I think they lost the initiative the moment they decided to focus on censorship instead of combating spam/bots. Other things that didn't help include killing third-party clients a few years back, and screwing with the chronological timeline. Twitter was frickin amazing from like 2009-maybe 2013ish (though the whole TweetDeck aquisition in 2011 was a serious blow) and has been in steady decline ever since from a quality and usefulness perspective.
> focus on censorship instead of combating spam/bots
There isn't really a distinction between these two.
The crackdown on abuse was absolutely necessary, although it doesn't really go far enough, because the platform was getting a name for driving off high-profile users.
Scenario One: I, a real, active user that discusses a variety of topics, says something someone doesn't like and twitter decides to ban/shadow ban me.*
Scenario Two: I set up a network of fake accounts to automatically tweet, dm or @mention people pushing the same thing over and over to thousands of users.
Twitter has a block/ignore function. That is all that is needed to deal with scenario one in the vast majority of cases. When companies start introducing their politics and speech preferences into a global communications platform in the form of censorship and banning, the utility of that platform drops immediately. Consider if anyone ever said something in an email or sms that someone else disagreed with, we took away their ability to use email or sms. I know it's not apples to apples since those are primarily one-to-one platforms but you can see what I mean.
Meanwhile, combating scenario two almost always has a positive effect, but apparently is too hard of a problem for Twitter and its $2b/year budget to tackle as evidenced by the complete and utter lack of progress on that front since, from what I can tell, the platforms humble beginning in 2006.
*Note this is a hypothetical, my account is and has been in good standing since I signed up but I've seen many accounts go away or be silenced in this fashion.
Edit: Had wrong date for twitters inception. Fixed.
Twitter has been very sloppy in maintaining a clear line between abuse and unpopular opinions. Twitter has value because it's a relatively open place where anyone can interact.
When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it.
The issue, and this isn't a twitter specific issue, is that the line between preventing abuse and censoring content is not a clear or distinct line at all - some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical.
It's not clear that Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit) has ever been good at navigating that line, or that they should be in that business. Reddit is somewhat successful in that most of the moderation happens at least at a subreddit level, so that if you disagree with a given community you can simply move to a different one.
Censoring ‘bots is one thing (by which they mean politically oriented ‘bots, and not consumer oriented ‘bots.)
Censoring people (at times classifying a person-associated account as a ‘bot) on one side of the political spectrum more than the opposing side is an altogether different thing.
The latter is what brings the accusations of censorship.
Twitter has become more and more useful to me over time. It is, for me, an indispensable tool for keeping up with what's happening in ML and in contact with people who I would otherwise never meet. Through careful curation of my feed I get a constant supply of interesting and useful information. (And some pictures of cute dogs).
Reading the Twitter Rules or TOS whatever it was I read is bizarre, if I remember correctly from what I recall Twitter had these conditions:
You can't get too many followers in too short of a time or you're considered a bot. If you are not active enough you're a bot. If you speak ill of Twitter well that's a an account suspension.
My lowly account of a few people I know was locked once no explanation but the bot accounts manage seem to just fine.
I think they lost the initiative the moment they let Twitter devolve into the cesspit that it is today. As an outsider looking in, Twitter seems tailor-made as a pressure-cooker for extremism and harassment.
2011-12 was when the C/D-list hires that were being brought into the middle of the company really ended up pushing out a ton of the earlier clueful employees.
What is the endgame for companies like Twitter and Facebook? It seems like the only behaviour for publicly traded tech companies is grow or die. So what happens when they hit some theoretical maximum? Is it not acceptable that they're making money? Is there no steady state? Not saying that Twitter is there. But theoretically what does that look like?
"Hey, so we basically maxed out our target market share. We're healthy, profitable, popular, but this is basically the limit. There aren't any more people in our demo left on the planet to capture."
"Nope. Go make more money. Sell more ad space. Or shift focus to a new product or something."
"But that will either degrade the quality of our product or take our eye off the ball and allow a competitor to eat our lunch."
"Too bad. I don't care how profitable you are, only that you're more profitable than last year."
There are plenty of public companies that reach a steady state. What happens for those companies is their PE ratios shrink, they start paying out dividends and their expectation is to be a big lumbering giant whose valuation isn't expected to have dramatic swings based on outsized expected future earnings. What happened here is not "Wall Street" saying that Twitter must die, it's saying "Hey, your newly expected future earnings are no longer able to justify your prior valuation and therefore here's your new valuation based on all currently available information".
Okay so twitter has been in a "valued based on anticipated growth" state. And other companies can matriculate to a "valued based on reliable dividends" state? This I can understand. Thanks.
> What is the endgame for companies like Twitter and Facebook? ... Is it not acceptable that they're making money?
The difference between Twitter and Facebook is that Facebook can make money.
In case of Facebook, it would be like:
"Can you get more users?"
"Nope, we already have the whole planet. However, we can squeeze more money from them. The users already accept that their timeline is created by an arbitrary algorithm. So we can make them bid against each other for appearing in their friends' timelines. If you want your mom to see your photo from holidays, you can pay $1 to make sure it happens."
In case of Twitter, it would be like:
"We already have the whole planet. We can ruin people's careers, or drive them to suicide, more than any other web service."
"Great, but can you make some money? For the shareholders, you know."
"Uhm... if we started charging people for using our service, most of them would leave, so..."
Don't forget the part where they now show you tweets that people you follow have liked, just the same as if they had retweeted them.
I already unfollowed people who tweet/retweet too much for my liking, and now I have to unfollow people who 'like' things prolifically also? Ridiculous.
> Don't forget the part where they now show you tweets that people you follow have liked, just the same as if they had retweeted them.
I rarely use twitter but the first time I saw these "person X liked this" I just looked up how to not get that. Turns out it's pretty simple, you just click on that tweet menu and select "I don't like this tweet", repeat for maybe one or two other tweets on your timeline, and then refresh your feed and they're all gone. People mentioned it can come back after a couple months, you'd notice quickly as your feed quality would suck, you just redo the same.
The only one I see now are "person X and Y liked Z tweet" but in that case I follow X, Y, and Z, so it's usually relevant.
Twitter has some misguided PR priorities. So many news stories include tweets from extreme perspectives that have gotten thousands of likes/retweets/whatever. Since Twitter really works on their API for this, it's clear they think it's a good thing.
This is their biggest source of free advertising and it always presents Twitter as a fringe-fest or, worse, knee-jerk mob mentality and nothing more.
They really need to re-think promoting a system that gives the outside world a view of only the most extreme and unflattering view. No matter your political views, someone you respect will have negative Tweets presented in the news. It really makes it feel like it's only a platform for someone else.
To me, the real TWTR story isn't the 14% drop this week, but that TWTR's price is up 100% from the level it held through all of 2016, a time which included takeover talks.
Twitter is not showing not much growth in MAUs. Valuation is still high. Market cap is based on future cash flows. No future cash flows (MAUs) means market cap has to come down. Just showing profit is not enough. It just shows you can control expenses but does not deserve the huge market cap. This is a $1billion company posing as a $30B company. Anybody disagree?
I propose that MAU growth is a dumb metric for a company that is 10 years old. Companies exist to make money, not attract eyeballs. Plenty of companies make good money without reaching every person in the world, or even a sizable percentage of them.
Twitter is the type of company that only works due to network effect. Like ebay and facebook. So I'd say the age of the company is immaterial, it's how much of the market they've acquired so far. MAU growth is a fair metric.
I agree with the intention of your message but if Twitter is making money from attracting eyeballs, won't it become the metric unless their business model fundamentally changes.
Unfortunately most tech valuations since the first dot-com boom have been predicated on the assumption that one company will eventually take over the world in a particular market.
They recently started logging out users and asking for mobile number. I didn't want to give my mobile number so I uninstalled the app. Occasionally visit the website and view some users' tweets (without logging in). But as it was mentioned elsewhere it's full of dark patterns and an irritating experience.
Readit News
There isn't really a distinction between these two.
The crackdown on abuse was absolutely necessary, although it doesn't really go far enough, because the platform was getting a name for driving off high-profile users.
Scenario One: I, a real, active user that discusses a variety of topics, says something someone doesn't like and twitter decides to ban/shadow ban me.*
Scenario Two: I set up a network of fake accounts to automatically tweet, dm or @mention people pushing the same thing over and over to thousands of users.
Twitter has a block/ignore function. That is all that is needed to deal with scenario one in the vast majority of cases. When companies start introducing their politics and speech preferences into a global communications platform in the form of censorship and banning, the utility of that platform drops immediately. Consider if anyone ever said something in an email or sms that someone else disagreed with, we took away their ability to use email or sms. I know it's not apples to apples since those are primarily one-to-one platforms but you can see what I mean.
Meanwhile, combating scenario two almost always has a positive effect, but apparently is too hard of a problem for Twitter and its $2b/year budget to tackle as evidenced by the complete and utter lack of progress on that front since, from what I can tell, the platforms humble beginning in 2006.
*Note this is a hypothetical, my account is and has been in good standing since I signed up but I've seen many accounts go away or be silenced in this fashion.
Edit: Had wrong date for twitters inception. Fixed.
When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it.
The issue, and this isn't a twitter specific issue, is that the line between preventing abuse and censoring content is not a clear or distinct line at all - some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical.
It's not clear that Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit) has ever been good at navigating that line, or that they should be in that business. Reddit is somewhat successful in that most of the moderation happens at least at a subreddit level, so that if you disagree with a given community you can simply move to a different one.
Censoring people (at times classifying a person-associated account as a ‘bot) on one side of the political spectrum more than the opposing side is an altogether different thing.
The latter is what brings the accusations of censorship.
You can't get too many followers in too short of a time or you're considered a bot. If you are not active enough you're a bot. If you speak ill of Twitter well that's a an account suspension.
My lowly account of a few people I know was locked once no explanation but the bot accounts manage seem to just fine.
"Hey, so we basically maxed out our target market share. We're healthy, profitable, popular, but this is basically the limit. There aren't any more people in our demo left on the planet to capture."
"Nope. Go make more money. Sell more ad space. Or shift focus to a new product or something."
"But that will either degrade the quality of our product or take our eye off the ball and allow a competitor to eat our lunch."
"Too bad. I don't care how profitable you are, only that you're more profitable than last year."
The difference between Twitter and Facebook is that Facebook can make money.
In case of Facebook, it would be like:
"Can you get more users?"
"Nope, we already have the whole planet. However, we can squeeze more money from them. The users already accept that their timeline is created by an arbitrary algorithm. So we can make them bid against each other for appearing in their friends' timelines. If you want your mom to see your photo from holidays, you can pay $1 to make sure it happens."
In case of Twitter, it would be like:
"We already have the whole planet. We can ruin people's careers, or drive them to suicide, more than any other web service."
"Great, but can you make some money? For the shareholders, you know."
"Uhm... if we started charging people for using our service, most of them would leave, so..."
"In that case, no more money from me."
Twitter is profitable (last 2 quarters) and is earning something like $3B a year.
https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/twtr/financials?query=income-s...
I already unfollowed people who tweet/retweet too much for my liking, and now I have to unfollow people who 'like' things prolifically also? Ridiculous.
I rarely use twitter but the first time I saw these "person X liked this" I just looked up how to not get that. Turns out it's pretty simple, you just click on that tweet menu and select "I don't like this tweet", repeat for maybe one or two other tweets on your timeline, and then refresh your feed and they're all gone. People mentioned it can come back after a couple months, you'd notice quickly as your feed quality would suck, you just redo the same.
The only one I see now are "person X and Y liked Z tweet" but in that case I follow X, Y, and Z, so it's usually relevant.
Don't you feel like a rat in an experiment?
What's the point of this if you don't even own the controls to the software?
Rhetorical questions.
Deleted Comment
They said they were culling bot nets and this is the result.
A lot more culling to go, though.
This is their biggest source of free advertising and it always presents Twitter as a fringe-fest or, worse, knee-jerk mob mentality and nothing more.
They really need to re-think promoting a system that gives the outside world a view of only the most extreme and unflattering view. No matter your political views, someone you respect will have negative Tweets presented in the news. It really makes it feel like it's only a platform for someone else.