zlacker

So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down.

And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.

>>milesf+(OP)
Also App.net charged money for use.

>>milesf+(OP)
Twitter finances (TTM):

revenue: $2.52B gross profit: $1.49B

It's only losing money because of stock grants.

>>milesf+(OP)
With the type and amount of attention Twitter maintains it has multiple, very viable business models. Notably advertising, data sales & company tools.

>>fraser+Y1
Which is a lesson in how VC can easily destroy a viable, profitable business with a "money-chasing-money" strategy.

>>nickba+e3
How do you figure that?

1) VCs own hardly any shared of Twitter[1]

2) Stock grants are used as compensation for people working at Twitter, NOT something that benefits investors (except in the sense people are working at the company the investors invested in I guess).

It's easy to blame VCs for everything, but I don't see how this makes any sense at all in this case.

[1] http://www.recode.net/2016/8/11/12417064/twitter-stock-owner...

>>nl+55
Who is in line for a buyout before other investors and at what multiplier? That information is usually not public and can be more important than what percentage of ownership a particular investor has.

>>nickba+e3
Twitter IPO'd over 3 years ago.

>>milesf+(OP)
> And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model.

...more pertinently, App.net didn't have one either - and they had an open API, charged real money and did all the things HNers' idealized version of Twitter would.

>>fraser+Y1
Okay, but don't these stock grants substitute for salary? It's not like Twitter could just stop granting stock with no ill effects.

>>sangno+ec
Maybe because the reason people use twitter isn't because it is useful but rather because

Either:

It is cool. So we must use it.

Or:

Everyone else is using it so we must use it too.

Seriously:

140 characters? Feature?

Everyone can read everything? Feature?

The two biggest technical "features" of twitter can be arrived at by dumbing down either google+ or facebook 98%.

>>reitan+Td
I have no idea why anyone even likes Twitter. Beyond broadcasting, there is nothing of value on it. Every tweet has absolutely inane replies. You can at least find some half-decent commentary in Facebook post comments, but Twitter is just insane babble

>>puranj+se
Two reasons:

1. It's where the people are. I don't think anyone is 100% loyal to it, but you have to respect its reach.

2. Instant answers. I can get insight on news via Twitter well before I can get it anywhere else. On top of that, I can get it from the people I want, many of whom are Tweeting hours before they are able to get an article published. This is great for sports, politics, etc.

I personally don't use Twitter nearly as often as I once did, and I rarely find reason to Tweet, but I do enjoy browsing it from time to time.

>>puranj+se
See, that's the funny thing. For me Facebook is full of inane babble and people being superficially nice to each other and incredibly ... provincial? It's like a bad sitcom.

Twitter on the other hand is full of interesting conversation, people speaking their mind, and great interaction and interesting insight. The amount of tech things I've learned from cool people on twitter is far far greater than Facebook.

Experience of both mediums prob depends on who you're interacting with. For me, Twitter is where the interesting people are.

Or as someone put it once: Facebook is for people you used to know, Twitter is for people you want to know.

>>puranj+se
How a social platform looks like to any given person depends on the people that person associates with. If twitter is inane babble to you that says more about what you did with twitter than about twitter itself.

>>fraser+Y1
NYT story on the matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/business/dealbook/twitter...

TL;DR -- Twitter paid out about $680M in grants

>>puranj+se
Don't think of it in terms of technology, think of it in terms of people. We live in the future where not only can you watch your role models on TV, but you can also follow them on Twitter and read their daily thoughts and opinions in real time.

>>sangno+ec
Right - it seemed at the time it might become e an idealized version of Twitter. My hope was that by having to pay money to get in, it would keep out the shills and noise. I was a paid member for several years but it became clear that none of the people I followed moved so it became a ghost town.

>>reitan+Td
I consider "everyone can read everything" one of the most important parts of Twitter.

I wouldn't use Twitter if it was limited to people I already know, for instance.

>>puranj+se
Everyone has their own preferences. For exmaple, I have no idea why anyone even likes Facebook ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Twitter is the only Social Network I use.

>>puranj+se
For instance, infosec and developer community is mostly on twitter. Great for trolling and has clean interface unlike notorious Facebook clumsy UX.

>>macspo+m
Did it? I remember registering lots of accounts just when it launched because I had a column in tweetdeck with a search that was something like "app.net/invite-code/" (all invite codes URLs started with the same pattern) so every time someone posted an invite URL I got a notification and I could register a new account ;^}

>>milesf+(OP)
I think we would all be better served if the blockchain could be replicated and tweaked to become a new public publishing platform that is the equivalent of Twitter today. Access to the blockchain would then become a function of clients who follow the established spec/protocol, analogous to browsers and the web today. There are a couple of startups that are already pursuing the idea, but I think that this could only become realistic if Twitter were to die.

>>milesf+(OP)
Yeah it's pretty ridiculous. Also, Twitter still has an anti-developer stance. For the shutting down of App.net despite Twitter's unchanged politics to make sense, I think it's because the Twitter model as a whole is dying (which obviously includes App.net and similar microblogging services). I hear Instagram and Snapchat is all the rage now. Ain't nobody got time to actually read text these days in the days of strongly social networkified attention spans.

>>akjain+sn
It was $50 per account when it first opened, you must have got in when they stopped charging (it was already dying out by this point) but used an invite system.

>>fraser+Y1
> It's only losing money because of stock grants.

That's like saying "We're only losing money because we have to pay our staff"

>>sspiff+Om
But every other platform has that as well.

It is just that twitter only has that option.

>>nickba+t8
They are a public company, with a single class of shareholder. They can all choose to buy or sell via the public market.

Your comments would make some sense if they were pre-IPO.

>>2sk21+xk
> My hope was that by having to pay money to get in, it would keep out the shills and noise.

Interesting. I'd expect something entirely opposite - with one platform, pay-for-entrance, shills / marketers can just write the entry costs off as a small marketing expense. OTOH I can easily imagine a lot of smart people with interesting things to say shying away from spending money on such a platform.

>>puranj+se
Where else in can you follow DeepMind and FAIR researchers discussing the latest OpenAI research paper?

It seems to me that discussion is pretty much the opposite of inane.

>>reitan+lq
Facebook has become much less interesting once it started constantly reminding people about privacy options and almost everyone went from default-public to default-friends, or often even more restrictive settings.

>>TeMPOr+7r
It's not like using Twitter doesn't come with costs; you need to learn how to use it, you need to follow people to stay up to date, you should probably reply to some of the people tweeting at you; and last but not least, you also need to spend time on actually coming up with things to say. That's a massive time investment. The opportunity cost of that time is a lot more than the $5 app.net used to cost per month.

I assume that $5 a month is only a problem for occasional users -- but I doubt that those add a lot of value to the ecosystem (aside from higher numbers of total users signed up and other vanity metrics)

>>milesf+(OP)
Twitter has no issue making money: They made over a billion last year. Their problem is in growing: They have about the same users they had 2 years ago.

>>jakobe+st
Many regular users start out as occasional users. A fee impedes this.

>>puranj+se
On Twitter you can banter around with famous people you'll never meet in real life and who won't friend you on Facebook.

>>milesf+(OP)
You're forgetting that by the time app.net came up twitter was already "the" platform for this sort of stuff. App.net didn't improve on the model in any way. No awesome features, no additional value. It tried to compete with a service that's already used by millions with terrible branding (starting with the name) and a pricing model that's good for SaaS companies (because they work with business that use the solution to make money) with consumers (who don't).

Having a business model is nice. Having the right business model is essential. Twitter has a business model now, and while it isn't ideal it's in line with their type of product/company and if you scroll through some of the other comments this model isn't all that bad.

Twitter can improve it, but that's a story for a different thread.

>>Joachi+uc
They pay pretty competitive salaries as well. The stock grants will eventually roll off as people's plans vest and are replaced with smaller ones(new employees have been getting smaller ones for a while already)

>>maccar+mo
They do pay their staff. Unfortunately the stock compensation was based on the … highly optimistic … story they told around the IPO about growing to be as large as Google or Facebook. Why spend prudently when you're about to be stupid-rich?

>>reitan+lq
Yes, but most other platforms don't have the same level of vibrant public discussions.

On things like Facebook, discussions are mostly between friends or "friends of friends", with no chance of an outside opinion, for instance.

>>nl+55
Didn't USV invest in Twitter? Did they cash out after IPO?

>>PanMan+vt
I imagine they have fewer users than years ago -- I doubt they've been careful to remove _non-human-eye_ users from their MAU.

>>Mithal+lg
In my field (marketing), it's overrun by spam.

And anytime I've looked at anything remotely political, I had to take a bath afterwards

>>TeMPOr+fr
They only did that due to user demand though. People didn't want their private life wide open for the world to see.

>>PanMan+vt
Maybe Twitter is fully grown. There will be some churn, but it's basically as big as it's going to get. With the current user base, they can generate billions of dollars in revenue.

The problem, then, seems to be with management and the board not understanding or maybe not accepting reality as it is. If they can figure out how to run Twitter with hundreds of people rather than thousands, they will have a great business.

>>EGreg+ZN
>Didn't USV invest in Twitter?

They sure did. Fred Wilson (USV partner) has talked about it (Twitter as a portfolio company of USV) many times on his blog avc.com .

>Did they cash out after IPO?

Not sure.

>>Mithal+lg
I haven't done anything with twitter. Technically I do have an account, but most times I visit the site, I'm not logged in. I can't find a way to get a toehold toward anything but inane babble.

>>TeMPOr+fr
My problem wasn't default public but rather that I am fairly certain they retroactively made pricate stuff public.

>>milesf+(OP)
app.net never had the audience. Network effect is a real b##ch to overcome.

>>vram22+W71
Well otherwise what does it mean if they have a tiny part of an $18B company?

>>sspiff+mG
Well going further than that, on Facebook, for a lot of people the majority of their 'friends' are school friends (for younger people often their entire school year, even the years above/below), and extended family, people that they feel obligated to add (due to Facebook's pressure to have a high friend count).

These are ultimately people they wouldn't choose to follow the conversations of at all, given the choice.

For me Twitter was like starting with a clean slate. I just follow the people I want to follow, basically no 'friends', just interesting people.

>>puranj+nQ
Marketing and politics are probably the two worst areas to try to find any humanity in.

I use it for things like gaming, talking to locals (almost everyone I know in my current city I met through Twitter, or through someone I met through Twitter), getting local news, and keeping up with friends.

>>acdha+cG
I can't count the number of companies I've seen die or collapse because of this mentality.

>>farees+un
Let's take all of Twitter's scaling problems and put them on a protocol design that's way more difficult to scale and optimized for entirely different access patterns and bandwidth requirements?

This seems like a entirely inappropriate application for blockchains. There are other more suitable P2P constructs we could create using similar ideas (which predated bitcoin) instead of jumping on a bandwagon.

>>nl+Uq
Derp, you're right. I'm an idiot.

>>EGreg+iI1
Ok got you. I had not read the OP. Interesting.

>>akjain+sn
It was freemium. A free account with follow and storage limits and a premium at $36/year.