- If they are shareholders, they don't seem to be declaring their conflicts of interest.
- For Twitter to respond would require that Twitter be taking editorial positions regarding the activities of competing media conglomerates. ("You're down, you should all just cash out now" [while you have far more daily active customers and revenue per user than a number of TV channels combined].
- Are there competing international interests and biases? Is the market for noiseless citizen media saturated? How much time is there, really?
What is their interest here? How do they intend to affect the perceived value of Twitter? Are there sources cited? Data? Figures?
Twitter is a public corporation which hosts Tweets, sells ads, and selects trending Twitter Moments.
Both companies are media services. Both companies compete for ad revenue. Both companies compete for readers' time.
(Medium allows journalists to publish information and/or editorials for free (or, now, for subscription revenue from membership programs)).
Im not sure if thats the main audience pushing the narrative of growth. There is an industry that created the "growth hacker" position, and I dont think it was journalism.
True but it seems that most journalists were keen to embrace that credo. At the end of the day, "hockey-stick growth" has become the predominant narrative; does it matter much where it came from initially?
A phrase that sends shudders through stockholders!
It is amazing that companies seem to think that there is infinite growth potential if there ever was any growth -- sometimes you are just at your max level!
I don't think twitter is at max level, I just think that what they think is innovative is not innovative to users.
And if they were to go for profit now they'd be worth of a market cap of a couple billion - many times lower than what they are now.
Growth is good because it causes the share price to increase.
However, a company with low (or zero) growth and solid profits can still be a good investment if it pays good dividends.
Unfortunately, Twitter does not have growth or profit.
I've recently started using Twitter more to stay in touch with deep learning community and I can absolutely see why less tech-savvy non-fan user would turn away after few attempts. I can also see if they can turn this around and grow 10X in terms of DAW/MAU with good product planning.
Come and hear angry people ranting at the internet!
Rants and tweet-storms get lots of views, lots of clicks. But they are not necessarily what most people want to see. Most people are not on Twitter most of the time. And for most people, their primary exposure to Twitter is "oh look, there's yet another news story about a "public backlash", with a selection of angry tweets embedded in the article".
Beyond that, I've never been able to make any sense out of their threading system; the only way I can figure out what is happening is if someone inside the mess writes an article explaining it and quoting the relevant comments. The actual feeds all seem to be incomprehensible mishmashes of quotes and references to people who aren't present. (I assume there's a view which makes it all hang together if you have an account and actually log in rather than simply browsing, but the fact that I can't really see what's inside the box means I have no motivation to get involved.)
Furthermore, getting too comfortable with a communications medium solely owned and controlled by a single company seems like a recipe for long-term disappointment.
Other than that I am totally in agreement with you, Twitter is a success, just not as big a success as some people hoped but that doesn't mean it needs to sell to the highest bidder either. It's just another large company making a modest profit, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I propose that we call this the Scarface effect: "The world is not enough."
Entrepreneurs are in this game to create more and more economic value from the same finite resources. Take time: people have roughly the same time now than they had 40 years ago. Yet, we create way more economic value out of this time than 40 years ago, because our productivity has gone up.
Resources are finite, economic value is potentially infinite. Therefore, yes, you can have virtually infinite growth of economic value.
I prefer to phrase it as "potentially asymptotically endless growth of economic value". Lording over all of this are the (as far as we currently know) iron laws of thermodynamics. Until the economy is majority fad/fashion-driven and ascribes value literally upon human whimsy, it must derive ground truth value out of those laws, and as far as we know there does not exist an infinite supply of energy. We are a long ways from reaching the asymptote, but even "virtually infinite" will literally cook the planet with an economy using ideal Carnot efficiency-based engines.
> Until the economy is majority fad/fashion-driven and ascribes value literally upon human whimsy, it must derive ground truth value out of those laws.
I would disagree with that, but I'm happy to reconsider if you care to explain more. Economy is based on our preferences, as economic agents. The rationality of our preferences is irrelevant to the economic system. In this way, there is no "ground truth". That's supply and demand, not a cost-driven economy. There is no economy outside of interacting economic agents performing transactions, this is what an economy is.
This is brilliantly clarifying, thank you.
Do you mind explaining how? I'm not sure I understand.
http://freakonomics.com/2014/01/24/can-economic-growth-conti...
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, just trying to explain the thought.
The concept of infinite substitutability was presented as a "principle" in a 1976 paper, itself trying to argue out of the all too obvious implications of Limits to Growth (1972).
"The Age of Substitutability", H. E. Goeller and Alvin M. Weinberg, The American Economic Rrview, Vol. 68, No. 6 (Dec., 1978), pp 1-11 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2951003?seq=1
Somehow this hypothesis has been raised to the level of a scientific law of economics, trumping thermodynamics, physics, chemistry, and 216 years of actual experience of the Industrial Revolution and subsequent industrial periods, as well as economics' own law of diminishing returns.
There's nothing here but wishful thinking.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=infinite+subst...
So yes, there is a ceiling in available resources (although there's a whole lot of resources that we can tap in the solar system alone), but as long as you don't see a ceiling in productivity improvement, you don't see a limit to growth.
For productivity, virtually all of the Solow residual disappears if you add energy as a factor. R. U. Ayres and Charles A. S. Hall are two (and independent) authors among many who've demonstrated this. Ping back if you'd like me to dig for specific references.
Orthodox economics of course ignores this.
Imagine if moores law continues going strong, until we have computer's powerful enough to simulate realities. Now anyone can have whatever they want, only limited by computer processing power.
Also, just becuase resources are "finite" doesn't mean we are anywhere close to the limit.
You could just as easily respond by paying "Sure, the universe is finite. Let solve inequality by limiting the amount of resources a person can use to 1 galaxy per person. Nobody needs more resources than an entire galaxy!".
Until we get to that point, we aren't anywhere close to "finite" growth.
A computer isn't a perpetual motion machine. It runs under the laws of physics just as everything else does.
How much energy do you think you would need to truly simulate a galaxy at quantum levels of resolution?
But what if you don't need quantum levels? Then you're into a more subtle argument - confusing an economy of resources with an economy of experiences that can be created using those resources.
It might seem "obvious" how that makes it possible to use less of everything, but if you think it through in detail it really isn't. You still need practical infrastructure, power, and even if everyone is in VR 24/7, you still need nutrients and waste disposal.
You can't start by assuming infinity because Moore's Law, and then pretending it makes all the hard problems go away. It doesn't.
The point is, if you can be millions of times more productive with the same quantity of resources, your reserve of economic growth is gigantic. Not truly limitless, of course, but limitless for all intents and purposes.
There is a lot of energy out there and a lot of technological growth to go before we hit a "finite" limit.
With that model, saying that economic value is "potentially infinite" is equivalent to saying that there will always be a way to improve someone's life.
Georgescu-Rogen, Daly, Soddy, Bohm-Bawerk, Marshall, Smith.
Stock markets are speculative, so investors trade on the story and the fundamentals on a sliding scale, in the case of twitter it's fundamentals aren't strong without a road to profit, one that they are also quite far away from, and in terms of story being compared to FB which now has 4x more users and continues to grow doesn't allow it to create a story that investors can rally behind or support it.
Ultimately the main issue with Twitter was lack of leadership and decision making and the failure to acquire Instagram.
If Instagram was a part of Twitter then they would have a secondary social network, that today (although with FB integration) has already outpaced them in terms of user numbers and continues to grow.
That failure is why they are where they are currently. They haven't been able to do a large strategic acquisition that really pushed their company forward and the ones that they have done were mainly add-ons and smaller in comparison that were never able to stand on their own.
Kudos to Mark and Facebook for being decisive and pulling Instagram from out under Twitter, but if Twitter want to get the deal done they should have led with a Billion not $500MM and the deal would have been theirs.
It's probable that you're speaking metaphorically here, but your metaphor is abstract enough as to not communicate any meaning. It's clear that you think someone is demanding growth. Who is demanding growth? When you figure that out it will be much clearer to you what's going on here.
And it's also hilarious and a perfect example of why Twitter is a perfect example of the tech bubble. Twitter is not going to grow in value sevenfold: in ten years they have not even broken even yet.
Some or much of the noise for that is brought on by major shareholders people who bought in and or have large positions which developed when the stock was much higher.
Assuming such a thing exists. Which it might not; sure, Twitter could stop trying to generate growth and cut a bunch of costs, but there's no guarantee that that wouldn't result in a gradual (or rapid) exit of user time and attention (in general, or just in the advertiser-valued demographics) to other services, as Twitter stopped moving forward while the market kept moving forward.
The best thing for Twitter is to go back to being a private company and charting their own future and be free of what Wall Street wants them to be.
Or News Corp / 21st Century Fox.
The post-growth phase of a social network doesn't have to mean its collapse. Look at IAC, InterActive Corp (iac.com, ticker IAC). They run a lot of sites - Vimeo, Ask, About, Investopedia, Tinder, OKCupid, etc. - have a market cap of about $5 billion, and keep plugging along. They were started by Barry Diller, the creator of the Home Shopping Channel, something else that keeps plugging along. Diller is still CEO. IAC is boring but useful.
Twitter doesn't have to "exit"; they're already publicly held. They just have to trim down to a profitable and stable level, and accept that they're post-growth.