a business will
hold but I guess I'm here for the ride.

~~~
cookiecaper
Twitter needs to find a frictionless way to get paid _by their regular users_
that most users won't notice or think much about. Several potentials exist:
can charge to follow additional users above a certain threshold; can charge to
expand publishing platform (i.e., to be followed by more than a certain
quantity of users); can have "premium channel"-style users that only paid
members can follow (this may also be a way to allow publishers to monetize;
set your feed "paid follower only" and split the revenue with Twitter), and so
forth.

The FREE! model only works out when you can sell your users' attention.
Twitter has proven that it can't do that -- for whatever reason, user
attention on Twitter is not worth what it's worth on Facebook or Google and
they can't make a profit from it. So they need another way to monetize, and
IMO that should be the tried and true "make people pay for what they use".

~~~
bad_user
Paying in order to increase the maximum count of followers sounds really bad,
given that those are the users that also generate content and hence _the
reason_ for why you also have lurkers with under 100 followers that just
consume content.

Your proposal is a terrible idea, because Twitter should be paying those that
genuinely attract an audience, not vice versa, since those people can always
switch. Popular people will be popular anywhere. E.g. Linus Tolvards has a big
and active audience on Google+, even though it is in general a ghost town.

------
niftich
Can we talk about Fabric again? Fabric [1] is a product done by Twitter but
heavily de-emphasizes the Twitter association -- it's a value-added Twitter
SDK that apps can build into themselves and get crash reporting (ex-
Crashlytics) and ad network integration (MoPub) too.

In the scheme of Twitter's self-reflection trying to figure out how to cut
costs and find what it wants to do, do you feel Fabric fits into it? Do you
feel the 'core platform' i.e. the microblogging site fits into it? Should the
less strategic one of these be spun out; or should they be less separated?

[1] [https://get.fabric.io](https://get.fabric.io)

~~~
zedred
And think about how much this costs Twitter! The Fabric SDK allows apps to do
phone number verification (SMS/Voice calls) for _free_. This is usually the
single greatest cost associated with running any app that does phone number
verification (often even above engineering salaries). Multiply the number of
SDK users by the cost of SMS/voice delivery, and that's a ton of money out the
door every month.

There were some rumors that Twitter has tried to spin off Fabric into another
home, but it sounds like potential buyers balked when they saw the costs
associated with it.

The prevailing theory is that Twitter originally saw this as a way to collect
user data in the mobile app paradigm in the same way that the Twitter "follow"
and "tweet" buttons do in the web paradigm. It sounds like it hasn't paid off,
though.

~~~
netik
You forget that Twitter purchased an SMS aggregator a few years back. SMS
sending is near free for Twitter. I still remember integrating all of the VPNs
to the carriers to support this mess.

~~~
zedred
"Near free" is expensive at that scale. Look at Twilio's S1, Twitter's costs
can't be much lower than theirs.

------
user5994461
3800 employees, $2700M spent a year.

That's 700k per employee. IT'S FREAKING INSANE!

There are only 4 tech companies in the world who ever made more than $700k in
revenue per head, in any recent years: SoftBank, Microsoft, Google, Apple

[http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-
per...](http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per-
employee-2015-10)

~~~
criddell
I don't understand how Twitter ended up with almost four thousand employees.
If I had to guess how many people worked there, I would have guessed at least
an order of magnitude less than that.

When Facebook acquired Instagram, didn't they have something like 15
employees?

~~~
VLM
Snekay VLM skill, don't tell anyone... business leaders will pretend internal
organization is confidential, so all the twitter.com website reports is 40% of
personnel are technical and if you've been around the block a few times, thats
a way of saying 60% are in sales. So secret of them like trying to peer into
the NSA. Then HR posts 50 bazillion job openings totally dropping the docs on
every strategy the company has ... if I know which cities are hiring data
center operations employees and what skill set they want, then I can tell you
where the data centers roughly are, and in some cases exactly how they
operate.

So don't tell any business leaders, let them stay in the dark about secrecy,
but I can tell you purely as an outsider using their own websites for "about"
and "careers" they have about 2000 people in sales, about 200 in engineering
support of sales (aka data engineers). About 600 in operations (even 24x7 what
is that small army doing?). Several hundred software developers of various
requirement sets. A couple hundred deep research R+D types. My numbers are
wrong and not in a quantity large enough to matter, at least for investment
decisions.

In a way your estimate is about right, takes a couple hundred front line
people to literally make it roll. Everyone else is trying to sell or support
or develop or otherwise glom on. And are more or less disposable in that they
aren't needed day to day to make the place roll. Yeah yeah I know, no
accounting dept will get noticed after a couple quarterly taxes are missed,
but just on a pure "who needs to show up tomorrow or else the doors close
forever" that number is only in the hundreds.

I've been doing this since the 80s for my own investment purposes and stock
trading based on published newspaper job reqs and more recently based on job
postings is not legally insider trading. If I were to apply and gather data
with or without signing a NDA that would be open and shut example of insider
trading, so I never invest in companies I apply to work at, just to keep
things perfectly clean.

I do extensively research jobs I apply to, and that sometimes freaks people
out when I walk in and have insider level knowledge of their operations just
from reading the last couple years of employment ads. Gotta keep the power
level masked when its unnecessary. "wait wait wait, how could you know we're
secretly opening a new engineering center in XYZ when we haven't even told our
current employees they're all getting downsized?" "Well you put an ad in the
paper to hire them in XYZ so what do you think I should assume, not my problem
if your employees don't read the papers."

I was originally inspired by blackhat social engineering stuff from decades
ago.. if they're trying to hide the make and model of the minicomputer you're
dialing into, don't spend days trying everything when you can just read off
the info from the employment ad for the "rsts 10.0 sysadmin" in the newspaper
a year ago or whatever.

------
system16
Apart from killing their third-party ecosystem, I think Twitter's biggest
failure has been their inability to monetize their huge celebrity and brand
base, and I wonder if this partly has to do with their "verified account"
system. How to charge celebrities/brands without pissing everyone off?

Top-tier celebrities and brands can and would easily fork out high fees to use
Twitter. But Twitter can't just charge some blanket fee to verified accounts
because right now, "verified accounts" are not exclusive enough. They also
include "key influencers", bloggers, industry people, other hangers-on (let's
call them Group B) and they can't/won't support the high fees and would
revolt.

Twitter could try and create a new way to categorize celebs/brands, but that
would confuse things and may make Group B users feel less elite: so they'd
revolt as well.

------
rch
My sense is that while Twitter has been able to hire some very talented
engineers (incl. but not limited to those I know personally), the high-level
technical leadership hasn't been particularly successful.

Is there room for an independent 'moonshot' team reporting directly to the
board?

------
jswny
I've thought long and hard about why I believe Twitter as a service isn't very
valuable to me and I thing I've come up with the answer. Twitter is great at
delivering live information. If I'm following my favorite artist on twitter
then I know immediately when his album drops. However, that one important
tweet that matters to me is mixed in with a 100 other tweets of people I
follow retweeting or posting irrelevant things. For that reason the situation
in which Twitter truly shines for me (instant, up to date information) is
overshadowed by the fact that many people also use Twitter to post funny
things which I don't care about.

~~~
davidbarker
Have you experimented with turning mobile notifications on for certain
accounts? By doing that, I've got a steady stream of tweets from interesting
people when I open the app and browse my timeline, but I don't miss tweets
from accounts I want to see immediately because their tweets are pushed to my
iPhone.

The drawback is that you have to get all of that account's tweets pushed to
you even if you only care about a few of them.

------
Raed667
Twitter should be bought by a non-profit and get re-opened to 3rd party tools
like it used to be.

I hate the current Twitter, but can't neglect the benefits it has for the
entire world (and not only twitter users)

------
throw2016
There is value in twitter. Even the people who joke about twitter probably
realise there is value in it.

There is still nothing that enables one to broadcast information and enable
real time conversations better than twitter for companies, governments orgs or
celebrities.

That twitter cannot extract value from these cash rich and price insensitive
entities is a gigantic mystery.

~~~
niftich
It's risky -- it's hard to compete with 'free', because it takes no money and
very little effort.

If Twitter charges even just a little for influencers to post, lots of them
will just shift more of their announcements to Facebook status updates -- a
somewhat similar feature of the other social app everyone already has
installed.

Despite no one platform offering exact feature+UX parity with Twitter, there
are several other free platforms that are good enough for people. If Twitter
makes changes that make posting on it harder, its still-organically-growing
competitors could see an influx of people who will choose to abandon Twitter.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
I'm used to seeing junk on Fb and constantly ignore it; I don't think Twitter
suffers from that.

~~~
fwn
In both cases, Twitter and Facebook, the content you see is entirely based on
who you follow.

------
bluthru
Twitter should have a tweet quota and charge people who tweet too much. People
who chase hashtags and reply with reaction gifs have turned it into low-brow
garbage.

~~~
kbart
I'm pretty sure tweet count is used as a growth metric somewhere, so it's not
gonna happen.

~~~
felipeerias
Same story with bots and "active users".

------
butner
Why the 4a PDT earning call? Ahead of opening of (TYO) Tokyo stock exchange
Friday am which trades Softbank?

~~~
JamesMcMinn
Their explanation, I believe, was that their planned time would have
overlapped with several other calls, so analysis requested that they moved it.

[https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=...](https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=995072)

------
booleanbetrayal
I have a market need of being able to broadcast messages megaphone-style to
the internet, but they have to be artificially constrained to ..

------
ricksplat
I'm just back from a holiday in south east Asia. All the time I was there I
was getting ads on twitter targetted to the local market (in the local
language) presumably based on my roaming IP.

Maybe my grasp is a bit simplistic but isn't this just intensely stupid? My
twitter profile is explicitly Western European is twitter's location based
advertising really just as dumb as matching IP addresses to regions?

If I were an advertiser I wouldn't be too happy about twitter claiming
'impressions' like this.

~~~
glandium
This is not limited to Twitter. I live in Japan, most ads I see all around the
web are in Japanese for Japanese stuff. I went to Germany a couple years ago,
and everything was German when I was there. This is even more ridiculous for
the unskippable 30s video ads on Youtube.

~~~
detaro
Meanwhile I'm German, live in Germany and for a while got english ads of the
style "Welcome in Germany! As an expat, let us sell you some private health
insurance!". What a mess.

------
dbg31415
How many people does it really take to run Twitter?

If they need more than 100 people I'd be really shocked.

~~~
adrenalinelol
I'd wager a bit more than that to _maintain_ existing services. But they
haven't given up on growth yet, disappointing news doesn't = throw in the
towel. If these rumors are true, best of luck to those affected.

~~~
notfromhere
Even to grow, does twitter really need 3,800 employees? The site hasn't
exactly seen much change in the past few years.

~~~
forgettableuser
Jonathan Blow gave a talk to Berekley college students a few months ago,
complaining about the poor quality in modern software.

He picks on Twitter in one part, showing the graph of the number of employees
by year, challenges their claims to the complexity of implementing Twitter,
and mocks a UI problem he just had.

Twitter starts at 7 minutes:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA)

~~~
dbg31415
[http://i.imgur.com/U4mHId3.png](http://i.imgur.com/U4mHId3.png)

Thanks. Good video.

~~~
flukus
How do you even grow like that? The current staff during that spike must have
spent most of their time interviewing people.

~~~
cpeterso
That spike is misleading because the chart jumps from "Jan '11" to "Dec '13",
23 months. The other columns are all 12 months apart.

~~~
sjnsjn
still, 100+ joining every month, that surely was not an easy task by any
means.

------
mrmondo
I don't really have any insightful input into this other than to say, I hope
they're cutting the people they most likely don't need.

Twitter is the only social platform I actually like and still use, and the
only thing that could replace it would be similar but decentralised and as
widely adopted.

Why / where are they failing - are they failing? I know more people on and
using Twitter than ever, many of those have left other aging social networks
after finding them irrelevant or too invasive of privacy.

Twitter is simple, Twitter is what it is and it doesn't try to be more than
that, it does what it does well and it always has done. This - I enjoy in a
product.

~~~
ghuntley
Agree. I would happily pay $50 to $100 a year just to keep the twitter
experience as-is.

------
pmiller2
I know this is premature, but I can't help but wonder what the effect of
Twitter going under would have on the Bay Area tech scene.

~~~
mmanfrin
Twitter employs around 3900 people total, 2300 in San Francisco (numbers are
from some random google sources, so may be off by a bit/time).

In the first quarter, Yahoo laid off 3,135 people in the Bay Area.

Twitter going under would be newsworthy, but I don't think make too much of a
splash in the job market -- at least not any more than the normal tides.

~~~
pmiller2
Maybe the loss of Twitter as a platform for social media self-promotion would
be more significant than the direct effects of 2300 people suddenly on the job
market?

~~~
niftich
Conversely, other platforms have already come along that target some of
Twitter's use-cases and offered better UX and user engagement. I'm sure they,
or a new player, could fill the void (successfully).

This is also less of a problem today (as opposed to years ago) when everyone
with a meaningful social presence cross-posts or maintains a split presence on
multiple platforms.

~~~
Ar-Curunir
Is this true? At least within the niche of security and crypto academia, I
find Twitter to be a _very_ useful tool.

------
bad_user
Came here to say that I love Twitter and am online on it far more than on any
other service.

I even clicked on its served commercials, because Twitter has my professional
network and managed to score some ads that triggered my interest, versus on
Facebook where I have a list of friends and acquaintances with which I've got
little in common with.

Their problem is their ad inventory and their targeting. They should serve
more ads and improve their targeting.

------
krzrak
Not cool for Twitter employees to learn about such thing from the press, not
officially from their management.

------
Overtonwindow
Something I've never been able to wrap my head around is how does Twitter make
money? I mean real money. Not valuation of eyeballs, not VC cash, but honest
to God profit? It has always baffled me and I wish I knew what the unicorns
say to the VC's when (hopefully) someone asks this question.

~~~
niftich
Selling display ads (ie. the same way Facebook and Google have done and
succeeded)

~~~
shard972
Didn't twitter say years ago they had a business model plan that _didn 't_
revolve around advertising?

------
jqueryin
One of Twitter's problem is not properly controlling their feed. I never use
their mobile or web client. I solely use a highly customized Tweetdeck. With
this experience, I never once see an advertisement. That's a huge loss for
Twitter.

Perhaps it's just me, but I wouldn't have a problem seeing advertisements in
my Tweetdeck feed if it meant they'd remain successful. I'd much rather see
Twitter succeed as it's the only platform I use to keep up with thousands of
professionals and news sources. It's entirely a different experience than
Facebook.

I think the Twitter community should suck it up and accept the fact that they
get served a couple of advertisements in order to support a news service and
contend delivery network unlike any other in existence.

~~~
system16
What's bizarre is I thought the whole purpose of cutting off/restricting
third-party clients was so that they could control what was in the feed i.e.,
serve advertisements.

If they still allow some/limited third-party clients and don't force ads into
those feeds, what was the point of burning their bridges with the developer
community?

~~~
snowwrestler
What Twitter did was install rate limits on free access to the API. This means
that to provide a full-service 3rd party client, the app developer has to pay
Twitter to get above the rate limits.

So: if your 3rd party app is not showing ads (as most don't), Twitter is still
getting some revenue from the app developer.

Personally, to me this seems like a reasonable trade off.

But a lot of 3rd party app developers could not afford to pay those fees, and
so lost their businesses. You can see how that would piss them off. But from
Twitter's perspective, they were just freeloaders.

------
sixtypoundhound
Was pondering this for another business and it seems relevant here. How many
people would be required to run "the core" of twitter (basic microblogs)?

Seems like that could be very lean...simple UI. A feed. A huge database. For
web and apps for the two major mobile O/S.

Now go one step out. Running ads on that feed. Core sales team (those with
paying accts) and administrative team. Need a revenue source. Add them back.

Now....what does everyone else do and is it generating cash?

My suspicion is:

\- First two groups are lean & covered by revenue \- Most of the rest of the
team is "strategic" yet not revenue generating \- The rest is support and will
scale up/down with headcount

Standalone twitter + ads feels like a business you can make ramen profitable.

------
s0me0ne
Wonder if Twitter will end up like Delicious. Even with Pocket, Diigo and
such, I'm not sure what people use to save bookmaks these days. Delicious went
through several hands, Diigo was almost there but their bookmarklet doesnt let
you know if you already have something tagged. Delicious abandoned their FF
plugin and so its basically not worth using the site anymore.

I'll be honest, I wont miss Twitter if it dies out, as I'm not a user. The
thing I hate is how Twitter killed RSS for many browsers and users. So if
Twitter dies, so be it for causing that to happen.

------
prirun
I can always tell when Twitter is in trouble, because I get a security notice
from them that there has been suspicious activity on my account, it has been
locked, and I need to login with an assigned password. (I never use my Twitter
account). Happened after the last quarterly earnings report and also
yesterday.

In other words, "We need more active users, so please log in soon so we can
count you as an active user."

------
chinese_dan
Twitter lost the trust of many users and are now suffering the consequences.
It was once supposed to be the place for the freedom of speech and truth and
is now just another arm of the left-leaning politicians in the US.

So many conservative/libertarian political figures and personalities have been
permanently banned from Twitter in the last year for only posting an opinion
that it can no longer be chalked up to circumstance.

Good riddance.

~~~
efdee
I would be interested in seeing a list of political figures and personalities
that got banned and the reason for their ban.

------
kriro
I feel like a takeover is only a matter of time. If you're Alphabet or
Facebook you're probably interested (I'd say Alphabet should be more
interested, for Facebook it's probably mostly a blocker play). The question is
how long do you let them "rot" to drive down the acquisition price?

------
mrcsparker
I wonder why Twitter doesn't do consulting. They have developed a lot of the
big data frameworks that we use today and understand how to scale.

They have the talent and are in a unique position of being Twitter.

~~~
Rapzid
Just out of curiosity, which ones have they developed?

~~~
niftich
Some software that Twitter has put out:

[1] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine -
[https://github.com/twitter/heron](https://github.com/twitter/heron)

[2] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system -
[https://github.com/twitter/finagle/](https://github.com/twitter/finagle/)

[3] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database -
[https://github.com/twitter/flockdb](https://github.com/twitter/flockdb)

[4] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent
distributed datastores -
[https://github.com/twitter/gizzard](https://github.com/twitter/gizzard)

[5] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached -
[https://github.com/twitter/twemcache](https://github.com/twitter/twemcache)

[6] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis -
[https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy](https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy)

~~~
moderation
[7] Mesos, abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away
from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic
distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively. -
[http://mesos.apache.org/](http://mesos.apache.org/)

Mesos was invented at UC Berkeley but developed and battle tested at Twitter.

------
netik
The sad thing is that the market will love this and the stock will go up,
while many engineers wonder where their job went, and mid-managers/execs will
reap a profit.

------
wh0rth
Cuts could mean a different direction which would be good for many peoples'
stock portfolios. Time will tell I'm sure but I'm hopeful.

------
santaclaus
app.net should have waited three years to pivot into a Twitter competitor...

------
cicero
I was at a presentation for high school students last week. At the end, the
presenter gave out contact information for Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
There was no mention of Twitter.

~~~
yolesaber
Cool anecdote, bro

------
NietTim
Ah, maybe people won't get shadow banned at the same rates anymore now. Just
maybe it's a good thing

