Snapchat to IPO in March 2017

I know Twitter is loved by lots of people. Their rate of growth is almost flat is the problem at the moment.

Who’s a logical buyer though? Every potential buyer has walked away. Rumor is their comp is sky high now, because the stock has done so poorly. They’ve had to pay people higher salaries to keep them around. That has to make them a lot less attractive to a buyer.

Twitter should not need to pay much for their employees, because I don’t think many of them are any good. If you ever use their different clients the flaws are painfully obvious and they don’t get fixed, ever. I simply don’t know what their apparently princely paid devs are doing all day everyday.

Abuse and harassment are rampant on Twitter. Tons of people get rape and even death threats on Twitter everyday. It has been a problem since forever. And yet it’s still a problem. Today. 2016. The chief enforcement staff on Twitter is a woman who has to use pseudonym to avoid harassment herself. What kind of weak sauce crap is that?

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I’m sure allowing people to post 140 characters is hard.

You know how the game is played. It’s post IPO, the devs that own shares worth of a Windfall have gotten their money. The ones that are still getting paid handsomely are the senior director+ and VPs. And at this point, the company doing shitty it doesn’t affect how much they get paid that much.

And Jack is not helping by just phoning it in part time. Twitter needs a war time CEO who sleeps in the office. The product is drifting and running on fumes. There are still passionate users like myself who give their mediocre products a pass, but there aren’t that many of us.

So if Twitter stock price goes low enough, say below $10, they will get a buyer. Also Twitter is a media company like ESPN, it’s not a tech company. Its tech sucks. Disney or Comcast are its most likely buyer.

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I don’t think Disney would buy. Way too many issues with racist comments and other vulgarity. They don’t want that anywhere near their image.

Disney was one of the companies that did due diligence but at the end walked. Disney owned ABC and ESPN. Especially ESPN has great synergy with Twitter.

Twitter’s abuse problem needs to be sorted out buyer or no buyer. The fact that it hasn’t been able to speak volume about their lack of tech prowess. Look at Facebook. Day and night difference.

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I agree on the synergy with ESPN. Disney needs to figure out the cord cutting world, because it’s damaging their ESPN cash cow. I think it’d make more sense for Disney to buy Netflix and show live sports on that platform. They could also make it the exclusive source for all of Disney’s media.

Not trying to defend the engineering by any means, but the culprit seems to be the product. Since its inception, Twitter has had its roots in freedom of speech: if your government is giving you shit, you post stuff on twitter. If main stream media is giving out propaganda, you tweet about what you think is the real issue. Because they’re so liberal about allowing any kind of contents, their anti-abuse algorithm is deliberately overlooking a lot of things. And it’s a fine line between some kid giving crap about Trump and some kid sending out death threats. These are really hard AI problems. Unless you go gung-ho with rule-based algorithms (if tweet contains “f&*k”: blacklist user) you aren’t going to surgically extract the bad posts. And that’s a really labor-heavy solution that engineers don’t want to do (and look down upon).

Other companies have taken the path of preventing abuse completely. If you start saying hate rants on Facebook, Facebook is super liberal about suspending your account forever. Twitter can’t do that because their entire product is meant to be a ventilation outlet for many users. And these are by the way their die hard users, so you don’t want to piss them off. So they’re at a crossroad of 1) re-shifting their product to broadcasting outlet like ESPN (at the expense of losing the mainstream twitter users), or 2) staying as minor, niche-market product to keep the existing users. I would personally like 2), but of course 1) makes more sense given their state as a public company.

In contrast, if you look at LinkedIn’s feed, it’s even worse. It still amazes me there can be so many ignorant people even in the tech world. Their comments are meaningless, shared articles are crappy. And their problem is lack of content / ecosystem (i.e. not enough professionals would liberally share stuff on such platform) - I think they should just shut down the feed and keep acting like an online resume repository…

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I am not AI expert, but if people manually report abuse thru their completely manual API, they need to have adequate staff to handle the complaints. It’s not even a tech problem, just hiring enough people to handle user complaints.

Many features that look like a weekend hackathon project in Facebook took months to do in Twitter. Like their recent relaxation of character count. So FINALLY links to photos don’t count towards the limit. And they have the balls to talk about it as if it’s some modern day miracle? Hello? And why the heck is @-ing users still count towards limit? So if you are talking to 4 or 5 people suddenly you only have like 50 chars to talk? And tweet storm is laborious to do, and not easy to read. And their web interface is garbage. The list is long.

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Oh, and Twitter’s search is garbage too.

The walking away part to me is a negotiation strategy. It’s like buying a car at the dealership.

Haha… You’re clearly someone who loves the product more than I do. Yeah, they certainly don’t do their due dilligence on customer feedback (it feels like using Microsoft product).

Launching products from hackathons should be way harder for them compared to facebook, since it’s all about scalable infrastructure. They’ve running their company like a startup even with the large size, and that’s the price they pay. They had all the time they needed to rewrite most of their stack whilst their product was going to hell, but instead kept trying to reshift the product from crap A to crap B. :frowning: My teammate who used to be at twitter had all the power to shut down all kinds of features (they didn’t have per-feature on/off switch) even though he was 2yrs out of college… Imagine the daily crises they go thru due to bad infrastructure…

If Snapchat is worth $25B, I don’t think Twitter is worth much less. Although I don’t use either of them, at least I think Twitter has some solid fan base and has been incorporated to most people’s social life (except mine), unlike Snapchat.

[quote=“notabene, post:54, topic:958”]
Haha… You’re clearly someone who loves the product more than I do. Yeah, they certainly don’t do their due dilligence on customer feedback (it feels like using Microsoft product).

Launching products from hackathons should be way harder for them compared to facebook, since it’s all about scalable infrastructure. They’ve running their company like a startup even with the large size, and that’s the price they pay. They had all the time they needed to rewrite most of their stack whilst their product was going to hell, but instead kept trying to reshift the product from crap A to crap B. :frowning: My teammate who used to be at twitter had all the power to shut down all kinds of features (they didn’t have per-feature on/off switch) even though he was 2yrs out of college… Imagine the daily crises they go thru due to bad infrastructure…
[/quote]I heard that most startup’s software are crap, not scaleable, shaky software architecture… the game is to hype to high heaven to attract Angels’ money, and use these free money to overpay for brilliant software engineers to rebuild everything :slight_smile: . Founder merely need to have some rudimentary software development skills, and outstanding con skills.

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It is at this point I doubt you are a Millennial… :slight_smile:

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Hey I still use FB, been using it since 2004 :sunglasses:

That’s the money quote here. You are exactly right. With a common, solid backend you can launch anything overnight. With systems held together by duct tape you have to labor on each and every one.

I used Twitter long enough to remember their famous fail whale. Facebook was only 2 years or so older and 100x their scale or more and never went down. For the longest time you need a 3rd party utility to post picture. Today in 2016 you still need a 3rd party site to catalog tweet storms.

I use iMessage, me.com, iCloud, iTunes, Safari, FaceTime, Keynotes, Numbers, Pages, Apple Map, iBooks, iMovie, Stickies, Notes, Siri, Reminders, Preview, Photos, Contacts, Facebook and this forum :slight_smile: