The Future of Twitter: Q&A with Jack Dorsey | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Twitter: Q&A with Jack Dorsey

bloomberg.com

49 pointsbko19 comments

No question about censorship on the platform. Extremely disappointing. Twitter is being wielded as a political censorship weapon.

What, your inalienable right to be provided with a platform by a private company is being infringed?

That's a fair point, they are under no legal obligation to provide a platform for free speech. That doesn't mean it isn't a valid thing to desire from your social media service of choice.

Correct. Facebook censors certain topics, but at least they're honest about it. Twitter claims it isn't happening at all, which is a clear lie.

I haven't read Facebook or Twitters complete terms of service but I'm sure they allow for censorship. So as long as users agree to the TOS then it doesn't matter what words come out of the founders mouths. They simply leverage hypocrisy to their advantage with no shame.

They didn't ask him about censorship. He most definitely lied about it when interviewed on the Today show. Too many libertarian/conservative voices being un-verified, etc.

And removing a blue checkmark next to someone's username is censorship... how?

What about removing trending hashtags like #WhichHillary?

I remember when Twitter first started and there were tons of interesting people talking to each other.

I got freelance jobs through Twitter and internships and friends. One time I told my parents I was going to meet my company who I had been working for for 4 months while only knowing the people through Twitter. They were concerned.

But today, it seems like most everyone who follows me is a brand of some kind.

Twitter is still, imho, the greatest social network. But it could be so much better.

You nailed a pretty important point. It's now about branding, personal or not. Which really stinks because I used to love bouncing one liners with random people a while back. Twitter allowed you to poke somebody in a friendly way and get a similar response. Now it's just about brandind.

It's frustrating, because it is the only social network that I'm using but I don't actually think twitter has much of a future at all in the longer term.

If they levied a $1 charge on tweets by people with more than 1K followers I'm sure that would go a long way towards making ends meet. On top of that open up the firehose and the api and it might just fly.

But with the current six-different-directions-at-once strategy I don't see it going anywhere at all.

Jack Dorsey did not mention anything about an API, developers, or the phrase "3rd-party." I'm disappointed, but not surprised.

He prolly didn't wanna bore people.

Happily Prashant, Developer Relations at Twitter, answered all the questions a few days ago in HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11298688 (irony)

I guess I don't understand why Twitter is considered in decline. More simply put, what exactly were people expecting from Twitter that it hasn't achieved?

They have:

- 100+ Million daily active users

- 1.3 Billion registered users

- Growing revenue: 710M Q4 2015 (+230M YTD)

- //EDIT:$11B Market Cap (-3B/21% since IPO)

- Active and engaged community

What am I missing here?

[1]http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/march-2013-by-the-num...

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/10/twitters-user-growth-goes-n...

[3] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR

//EDIT: I read the graph incorrectly from their IPO document. In that case it makes more sense that people would be worried

To start, perhaps a positive earnings per share?

http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/twtr/revenue-eps

Ok, that's a start, but it's clearly trending better YOY. With their revenue growth, that would seem to match other high growth companies.

As an example TSLA EPS is abysmal in comparison and worsening based on actual reporting - yet nobody is calling their death or wringing hands.

So it's gotta be something else.

[1]http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/eps-forecast

> As an example TSLA ... nobody is calling their death or wringing hands.

No way... lots of people talk about how Tesla's earnings are a problem and people regularly prophesy their death:

https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+earnings+overvalued

Tesla is a classic gamble right now. Their market cap is unjustifiable at their current scale. If they can continue their growth curve the bulls will make money. If they don't, the bears will.

The article is missing a subject to the "decline" and I presume the "people" that you are talking about are "investors". Twitter is growing year over year (YoY); but the rate at which its user base is growing YoY is slowing down or declining. At an already large user base, having exponential growth is just hard. But other similar category companies of similar magnitude of user size are doing well. So it just looks like Twitter is not growing fast enough to justify funds pouring money into TWTR. The earnings multiplier is simply not there for TWTR. Here's a nice graph that summarizes recent relative growth pattern: https://www.statista.com/chart/3200/twitters-user-growth-com...

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