But not the features that retain advertisers. Which were the silent issues that no one talked about before.

And indeed, advertisers aren't talking about it now. They're just leaving the platform in droves. There's no one _to_ talk about it with. Entire teams (including high ranking executives) that kept relationships with advertisers have been fired.

Twitter doesn't even have anyone answering / categorizing the complaints anymore.

> Don't think Twitter's revenue issues have anything to do with sales staff. Advertising channels/campaigns can and should be 100% automated.

You can't automate news. News is constantly changing. Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.

Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior. Not because sales staff were laid off. It's quite obvious to anybody looking at the situation objectively.

Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated. Too many developers have an inflated sense of self importance

> Not because sales staff were laid off.

There's plenty of advertisers who have blogged about "My emails to Twitter stopped getting answered" around the time of the 75% layoffs. This is well documented.

What do you want the advertisers to do? To just keep giving money to Twitter even when all their contacts have disappeared? There's some pretty basic behaviors that have nothing to do with politics here that Twitter is failing at.

If I were an advertiser (and I have in the past), I would look at the metrics of engagement for my ads to assess their efficacy, not talk to a representative. Either you're happy with the revenue lift or you're not.

To say that ad sales has to be a manual, high touch channel is simply wrong. Perhaps you have staff on hand for large accounts, but why would e-commerce drop shipping headphone company #7 need to talk to a human?

I'm talking about the $100+ Million advertisers, not small ones like you.

Disney is most interested in making sure that Mickey Mouse / Winnie the Pooh / Zootopia is not accidentally shown next to furry porn. Southwest doesn't want its ads shown next to airplane disasters. Kellogs doesn't want "Itsssss GREAT" being shown next to the Ukrainian War.

As I said before: you can't predict the "X is being shown next to Y, please stop that" problem. Its impossible to predict X, its impossible to predict Y. You just gotta have email lines with these big companies and promptly issue your programmers / machine learning / data scientists the new algorithms to keep advertisers happy.

-------

Twitter is 100% the grounds where furry porn, Airplane Disasters, and Ukrainian War disasters are constantly being discussed and shared. Advertisers want protection of their brand, despite the online discourse.

Twitter didn't have a keyword list to exclude after being in the business for like 20 years? They needed ad buyers to manually contact them and then needed someone to add that with a developer?

IIRC, those tools were in an incomplete state before the takeover... but at least they were somewhat working and Twitter's executives were prompt in responding to any issues. But the APIs have been degenerating rapidly after the takeover.

When the tools aren't working as expected, the advertisers then emailed Twitter's API teams. All of those teams have been dismantled, the executives have been fired. With no one left to contact, the advertisers have begun to leave.

That's wild. Why is ad buying such a mess? Google's setup felt extremely outdated last I had to work with it. Is it just largely ignored because it's assumed that most buyers will work with some agency / platform that will integrate with the API and provide a better UI?

Southwest and Disney continue to advertise on Twitter, so I assume they're satisfied with the tools in place.

> Twitter has functioned fine after massive layoffs, and feature velocity has only accelerated

Feature velocity for users. Not customers. Also, the deprecation of APIs strongly intimates Twitter Blue was a failure.

> Also, the deprecation of APIs

... and has driven away, or may drive away, many of the core content providers for their network effects. People who buy a third party client for twitter are generally not casual users. I reached out to a few friends I would consider 'posters' a couple of journos, a couple of 'personal brand' advertiser types... all of their twitter engagement is way down .. from both sides of the conversation. Two of them are now in a 'mostly I just post now' mode. Having conversations has become to hard. The other two are struggling along but they've had to cut way back, one said 'It was like I was building a house with a nailgun, but it got taken away and someone handed me a rock.'

It took me two days without tweetbot to realize it was was one of the only things that kept me actually using twitter. Finally causing me to mothball my account and throw up a personal mastodon install and start re-finding my personal follows there (I'm at about 50% of my list, but i'm finding that mostly what I'm missing is retweets from a few degrees out). My feed's incoming posts per hour are certainly down from twitter by about 60% but I was honestly expecting much lower numbers.

Why isn’t there a Tweetbot for Mastodon?

Onboarding is a PITA. With Twitter ceding the ground, this could be a real differentiator. Hell, you could build a licensing component paid to the servers.

There is, it's just in beta. It's called Ivory: https://tapbots.com/ivory/

It won't help you, currently or maybe ever, pick a server, but it's a great client even in it's beta form.

> Advertisers dropped spending because they don't like Elon/his behavior.

I mean, yeah? If someone fired all my contacts at a company and didn’t return my emails as my revenue dropped as a result of their changes I would also stop paying them?

Thanks for confirming

Twitter has lost 75% of it's employees, 50% of it's revenue and gained 25% more debt.

It's gone from a break even company to financial ruination.

Twitter is shutting down data centers and offices. Elon Musk has single handedly collapsed the company.

Twitter will shortly be either bankrupt or personally funded by Elon Musk's bank balance by the end of the year.

He overpaid massively for the company, yes. That was a critical mistake and why its now encumbered with debt.

It seems like playing chicken with "Don't make me pay this hugely overinflated price I promised or I'll crash the company." as your strategy maybe wasn't such a smart idea. Now he's out the money and has literally nothing to show for it. Meanwhile his other ego stock, which he somehow had manipulated into a wild overvaluation, is now crashing because everyone can plainly see that he's just kinda a dumb motherfucker.

And Twitter needs advertisers more than advertisers need Twitter. Maybe there are exceptions but I can't imagine Twitter is this uniquely wonderful channel for the vast bulk of advertisers.

> Advertisers _constantly_ are complaining about "X is being shown next to Y news event. Please stop that", and its impossible to predict X, or Y.

It would be interesting to have a UI that lets them say that they don't want to be next to X, or they do want to be next to Y, and they pay different prices to appear next to more/less popular things.

This is table stakes for ad platforms. You still also need to be reactive to new events.

Why not use the same tools?

Internally they probably are, it's just a question of whether the advertiser or agency or platform is pushing the buttons. For obvious reasons the platform owner can usually push them fastest, and can earn more money for doing so, so why shouldn't they do it?

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs.

I don't know if deliberately breaking their developer API for third party clients counts as "shipping features faster than ever".

They also put back the "for you" tab to force people into algorithmic timelines, which they already tried once and pulled back since everyone hated it.

They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it.

Twitter was run as a charity prior to the acquisition. Just as many VC fat tech companies were

This is "obviously" based on... no communication whatsoever from the company yet.

Another comment of yours says "quite obvious" about advertising, which doesn't seem to be an industry segment in which you work.

It seems your observations are right in line with Twitter's new owner, to whom everything that's happened over the last few months has also been "obvious," and mostly wrong.

Yes, Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years, and likely many more over the next two decades is a totally incompetent buffoon.

I’d rather take his side than the small minded and intellectually weak detractors.

Just because things tend to be a certain way, doesn’t make it optimal or right. Evidence, all of history where bad practices were pervasive and common and later usurped by better practices.

Maybe use forethought and critical thinking rather than credentialism and groupthink

If Elon is mismanaging Twitter your post would be a good example of the cognitive bias called the Halo effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

To say that somebody’s success at tasks that are highly correlated with a separate task is irrelevant is simply wrong.

And people who tend to succeed at most things they do, tend to do so for a reason. It’s effectively statistically impossible for it to be sheer coincidence/luck.

Or should I just pick random “logical fallacy” links to put in my replies instead?

If a baseball teams wins their first four games and you see them in the seventh inning behind by 30 points in game 5, is the relevant correlation how the team did in games 1 to 4 or is the relevant correlation how a team who is that far behind a particular game tends to do?

I simply noted you appear incapable of perceiving Elon as making bad decisions, which is kind of funny, since he seemed to think agreeing to buy Twitter was a bad decision, and was in the process of losing a court case about it before he saw the writing on the wall and closed the agreement.

If he actually is making bad decisions, I think the halo effect is at play.

You just used an appeal to Elons other companies while telling others to not use credentialism?

Actions that drives results aren’t credentials, they’re evidence.

Saying you have a degree in this or that, or title X/Y without having any results to show for it is credentialism. Unfortunately far too pervasive in our industry.

Ah you don’t value the outputs the same so you want to allow appeals to authority as long as it’s shown profitable outcomes. I’m on the same page now.

Yes, somebody building multiple of the world’s largest companies is a much higher hurdle than getting a degree or mid level manager job title.

By your logic we can’t consider any accomplishments from somebody’s past as a reliable indicator of their future results.

Which is obviously not true. “Credentialism” is giving far too much weight to low barrier to entry and easy to accomplish titles.

Ignoring past results, the fact that Twitter is functioning fine after 80% layoffs has already validated the decision to downsize. No need to look to the past.

The level of nastiness in your comments here makes it very hard to take you seriously as an "objective" observer. Considering that you're using your HN profile to attract clients—"Hire me for your development needs!"—you might want to tone that down. I wouldn't want to work with anyone who thought it was appropriate to behave that way.

(And I'll say your rosy impression of Twitter seems a little strange for a supposedly objective observer, given the recent outages/pervasive legal problems/chaotic feature rollouts/various fits and reversals/overall dysfunction that has characterized that company since it was acquired by Elon Musk.)

Nothing nasty about my comment, its a factual response to the parent comment.

Fortunately I couldn’t care less if somebody decides not to work with me because they disagree with my opinions. People who care about results will get ahead, those that don’t won’t

> ... small minded and intellectually weak detractors. ... Maybe use forethought and critical thinking ...

> Nothing nasty about my comment, its a factual response to the parent comment.

I called out your use of the word "obviously" without factual basis, and you responded with insults.

Insults and praise for the CEO of Twitter, which is irrelevant, since he still has not made any statement whatsoever on the subject, which was entirely the point of my initial comment.

"Elon who made Tesla and SpaceX some of the largest companies in the world in just a few years,"

What in earth are you talking about? He brought his way into those companies. I think you are confusing Elon Musk the fictional PR character who exists only in paid press releases with Elon Musk.

Elon Musk's success was being the CEO of a slimy payment processor.

your forgot '... until he was shown the door.' on that last sentence.

I didn't say he was an incompetent buffoon, you did. I think it's more true than not, but those are your words, not mine. I said only that he was frequently certain while being wrong.

When he makes a pronouncement and then reverses that pronouncement, one or the other was incontrovertibly wrong. Whether he was wrong first and right later, or right first and wrong later, the list of reversals at twitter is a long one, starting before he bought the company.

He tendered an offer that skipped due diligence, then attempted to avoid doing what he'd agree to do, invoking the due diligence he'd explicitly skipped in the process. Then they day before he would have to open up his financial records in court, he reversed his reversal and closed the deal. Since then he's stated multiple times he regrets buying twitter.

However many times you count him being certain-but-wrong in that story, it's more than zero, despite the financial success of his unrelated companies, and despite your unwarranted personal insults.

> They obviously did that because the API is not benefiting them at all from a revenue perspective. If it were, they wouldn't have gotten rid of it.

Everyone hates on Dorsey because he essentially turned Twitter into a walled garden (killed third-party clients + RSS support), but really, how else are you supposed to make a startup that got millions in funding profitable? Just by giving your stuff away?

Nobody begrudges Twitter the right to (the opportunity to) make money. It's not clear why they decided not to work with the clients. They could have put ads into the API feeds and required that clients not filter them out, or some such thing.

And it's fine that they didn't. It's even fine that they shut down the API. But the lack of communication is ridiculous. Just tell people what the fuck is happening. They don't have to like it, but complete ghosting is the way you burn bridges completely down.

Charge for API access. Learn what features users want from the third party tools. Implement those. Profit.

The API benefitted power users primarily who are responsible for keeping their large number of followers on Twitter.

Let’s see where those power users go, shall we?

Not willingly:

Twitter to Devs: Don't Make Twitter Clients... Or Else [2011]

https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-api-clients

Twitter's API Update Cuts Off Oxygen to Third-Party Clients [2012]

https://mashable.com/archive/twitter-api-big-changes

(how could Elon do this!?)

But amazingly third party clients still thrived even after those API nerfs for over 10 years.

I mean it's within his right to do it, and I can even see the arguments. However, to do it without even a press release let alone notice. Without even answering support tickets from those third party clients. Just an utter failure of management.

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs

Desperation from the remaining devs? I mean, I can crank out crap as fast as anyone wants me to if it doesn't have to work right.

Another approach to look at this:

- They are experimenting more aggressively. - Depends on what features you build and time that it take to build those. - How much can you afford to delay the tech debt.

When the CEO is focused on rolling out features faster, everyone rallies behind. Does it mean the company is operating great. End of 2023 will be a good indicator.

Also note that recent tooling around LLMs (eg. ChatGPT) will improve aggregate efficiency.

I guess features go out the door faster when after firing the janitorial staff makes the office smell and people that work there have to bring in toilet paper.

Twitter has been objectively worse since the layoffs. I get tons of sex-bot accounts liking my posts that never existed before, the app constantly refreshes itself, there’s a few second loading message every time I view my timeline that didn’t exist beforehand, and my timeline is much worse than before (instead of seeing mostly tech stuff in the area of my interest, 60% has become fluff akin to my instagram story rec’s).

Opposite experience here. I've had almost 0 porn spammers as opposed to at least weekly before.

For me it's the crypto bots. Out of control. Stopped looking at notifications for a while because it was always randos pumping air drops and nfts

So far every new feature has been a previously-developed canceled feature. Even Twitter Blue was an existing feature repurposed, and it took two tries to release.

> Interesting that Twitter is shipping features faster than ever after 80% layoffs.

Do we have an independent source that doesn't have a history of dishonesty confirming this? Does it have a creative definition of 'shipping', 'feature', and 'faster'? Are there any long-tail dangers that have, or have the potential to blow up in Twitter's face from it?

My car goes faster and gets better MPG ever since I stripped out the weight of the braking system...