Twitter is so powerful. When Paul Graham wants to say something, he takes to Twitter to do it. Not Facebook. Not Hacker News. Not reddit.
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.
I find the exact same thing; on every other social platform you get out more or less what you put in and it's reasonably easy to build persistent acquaintances and even intimate friendships over time.
I decided to make a concerted effort to participate more on Twitter a few months back, but if you have a low number of followers hardly anyone interacts with you, it's like being in a big crowd where a few people have megaphones and everyone else is whispering. I suppose I could buy a bunch of followers for $ in order to seem more worth talking to but that's a bullshit tactic and I don't respect platforms where bullshit is rewarded. Twitter seems to function best as an adjunct to other media than as a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Frankly I feel Twitter has made the internet (and by extension, society) worse in numerous ways - the dumb 140 character limit (notwithstanding this being inherited from SMS), its appalling user interface, and the overuse of simplistic metrics to score everyone and everything they say, promoting the crudest sort of lowest-common-denominator social proof.
As far as I can see the best way to be popular on Twitter (other than already being famous to start with) is to be an ass, which will get social approval from people who feel the same way but are inhibited from expressing that for whatever reason. The good things about Twitter (speed and flatness) persist despite the other factors rather than as a result of them. If it shut down tomorrow I think people would get over the loss within a week.
I did the same a year ago, largely agree with this, though I would note that it has been extremely useful to follow journalists (and comedy people/funny users). Specifically in regard to journalists however, I feel, just barely, that its worth it. One is able to gain a sense of what these people actually feel, away from an editorial board. Which is both enlightening and highly useful, if you actually devote time to reading journalism. Its also been very useful for organizing, as in, "there is a rally ya'll, come to such and such, like, now". More than once I've missed emails or other communications that would have pulled me into an action, meeting or other event but saw references to it on twitter and was able to make it at the last minute.
One interesting comment during the debate was that many (liberal) journalists use Twitter as a side platform on which they feel comfortable voicing more personal views. While it is an acceptable practice in their circles, conservative readers often point to those tweets as evidence of liberal bias in the industry. Regardless of the professional ethical consensus, it may be a cause of distrust, and suggests a general problem of liberal journalists preaching to the choir.
Eh, I'm kind of in the Colbert (although far more to the left) view of "reality has a well known liberal bias". It was a great joke, and I think got to the heart of the screeching about "bias" from "conservatives" (reactionaries). I find the idea that there is a neutral impartial view laughable, honestly. But then, I'm a commie, so shrug.
A final thought as well, I think, whatever your politics, that much of the liberal bias talk from the right, especially the now unmasked far right, was simply language policing. It was an attempt to set the terms of the debate and pull the frame as far right as possible, which seemed to have been largely successful in my opinion. Thanks for the link and the comment, I'll check it out!
I get the idea behind the "reality has a well known liberal bias" shibboleth. I think, however, that a more accurate and less self-serving formulation is that reality is non-partisan. Reality doesn't care about anyone's cherished political views.
It's certainly contributed to the irreparable ending of the relationship between conservatives and the MSM (to the detriment of both, and society itself). But conservative journalists and pundits are no less shy about spouting off, provided they work for a conservative outlet. I think what you don't see is journalists at mainstream (read: liberal) outlets who happen to be conservative, instead of token conservative pundits like @DouthatNYT, expressing their views publicly.
I'm like you. I would rather a tweet than email from a stranger. It just feels less intrusive and better for quick a back and forth with a bit of personality.
It's interesting to see how the power and reach of every word on Twitter by politicians or journalists, yet Twitter is unable to profit from it. On the other hand, nobody cares about the power of a Facebook posting or an instagram, yet Facebook makes so much money of the frivolity.
It does seem like having early access to all tweets would be immensely valuable, even if it was only a second of lead time. (Sure, Trump tweets are valuable on their own, but market info has to be encoded into coarse-grained info about individually useless tweets as well.) Unless they have an explicit policy against it, Twitter must be selling this, right?
New business model: For $1M per tweet, you can have a 50ms head-start on tweets from Trump. Just Trump, just one tier of headstart/pricing. You prepay for the next N tweets. You can set time-ranges (like, "when the markets are open") for when you want to pay for the headstart.
I bet they could get a few tens of millions of revenue there. Probably HFT firms would at least experiment with it, right?
Might get them into some serious regulatory crosshairs.
> In 1983, Switzer was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an alleged civil violation of the laws prohibiting "insider trading" of securities. He defended himself as having innocently overheard the information while lounging on the bleacher behind some corporate insiders—at a stadium where Switzer was watching his elder son compete in a track meet. The case was tried in Oklahoma City United States District Court (before a special U.S. District Judge appointed from Kansas). The case was dismissed at the conclusion of the Government's case for its failure to demonstrate that there had been any purposeful disclosure to Switzer.
The situation is even more clear for Twitter. If I'm a marine biologist making the world's most detailed measurements of the ocean, I can clearly use this info to buy or sell stock in a fishing company, even if I don't release that info publicly. Likewise, I can sell that info to someone else who makes the trades.
After reviewing the info you provided, I beleive you are mainly right. The only exception i can think of would be a situation where trump possesed inside information due to his position, then shared it via twitter early. That would be a violation, but it gets complex, and im having trouble formulating the exact line.
Prices are not nonpublic info. You can get them a number of ways without using bloomberg. Most people in finance believe in at least semi-efficient markets which means prices are not material anyway
It's reminiscent of the way that broadcast news was transformed as profit became a motive (basically the themes that are explored in the movie 'Network').
News orgs were never in themselves meant to be profitable, yet they were at the heart of the big three network's identities (and had enormous reach).
Local ad networks masquerading as news organizations. Record labels and newspapers have a lot in common; they were global logistics companies first (the core competence of Atlantic was shipping highly-processed petrochemical discs around the world) and media companies not really at all.
What newspapers had was a lock on the business now owned by Craigslist, with the transport and fulfillment network (newsagents and delivery vans!) being the key asset. Once that went away they were no longer businesses.
They didn't see it that way, but that's because their core business was so good they could afford to delude themselves - it didn't matter that they didn't know what they were really doing, the business model was that powerful. Google is remarkably similar in many ways.
The networks were given broadcast spectrum in return for one hour a day of public service, which took the form of news broadcasts. This was taken quite seriously by the original owners of the networks as a solemn duty to inform the public. They built large, global news gathering organizations that were a source of pride to them personally. They practically competed to lose the most money on news. (IIRC, by the mid-80's losses were in the $300m/yr ballpark.)
By 1987, a number of factors - changes in ownership for the big 3 networks, upstart FOX network, the increasing importance of celebrity anchors on ratings, deregulation of media ownership laws and other factors - caused a mass shift towards looking at news as profit centers.
Ken Auletta's "Three Blind Mice" is excellent. (At least on recollection. It profoundly changed my understanding of the media when I read it 25 years ago.)
Newspapers have never had such constraints but there were laws limiting the concentration of ownership aimed at making sure people had diverse influences in any one market. For instance, TV channels could not be owned by the same company that owned a newspaper in the same market. I don't know enough off the top of my head to expand more usefully on that.
Also just got James Fallows' book "Breaking the News" – he's one of my favorite writers at the Atlantic, and so far it's a great book – don't know if it talks about this aspect of the news, but still worth checking out.
You can reach people on Twitter, but there's some question as to how much you can influence people. Periodically I see articles from people with hundreds of thousands of followers who admit to being unable to translate that into sales, or hits to their site, or votes, or whatever.
Twitter is a great platform to keep your name in the public consciousness. So... indispensable if you're a Kardashian. Other than that, though, it's not clear. A lot of people are wasting a lot of time building up a subscriber account that ends up being meaningless.
Facebook makes money because people give it a lot more information than they give twitter. Too much, IMO.
Snapchat has a novel engagement mechanism. Short multimedia interactive ads in a captured setting. The format has potential. The Snapstream keeps people hooked. It's basically a next gen Facebook but more private.
Look at all the articles written when Beyonce posts her pregnant body on Instagram as an example. we only think twitter has so much influence because thats where a lot of techies hang out.
Care to share which of pg's tweets you found powerful? I would say that when pg has something to say, he takes to his blog. I dont think his tweets are within an order of magnitude as valuable as his blog. And for that reason I don't agree with your assessment of Twitter.
I don't think you're giving the distribution mechanisms enough credit. The only reason that the POTUS's tweets hold so much weight is because every 24 hour news company reports on them endlessly. It gets power from magnification.
Twitter simplifies re-broadcasting and discovery..
Only people who know Paul Graham will know about his blog, but his tweets can be re-broadcast to a much wider audience through re-tweeting, who can be exposed to him without having sought him out or known about him in the first place.
I've discovered, and subsequently followed, probably half of my twitter feed through re-tweets from my existing feed.
I have to imagine that's the same for a lot of others.
That's funny. When I first started reading his blog, I had no idea who he was, and Twitter didn't exist yet. A friend emailed a link to me because he thought I should read it.
I definitely wasn't implying that there are no other ways for people to discover content, and email is of course still a very popular way for that to happen.
I still email links, and receive links by email, all the time ..
Torvalds. David Brin. Tim O'Reilly (although Tim uses or used to use multiple platforms in an ongoing fashion). Randall Schwartz. A few others I'm not thinking of right now.
Plus garnered a bit of a "tech"/thinker corner. I don't know whether it has any remaining vibrancy/growth, at this point, or whether its mostly a matter of inertia combined with the crapitude of other platforms for the particular communicating they are doing.
Too bad Plus was so thoroughly hosed from the start by political agendas.
OT: At Christmas, I stopped accessing Facebook. I thought it would be for a few days or a week. Coming up on two months, soon, and I haven't been able to make myself go back. Even with a relatively small set of FB friends whom I actually, personally know, and who are nice and not rabid and actually respond meaningfully to some of my own contributions, there.
In some ways, the impersonal, more technical content on Plus (and here, and etc.) is easier. There is no "missing aspect" as there is with FB engagement with friends.
Twitter? Gave up on that years ago. Tim O'Reilly had an interesting post or two about some of its positive, community aspects, in its early days. But now, it just mostly seems a megaphone for the loud and discontent.
And then, too, anywhere Trump et al. are and that seems to aid his lying megalomania. I'm not inclined to lend it the (incremental) support of my participation.
If he's a particular indication of their future, well, then, welcome to the gutter, Twitter.
Are you sure there weren't some sort of recruitment effort with at least some of those guys... Though you do see some tech pages out there, maybe because of Hangouts? shrug
I didn't know Tim O'Reilly was on G+ but ALL these recent posts are pop-politics and ugly at that! I thought you were referring to all Google services being tied in.
I don't know. Good point. I expect some, e.g. O'Reilly, were actively solicited.
I don't spend too much time in Plus. Brin has had a lot of political stuff, recently, although he's a bit mixed and individual in his opinions and they do tend to tie back to points modeled in his sci-fi writing.
O'Reilly I see less frequently. I suppose he's getting more "elder statesman", too.
Torvalds actually addresses some tech stuff. Though he has personal stuff, too -- he does not use it as a "tech blog".
Reminds me some of Tim Bray's "Ongoing" blog -- self-hosted -- that I haven't been to in a while. A personal take, on both tech and other stuff in his life. Whatever the topic, informed, intelligent, and thoughtful. Creative, too.
I don't think Plus is in any kind of a steady state. Even what I wrote about, may well be in decline. Maybe it was better a few years ago.
Regardless, this year's politics have really shocked a lot of people, and this is spilling over into erstwhile non-political venues.
Oddly, when I clicked on Linus's G+ link it redirected me to a G+ advertising sequence, complete with web popups. I had to click a second time to actually get there.
I think that may be my biggest issue with G+ (despite so few people using it)... they keep changing it. Facebook evolves much more slowly, so it's much more predictable and comfortable to the distracted and comfort-seeking social media user like myself. G+ is constantly experimenting and I can't easily pin down exactly what it is...
I agree with this, Twitter is still the best place for celebrities to interact with their fans. Elon Musk for example has unveiled more than a few of his ideas and dropped details of his products on Twitter instead of anywhere else.
Which is something of a strength and weakness of Twitter. It can be used for conversations but the 140 character limit makes it tough. As a result, Twitter is generally best used for people who are broadcasting things to a group of interested followers. If that doesn't describe you (either as a follower or a followee) then you're probably not going to find Twitter very useful.
I don't like that it forces me to go to a page to see everything they've posted. The whole reason I subscribe to things is to see all of those things. I can choose to hide things, they don't give me the choice to see everything. To me Facebook is fundamentally broken in that way.
Which a mailing list would accomplish the same thing. In fact, I would prefer I just receive email directly from people I follow, rather than a separate stupid app.
The reach of mailing lists is orders of magnitude smaller.
People have to sign up for a mailing list; and people who aren't signed up generally don't get your content. This is a stark contrast with Twitter, where content is shared at a significantly higher rate. I don't necessarily have to subscribe to a certain source to get content from them, if someone in my network decides to share that content. When was the last time you received a message that was sent over a mailing list that someone forwarded to your inbox?
I don't follow Elon Musk, but if he puts out an important tweet someone I follow will retweet him putting his content in my feed. An Elon tweet with some big announcement easily reaches an audience of millions. No mailing list has that kind of reach.
Yes but there's no reason it couldn't, I believe was somebody's point. Twitter doesn't do anything that's not possible by other means. Following is conceptually the same as subscribing. Sharing or retweeting is the same as forwarding. You're only describing differences in usage patterns, and network effects from popularity of the network. Not discounting those at all, just noticing nothing unique has been demonstrated.
The interaction is completely different. I can check on Elon's twitter whenever I want without having to subscribe. People can have conversations around his tweets without spamming strangers' inboxen. I can send you a link to one of his tweets and you can pass it on to whoever you want without exposing my address to your friends. I have no idea why you would compare the two.
You just described a mailing list with a web frontend. Perfect example: NANOG (North American network ops group)
Massive mailing list. Web enabled. Trivial cost. Deep links possible to share. EDIT: And more than 160 characters! Hallelujah! A format an actual discussion can take place in.
I compare the two because I'm old, tech is cyclic, and everyone reinvents the wheel. Twitter is, clearly, not special, and can't justify its valuation.
I use twitter to get instant updates on current news from reporters sitting in WH briefing rooms and other breaking news unfiltered from the people on the ground. I like reading quotes from what is happening real time and being able to respond before it even hits the live NBC news feed.
You just aren't going to ever have that with a mailing list. If you could we would be doing it.
Obviously it could be styled differently/"better" for mass consumption, but that aside, it still exposes private emails and full names of the participants.
And I think the character limit is part of what makes it valuable...I don't really want to read an essay, the forced concision is great for a lot of the use cases. And getting back to Elon, he probably doesn't want to engage in deep discussion with all those randoms, he wants to drop a juicy tidbit, build excitement and let the discussion happen elsewhere. When he has something more to say, he writes a blog post and tweets a link.
I'm actually not defending Twitter's valuation or business prospects, just the value or uniqueness of the service relative to something like a mailing list. I'm still not convinced they're so similar.
The barrier for a follow is so much lower than a mailing list. I am not going to sign up for a mailing list from a random comedian to send me their tour dates that 98% of the time aren't relevant to me. But I will put up with them Tweeting those date if their other Tweets are funny.
Twitter also has this element of being like a river you can dip into whenever you're inclined and ignore the rest of the time. As you say, I do subscribe to some newsletters and mailing lists but it's very easy to get overloaded and/or end up filtering things to a folder that you never look at. Twitter seems to strike a reasonable balance of utility/effort/distraction/etc. for a lot of things that email-oriented methods really don't.
Ah right..
Like that story last week about the writer that got so addicted to twitter that she had to close her account?
From my point of view it doesn't seem so easy and balanced.
I'm missing something..
You just said that you won't click a button to signup a newsletter that delivers you funny jokes and the tour dates of a random comedian, but you are more than happy to press a button to get exactly the same things but with the limitations that the funny jokes must be less than 140 chars.
There must be a reason if I never used and understood twitter at all..
Emails require more of my attention and they arrive whenever they are sent. Tweets require zero attention, they are easy to ignore, and I never see them unless I specifically seek them out by opening Twitter. Basically Twitter is much more voluntary than email.
I get this, but it's kind of funny to hear someone say Twitter's unique value proposition is that you can ignore it. As a non-user I must be extracting tons of value from it then! It's the poor users I feel sorry for!
Just joking around. But, not completely. The value you speak of is really the ability to spend your time on something potentially more worthwhile. People forget social media has an opportunity cost.
Twitter is way better for directly hype-building around those tweets. Although maybe a mailing list could be marketed in a similar way, of done cleverly.
> I know a lot of creators of nerd culture. Game designers, writers, comic artists. Old, gnarled, crabby, battle-hardened pros with decades of experience. You'd have heard of a bunch of them.
> They all have something in common. It never fails to amaze me, but a single mean email or bad review can send them into a spiral. Like, they'll still be obsessing over it days later. I think, "Wow. After all these years, they still won't let this stuff roll off of them?" And then it happens to me.
> So we filter our inputs.
> ...
> Some people are mean. Some people are crazy. Some people are both. I do not let people in these categories pour poison directly into my ear.
> ...
> Twitter was designed, from Day 1, to enable any random person to send messages directly to any public figure. In other words, from Day 1, it was designed to be an abuse and harassment engine. It's not a bug. It's a feature. All that abuse and controversy is how it gets clicks and money.
To fix this "problem" they've been spending money on human moderators to filter content, tags, and ban people. They're spending money on employees to remove discussions and eyes from the site, which counter intuitive if their goal is to become profitable, nor does it solve the problem ultimately.
I don't have a Twitter account, so the only way I see it is if something gets reposted on my FB feed or some other media outlet. Which generally means someone notable and/or famous for some reason. Personally, I'm okay with this level of filtering.
Twitter is only useful because "normal" media makes news about notable tweets.
I surely don't get my information from twitter. Would seem silly to get all my information (or "important" information from "powerful" people) from a hundred character sound bites.
When people talk about getting their news from Twitter, they don't literally mean they never leave Twitter for information. 140 characters is enough for a headline and a link; you click through to articles that interest you.
Instagram has notionally the same dynamic as twitter but somehow they do a lot better at convincing their eye balls that they are welcome on the platform and have a voice. Or at least it seems to me.
I share the same feeling when using Twitter with a following mainly consisting of friends. If the sole purpose was to communicate with friends, why do so publicly on Twitter?
There is a sense that you can connect with influential people on Twitter, but the truth is your voice just gets lost in a sea of noise.
It's basically a publishing system. On Twitter I generally put only professional broadcasting related items for 90% of the content. Blog posts, that kind've thing. I rarely even read it.
There's even an app in the Mac App store that a friend of mine wrote called Wren that is just a simple little "store and tweet" system. Doesn't attempt to read anything, just lets you keep it on your desktop to tweet stuff periodically. That sums up my usage of Twitter.
It's largely replaced press releases. While people used to send out releases to outlets, now they tweet it and outlets follow you and report if they think it's news worthy.
I've found twitter works okay for discussing small scale events. Local journos tweet the goings on of city council and citizens and councillors and journos pile into the conversation. Muni politics is my hobby, but it does shine for this so I assume it extends to similar fields of small-scale news.
This type of statement reminds me of being in the music business (for the short period of time I was in it). Everyone would always hype their artist as the best thing since sliced bread. "You gotta hear this guy" "She's got an amazing voice" "They are so powerful". While I heard a lot of amazing talent — the fact of the matter was that they weren't "It". No matter how much marketing and promotion went behind them, they never grew beyond a decent sized market segment.
I do agree with you saying that Twitter has powerful impact. It's the primary social media network I use to get information from the development community I follow and I don't even use Facebook anymore. That being said, I'm starting to wonder if I'm in the same boat as the people promoting artists that were just never destined to be mega-stars.
I don't use twitter so if I'm wrong about this, I stand by to be corrected, but with twitter, I thought you can only reach people who have already chosen to listen to you.
It's powerful in that it's fast and can reach your followers quickly, and hope that they pass it on to non-followers, but it's fundamentally restricted in that you can't twitter to people who don't already follow you; the very people you need to reach most, given that followers are self-selectingly already on-message.
Twitter lets you mention anybody. Unless they've blocked you, they will be notified that you mentioned them. It's like /u/username on Reddit, but on Twitter it's the standard way to address people.
Anyone have any thoughts on turning Twitter into a publicly funded utility? It's fraught with difficulties, and maybe unconstitutional, but as you say Twitter is an extremely powerful tool and it would be a tragedy to lose it just because it can't find a way to extract money from its users.
Are you really asking to get money from the taxes that everyone pays for a dubious utility service as twitter?
If you really enjoy it finance it with your money.
I already finance organisations that are much more worth my money than a glorified newsletter.
It's a sad world in which we are living.
If I had a twitter account probably I should have tweeted my really deep analysis in 140 chars.
Wait for it.
Public funding would be massively problematic (especially in this political climate), but I agree about wanting to conserve the utility even if it's not a good way to make money. I'm surprised that a distributed open alternative hasn't appeared by now.
I've never seen a company in such an advantageous market position as Twitter, do so little with so many employees. They benefit from so much free advertising through self-promotion where people proudly display their twitter handle on TV or at the end of news stories and articles yet they're still unable to achieve any growth or noticeably improve their product.
From the outside it looks like they're at a virtual feature freeze and stand-still meanwhile all other Tech giants are firing on all cylinders with a continuous stream of new features and products.
Meanwhile Twitter struggles at implementing the most requested feature for many years - to edit Tweets. They're also in a prime position to benefit from Live video which they still can't capitalize on, there's no discovery and you can't even subscribe or get any notifications to the shows you're interested in, instead all you see is a tiny animated gif in the corner that's easily ignored as an Ad to show you what's playing.
I don't see how Twitter can continue as an independent company, the best thing that can happen to them is to get acquired and get some new blood in charge of product development, unfortunately there's so many trolls and hate speech on Twitter that no-one wants to touch them - another area they continue to flounder on.
When a tweet is reported on the TV news, people only see a screenshot. People aren't going to know if it was edited, when it was edited, or what was edited.
Many would also be pissed if after they retweet something, the original tweet changes in a meaningful way.
it is. if you give people the ability to edit tweets they could switch them out to something obscene when they get embedded in a news article, for instance. the whole point of twitter is to have small, public, immutable statements tied to someone's name.
2) Charge developers for API access based on usage.
3) Incorporate some sort of single payment solution to facilitate ease of charging users for payment without users needing to give credit card details to developers (e.g. like Apple does with the AppStore).
4) Let third party developers worry about how to get users to pay by providing things of value (for various definitions of value).
I think this could actually work in a few years. Developers will have long forgotten about the last time Twitter crushed everyone relying on their API. Then, once their revenue is up the power will go to their heads and they can repeat the cycle all over again.
Twitter's operating expenses are on par with Tesla's. Not to diminish how hard it is to manage Twitter's load but their spending is way out of proportion. And their revenue is on the order of 2 bn/year; there's no fundamental reason they can't be profitable.
I really like(d) Twitter. I feel it has played a huge role in democratizing public opinion, so that I don't just create my opinion based on what media houses throw at me. For me, it narrowed the gap between so called "celebrities" and normal people. It made possible for me to interact with and get insights from people whose work I care about.
I feel so bad about the poor execution on their product side. They get free marketing - they are all over the tv, news websites etc. So many popular people use Twitter to share information. What more can they ask for?
There are so many things that Twitter could've done first just because it was in a position to like no-one else:
1. Media sharing: absolutely ridiculous experience to the point that people share images/video on some other platform and end up posting the links in tweets. Even then, for an consuming user, the browsing experience is shit. WTF twitter?
2. Content sharing: twitter as a platform has way more relevant content (URI's, first person messages etc) than any other news/media platform. What do they do with it? They do nothing. Twitter can learn so much about my interests from so many signals that I (used to!) give them - they do nothing to help me read content that interests me.
3. Live: there is no better place than twitter to potentially learn about what's happening right now. How do they facilitate live content sharing? By having a completely different app for video (periscope) which creates a fragmented user experience.
4. Fun: they had vine - they kept it as a separate app (again creating fragmentation) and eventually killed it. How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?
5. Spam: for all the attention that fake news is getting right now, Twitter has been in a unique position to innovate in this area. Unfortunately, afaik, it has done nothing.
> How are you going to attract young users if you don't keep on trying new, fun, cool stuff?
This is definitely true. They don't at all try to get the young demographic while FB always makes small changes to keep it fun(video profile pics, reactions etc).
| Om Malik is the most recent of many people to ask why Twitter is such a big deal.
| The reason is that it's a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
| Curiously, the fact that the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an advantage. Because they haven't tried to control it too much, Twitter feels to everyone like previous protocols. One forgets it's owned by a private company. That must have made it easier for Twitter to spread.
Has anyone explored the design space that Twitter is a member of? It seems like it's just a cut-down version of publish-subscribe with a couple of eponymous channels (write, read) per user (and then the complexities of message threading).
The invention of hashtags was an attempt to add adhoc pub-sub channel support (not, as they are seemingly sometimes assumed to be, a metadata/folksonomy thing or an opportunity for a pithy closing phrase.)
All this is easy to duplicate. Is any of it even patented by Twitter?
What Twitter should do is extraordinarily obvious.
They should get very lean. Their platform has real value, which is why they're not disappearing in terms of use. There is also no replacement for what they provide and how they provide it, as of now.
At $2.4 - $2.6 billion in annual sales, they should be generating $600 to $800 million in net income. It's an absurdity of mismanagement that they're not. Their margins should be extremely high. At that level of net income, they can sustain a ~$20 billion market valuation and remain fully self-sustaining while they focus on growth + product.
They built Twitter as if it was going to be a juggernaut with high perpetual growth. They've been scaling back that structure very slowly, which is a mistake. They need to pull the band-aid off a lot faster, the crazy growth days are over.
If Wall Street doesn't give them a reasonable multiple on their new highly profitable structure, they should then work with perhaps a Ballmer + private equity + other insiders, to take Twitter private, where it can get out from under the Wall Street quarterly rat race.
I keep wondering about their part-time CEO. That has got to have some impact on the company culture. Just imagine how you would feel if your CEO couldn't be bothered to commit to the company full-time; would you in turn make suboptimal decisions through apathy? And then multiply that by everyone in the command chain.
I was going to type something like this and gladly found another person with similar thoughts. I firmly believe this is the right direction to go.
Of course, it's easy to suggest. I have to wonder though - what could really be the need for so many expenses? Is it impractical to cut down significantly and ride the success of the tech itself and sustain it with a much smaller set of teams?
Given the choice between believing stock analysts and stock prices, I err on the side of believing the price.
The price is set by people betting their money based on all available information INCLUDING stock analyst opinions. Any stock analyst's opinions are ALREADY factored in the price. Unless you have a reason to believe either that the market is irrational or that you have a more informed opinion, there is no more reliable prediction that you can make of future stock prices than current ones.
And remember, there are many, many, many billions of dollars looking for any market irrationality or lack of information so that investors can profit off of mistakes in current stock prices.
at what point do we all wake up from the momentary lapse of reason and admit that Twitter is not a good idea? it's not a good way to communicate (unless propaganda and vicious harrassment is what you're going for). it's not a good way to make money. it's not a good way to advertise. it's not good for anything really.
I still think it is pretty good for following interesting people. I have signed off from Facebook because I kept getting drawn into useless political discussions. That happens on Twitter, too, but it doesn't lend itself to neverending arguments in the same way. And it is easier to follow a diverse crowd of people.
Is it over? And the end result has nothing to do with the value of Twitter, it gave people a way to communicate when gov't was trying to shut them down.
I think Twitter's business model should be to charge users based on the number of followers they have. Give them a free threshold of say 10K followers, and then charge them a fee after that. Users clearly benefit, and often profit, from their large follower base. Twitter should profit from it too.
>Give them a free threshold of say 10K followers, and then charge them a fee after that. Users clearly benefit, and often profit, from their large follower base. Twitter should profit from it too.
Interesting idea, in theory. In reality, the "thought leaders" will simply move to another platform that is "free". Is Twitter markedly different than Facebook/G+/Instagram/Snapchat/email?
The 'thought leaders' are the product. They're the reason new people sign up. It would probably be better to implement something like twitch where you can 'subscribe' to someone with lots of followers for a small fee that twitter can take their cut of.
Or the inverse -- the Patreon model. Twitter already had the hard stuff down (network effect, verified users). Add some content distribution model and bingo, paid followers.
WhatsApp was bought because it was popular in India and Brazil, markets that have historically been weaker for Facebook Messenger. Together, they ensured that Facebook would get a nigh-insurmountable lead in marketshare over Google in the messaging space [1].
Twitter in neither a threat to anyone, nor a strong candidate for a defensive purchase [2][3][4]. The two companies are hardly comparable.
Yeah but people don't like being monetized. If someone has to pay to get a tweet in front of you then it's probably because nobody would bother to spread that information for free, so chances are any sponsored tweet has low value to the viewer. Conversely if you can have huge reach by paying then the (slim) value of social proof becomes meaningless because you're not really popular, you just bought the digital equivalent of a billboard in an attempt to seem popular. Adding too much money lowers the overall value proposition.
Being bought doesn't mean it had the ability to turn a profit. I don't think WhatsApp would have been able to do this on its own at the donation-ware level prices they were asking for ($0.99/year).
Twitter is the perfect case of a technology company that should have never gone public. They should have followed their valley peers with inflated valuations and no actual business and take private equity and foreign investment. Wall Street calls bullshit when they see it, and smart people short these types of companies. Silicon Valley doesn't provide a way to short these propped-up companies, they just continue to self-promote themselves on private equity and foreign investment. Wall Street is the most perfect market in the world.
Twitter is useful, but needs to be smaller as a business. If they focus on their core business, tweets, and get rid of at least half the employees, they'll be profitable. They just have to accept that they're no longer a growth company.
Between the censorship, the "banning people for reporting child porn" thing, and the lack of new products and features (what are they spending so much money on, they spend as much as Tesla for crying out loud!) I think it's well deserved scorn from Wall Street.
> When analysts start to throw in the towel on a company, that is not a good sign.
I've been led to believe that is the exact opposite of the truth. Isn't the consensus most bullish at the top and most bearish at the bottom? Its almost self evident that a stock is most hated when it is low and most liked when it is high. That's not to say that it can't go lower and so from a short term trading perspective it might not be good, but at some point the sellers will be exhausted and shorts will have to be covered and the trend will reverse. Unless Twitter they are so broke that they are going out of business, at some point it will become a good buy.
I was eyeing up the chart for evidence of this, because my knee-jerk reaction was similar to yours.
I'm still not sure how to judge this. The stock is essentially at the same place it was last year. There was some growth through Sept, Oct (hmmm...election??) but then it came back down to the mid-teens.
At this point, the stock is trading higher than expectations, which I think could be a good thing.
I didn't know about the earnings call when somebody mentioned Twitters disastrous stock price yesterday, I took some of that to be due to Snap filing, and investors looking at the market realising that much of Twitter's revenue will be moving over to Snap. That has probably already happened, but putting an IPO out likely raises a few eyeballs.
Lofty valuations are based on expectations of a lot of growth in subs and $/sub.
Even though they have a lot of users and some $/sub - without the growth it won't justify the valuation multiple.
So they have to get priced more like a normal company, with normal growth rates.
Which is the 'bubble burst' that so many post-IPO companies have to face. There's a few that can keep it going, or make up for it in other ways ... but not Twitter.
I feel Snap may be in the same category: their offer at least today is somewhat nichy. My mother uses Facebook, but will never use Snapchat as it is today.
I'm not sure I'd compare Snap with Twitter. Twitter has essentially flat-lined. Snap has only been monetized for a little over a year now and has at least demonstrated that they're capable of bringing in revenue, based on their ~$350M in 2016 and $1B 2017 projection. They're just beginning and I think they'll find more ways to capitalize on their large user base in the future.
I see your point - but when Twitter went public, they were still growing, and their valuation was lofty, based on expectations of considerably more growth.
Snapchat is in possibly a weaker situation: they are not making any money - and in order to justify their valuation, they really do have to grow for a long period of time.
I believe that Snap is 'similar to Twitter' in that Snap will not become like Facebook - i.e. 'ubiquitous and incumbent'.
I believe that Snap will likely 'hit a wall' in growth at some point.
The greater risk is that Snapchat may be a fad.
Twitter 'was a fad', but when the hype died down - they are still kind of a broadly usable tool for media, celebs - Tweets are used extensively in reporting coverage. This gives a lot of stickyness to the platform.
Snap ... is the 'zen cool' thing for 18-26 year olds ... but that could change very quickly. There's no reason that their user base can just switch to FB messenger (where everyone else is), SMS or whatever to do 'regular communication' when they are too old to be 'sharing irreverent stories'. And the 14-year-olds today, when they turn 18-ish may have some other cool thing to do.
So if we can separate the 'fad' and 'utility' parts of the platform - Facebook has a good deal of 'utility' that applies to a very broad base. Twitter has some 'utility' to a narrower base.
I'm weary that Snapchat just doesn't have the kind of 'utility' that it needs to survive after the 'fad' dies down.
That said, they have been good at innovating and 'staying cool'. A lot of brands manage to 'stay relatively cool'. They could adapt/evolve into something consistently cool, or consistently useful. Possibly. But there's nothing on the roadmap that says they would.
$/sub, sub growth, 'cost of acquisition' of each sub, (and assumptions about margins) is what 95% of the valuation is based on.
Now that they are 'going IPO' they're not going to be judged so much on 'lofty ambitions' and 'intangible market opportunities' - they are going to be judged mostly on 'how much free cash flow' they can generate over time.
So, $/sub (minus the cost to acquire each sub) and some assumptions about operating margins gives you the how much free cash flow per customer they can expect. This is widely different on different platforms.
Sub growth tells you how many customers investors can expect over time.
Hence profits.
Obviously it's very crude, and there's a lot more to it - but that is the most essential, basic economic equation that investors will look at to determine a valuation.
Snaps $/sub right now is negative at the 'net' level - i.e. after R&D, etc. - but the key metric people will be interested in is the 'gross' revenue (and profits) per subscriber. The idea being - one day, 'R&D' costs will stop growing so much, and customer base will still grow quite a lot. R&D and Operational costs are spread over an ever increasing user base, which will put the per-subscriber net margins into the positive.
Twitter is a perfect example of something that could have worked as a small company with moderate expectations and a tight budget. Instead they presumed that "eventually" the money would catch up to their Fortune 500 ambitions, if they could just get enough eyeballs.
Welcome to the new "real world" of the "Long Tail," Twitter. Turns out that being the #2 social network, just like being the #2 music streaming service, the #2 ride-sharing network, or the #2 search result means a big step down in importance, reach, and profit potential in the Long Tail world (and being #50 puts you in a completely different zip code altogether).
> Twitter created expectations that it cannot meet.
Yes but in reality they can massively scale down, layoff hundreds and be a very profitable company. How many employees do you believe it really takes to run Twitter? Maybe 100?
After they do this, someone can buy it and take it private and print money for 10 years.
It's impossible to follow a twitter conversation if you don't understand how twitter works. It's a huge barrier to entry for new users and I don't think they'll start growing again until they fix this problem
Would you please suggest a good overview of this? I've been on Twitter for years and sometimes use 3rd party clients, and my UX still sucks. I can follow Twitter conversations but find it virtually impossible to initiate one. I limit the time I spend using it because it makes me feel autistic, whereas I find other social media liberating.
After today reading theRealTrump for the first time and in general realising how much twitter is his tool of communication with his underlings, since the traditional medias belong to a different group, my first thoughts were actually, that this might be a powerplot against trump ...
I think I need to stop reading political news for a while and get out of the door again ...
HN folks, does every post about Twitter need to be made about the president? The unwarranted injection of politics into every single discussion is getting very, very tiring.
The article didn't mention him. He's not even in the top 25 most followed or active people on the site. Obama had more influence as #3! And yet, as I write this, every single comment in this damn thread mentions him. [1] Enough already! This is the first time I've wanted to flag an article for its comment section rather than the article itself.
This kind of comment, though surely well-intended, unfortunately doesn't push us in the right direction. The best move is to just post civilly and substantively on the topic at hand.
Edit: do flag unwarranted injections of politics, because you're right that we're not here for that either.
Given the comment score over the past few minutes, this is a contentious issue, and not one I'm willing to risk my flagging privileges (or other backend consequences like slowdowns or post throttles) for.
"Commenting substantively" about Twitter does nothing about the political flamebait that always winds up in threads about the subject, yet the only tool I have to combat it could blow up in my face.
Trump and Twitter are in many ways inseparable and at least tangentially relevant to the article. It's unique that a sitting president would utilize a social platform so prominently, that so many people would have the opportunity to engage with him directly. It's argued that Trump's uptick in Twitter usage has raised its overall visibility as well.
So, it's not unfair to bring him up. It's also not inherently political to do so.
> He's not even in the top 25 most followed or active people on the site. Obama had more influence as #3!
I think that's entirely the wrong metric. Obama used/uses Twitter to duplicate content that is being released as a press release, TV appearance, etc. etc.
Trump does not. His thoughts are "first on Twitter", and the combination of that plus the fact that he is the President of the United States means that he is an absolutely integral part of the Twitter story, whether you like it or not.
As of right now there are three posts that mention Trump: One that's down voted to the bottom of the page, one where it's just one out of three points being made, and the third is yours.
"The unwarranted injection of politics into every single discussion is getting very, very tiring."
Some folks won't be satisfied until everybody is clearly aware that they're deeply, DEEPLY unhappy with the 2016 election results.
This will continue for another three years, at which point things will change to how Candidate X is so much better, and we'll hear about Candidate X in everything. If Candidate X loses the 2020 election, expect a repeat of the current situation.
I don't think your parent's sentiment necessarily has anything to do with the results of the election. Even before Nov. 8 2016 there's been plenty of debate about how much politics should play a role in HN, even beyond what the guidelines.
This is not the first time a member has mentioned wanting less politics. It's perfectly legitimate to want to be able to discuss articles without having politics added to it. The current submission makes no mention of politics in general or Trump in particular. Given how much discussion of politics is going on in other threads, it's understandable to want the bar to to drag it in to be higher. How much of what is being said is new?
I based my post off of this part of the parent comment: " And yet, as I write this, every single comment in this damn thread mentions him."
And not only was that poster right, at the time it was written, it is a frigging epidemic everywhere right now. On HN, on Reddit, on every platform; if the topic at hand is not tightly focused and apolitical, somebody eventually will make a derogative Trump comment.
Some of it is purely for humor. Some of it is pure snark. Some of it is virtue signalling. But almost all of it is noise, not signal.
What this thread has taught me is that fighting this trend, even on HN, is not worth the time. The haters are going to hate, and there's no point suggesting that maybe it's not a good place for it, lest you want your comments greyed.
Trump uses Twitter, therefore any topic about Twitter is about Trump by proxy, or something.
Have you considered that this is a reflection of the way Donald Trump communicates? He injects his opinions on subjects he patently knows nothing about into public discourse on a regular basis, relying on startlement more than substance - like a shock jock on the radio. The social, political and governmental power he now wields is immense. I have to keep an eye on his tiny tweets of terror because random shit he posts there has the potential to directly impact my life in the short term.
This is precisely why lots of people were saying he should give up tweeting (at least on his personal account) once he took office, and rely on formal/official channels of communication for anything important. He has demonstrated a a preference for demonizing individuals and particular businesses and institutions, and where he leads, a mob of deplorables often follows.
You complain about being tired of hearing/seeing people talking about Donald Trump all the time, so presumably you feel unable to ignore it. It seems not to have occurred to you that people who dislike Trump are even more sick of hearing about and from him. Imagine being a Mexican person and hearing yourself and your family described as 'rapists, drug dealers and criminals' on an almost daily basis for the last 18 months every time you watch the news.
"You complain about being tired of hearing/seeing people talking about Donald Trump all the time, so presumably you feel unable to ignore it."
When noise drowns out signal, no amount of ignoring will help.
People being passive-aggressive about politics in a non-political venue are neither changing the political system nor contributing to the venue in which they comment.
While I would like to see this as the future of social relations, I doubt it in just about every aspect.
The reason services like twitter and snapchat are so dominate is because they're so easy to use and uniform across everything. It's why everyone now prefers slack/discuss to IRC and other legacy channels (among features aswell). Typical users don't have time to research and setup software, they simply just want to use it.
I understand that there's federated signup and all that, but the second you have to explain what any of that means to a user, you've basically lost them.
On the first listed GNU site:
This is the place for you who are tired of private companies controlling your conversations and contacts and selling them for profit.
While I care deeply about what this statement has to say, I don't think my ideals fall in line with the average twitter user. They simply don't care about who's profiting off of it, as long as they get to announce their next vlog.
of course, this isn't going to happen by itself. foss is famously bad at user acquisition and ui/ux. the interesting thing about federated (or federate-able) social networks is that they aren't designed as silos.
i'm in the very early stages of building a meta-social network[1] thing on top of matrix that gives you bi-directional access to gnu/social, irc, reddit, nntpchan, &c.
while I care deeply about what this statement has to say, I don't think my ideals fall in line with the average twitter user. They simply don't care about who's profiting off of it, as long as they get to announce their next vlog.
put your money where your mouth is and help us[2] fix it.
I think twitter needs to be saved. It obviously needs a lot of work especially with language and spam tweet filtering and fake accounts. But it is totally doable.
Why can't twitter charge a certain fee to official verified accounts of famous people who do use the platform to engage with their followers. And to justify their fee they can provide them with more tools at hand. I am not a very heavy twitter user but it is one social network product that has the power to do good and bad in real world.
Here's something from a heavy Twitter user that could save Twitter:
1) Offer ad freedom. Twitter has IIRC 300M users - if only 10% of these pay 1€ a month, that's 30M a month or 360M a year. Way more than enough to keep the lights on, and maybe even enough to replace lost ad revenue.
2) Open up the app ecosystem again - allow third party clients features like DM pictures and polls. Many people are fed up with the official mobile client.
3) Donald J. Trump. About 25M people follow him, and ad slots on his account should fetch a boatload of money. Not to mention that people sign up for Twitter just to read his latest brain f.rts... these could all be "upconverted" to full-on engaging Twitter users.
Surveys greatly overstate such figures because it is much easier to say "yes I want to pay" than to actually hand over money. Also, I would argue that Facebook is more important for most users than Twitter (their central problem).
and therein lies the problem, 10% of Facebook's MAU is 180 million, that nets them 1.8 billion a year. They made 9 billion dollars last quarter. It doesn't make sense for them to switch to $10 a year.
Even if they show ads to remaining users, most of the paying users are going to end up being avid users of the service who are probably more valuable for ads.
Regarding your first point. 360M is about half of their quarterly revenue. If they aren't able to survive with that amount, how would they survive with 360M a year.
Trying to profit on the backs of regular users won't work for Twitter. Charging a regular fee, loading up on enough ads to keep investors happy, or anything else like that is a quick way to lose a bunch of users. Instead, Twitter need to think like Google or any other ad network. They should charge those who make money by tweeting. The industrial tweeters, the people flogging their sites or albums or hair products or whatever. If you've ever hired a social media consultant, Twitter should be charging you thousands of dollars a year. I'm sure there's some level of "tweets read per week" that would catch Kim K while sparing most high school tech bloggers.
They really do need to do this. Any embedded tweets for Trump/about Trump should automatically have an ad underneath them. They've never had more eye balls on their tweets than now and they should capitalize on that.
I use a third party client (because the official one does not, for example, support multiple accounts) and I never saw ads.
Note this is not the client filtering them out (they'd be banned in an instant) it's just that the API only returns what's actually in my timeline.
Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.
> I use a third party client (because the official one does not, for example, support multiple accounts) and I never saw ads.
Huh? On Android I have three accounts and at least that works fine (given various exceptions, but generally it's OK). Not sure about iPhone client.
> Now that I think of it, it's the same with tweetdeck.. so, if you're a power user (the kind who'd be more likely to pay for the service) you already don't see them.
TweetDeck is a horrible mess for multiple accounts, from a UX perspective...
Twitters yearly revenue is more than 2 billion. So 360 million wouldn't solve their problem.
Twitters problem isn't that they don't make money. They make a lot of money. Their problem is that their stock-valuation means that in the future their investors expect them to make ridiculous amounts of money, and they don't have any obvious way to get there.
The same goes for many of the most influential people in the world.
Twitter has incredible utility for powerful people but very limited utility for average people. Maybe the exact opposite of facebook. On Facebook, my friends interact with me. On twitter, I speak into the void.