As a company, what's better than having others doing your work for you and promoting your service at the same time? Getting rid of that situation to me was the beginning of the end for them. There was such a rapid enthusiasm for Twitter that died off for a lot of influencers with that.
Stupid mistake from Twitter.
Basically Twitter has a long history of shutting down API access to any product or client that becomes remotely popular. Did they think being unpopular among developers would be something positive ? It's like they didn't realise ALL these twitter clients actually helped create MORE content on Twitter. That was stupid.
1. They should be more like Facebook. Never, ever again allow a third party app to control the primary way to view all of their data. It's too important. Grandfather existing apps in but slowly add new capabilities that they cannot access thus smothering them.
2. If Twitter can become more engaging / sticky it can keep users around for longer which should, in theory, help bring more people to their platform and let them display ads longer. This will ultimately force developers to work with them again, regardless of their feelings around trust.
Look at Facebook. They destroyed many games livelihoods with changes and people not only still use them but other than places like HN you rarely hear about issues with developers trusting them.
Are you thinking about how Twitter could be a better product or a better business?
For example Facebook provides a great way to engage in conversations (the quality of said conversations may or may not be dubious). You can keep track of conversations, where you are in the conversations and mute specific people within one. Twitter has almost none of that which, in my opinion, likely contributes to the less than half of the daily usage that Twitter gets when compared to facebook [1].
But that's just one example. Working better with video and other media and lowering friction to using Live video or capturing it right within the app all help to keep users in their ecosystem.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-02-12/social-...
How will that go down with investors expecting growth?
Overall I would imagine long term investors would have a positive feeling but only if a solid image is communicated to them regarding ways to improve and grow.
Make a mistake and you not only affect revenues (by cutting those contributing to revenue) but also cutting the ability to retain those remaining who actually do contribute to revenue.
No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it would be simple at all. Unfortunately I have no way to give you a good answer here. They have a disproportionately large amount of engineers and other staff compared to the product(s) they offer but without internal information regarding groups, compensations, etc there is no way I could ever begin to answer this as an outside.
> No doubt there's room for cuts, but 60-70% seems way on the high side.
I disagree. The best I can find Twitter currently has 2,900 - 3,000 employees (they had a high of 3,900 the best I can tell). What products and solutions do they have? Almost none with almost no evolution to show for the past 5+ years.
They are extremely employee heavy. Granted I can't know for sure how their internals work but 900 employees should be able to not only run but to evolve the platform without issue, even including sales and marketing.
Far more company have done much more with much less than that.
You have fair points but I think there are redeeming qualities :)
Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even post this because it's half on topic and half off topic. But I was thinking about some ideas I think Twitter should do and, well, screw it I'm curious to see what the HN community thinks of any of my ideas.
Twitter should:
- Lay off approx 60-70% of the staff. Seriously Twitter is way, way, way over staffed. I mean I don't want to see this happen but Twitter is so employee heavy I don't understand how they can sustain themselves without losing a large amount of employees.
- Longer forms of communication. Yeah yeah I know "Twitter is short it makes people be concise" yadda yadda yadda; look a lot of the top Twitter users constantly do tweet storms. Many post photos of long form content. Sure maybe you keep the same limits but allow a way to stitch together multiple tweets should you want to do something long form. Right now the dialog gets ruined because comments get spliced during the user posting their thoughts.
This has to be addressed somehow. They're losing out on too much conversation and context when people post things like photos of text.
- Need some focus around various types of media. Video is especially important. Look at Instagram, they copied Snap's stories and BOOM, big success. Twitter is positioned to be a messaging pipe for the internet. Let's get more types of media flowing through it! Make Live even faster to start (dedicated button). Make image taking native, too. Single button, type text, posted. Done.
- Better ways of handling discussions. Something threaded, not counting usernames in limits (to a degree; can't have someone spamming hundreds at once). In a similar vein create groups so conversations / discussions can rapidly happen inside of groups.
- More tools for filtering, maybe creating separate views for different types of people you follow (like it would be great to see what my friends are saying versus what news sources are saying etc without going through the cumbersome list UX).
- Verification so if someone wants to use their real name they can have it verified and can even filter by verified so they can filter out the noise if they want. Facebook is pretty damn successful at real names but you can also create alternate personalities via Pages. I think Twitter should mimic this functionality to a degree.