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Comment by largote | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's not going to go under. It just won't grow to FB/GOOG/AMZN/MSFT size (at least not under their current strategy), and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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I mean, how could it possibly grow into a Google type of company? it's product is just not that valuable. it could disappear tomorrow and nobody would have to change their plans for the day.

> it could disappear tomorrow and nobody would have to change their plans for the day.

Unless you're in an industry that depends on it for PR, like entertainment.

I have a twitter account that follows 9-10 theatres (and only those) in my city created so that I could follow the newest shows and stuff, but all I got was repetitive broadcasting of the same stuff multiple times a day by all the accounts I follow, so overwhelmingly many times that the actual new stuff that I was looking for got buried somewhere in the useless flux of yesterday's news. And overall most entertainment sources on Twitter behive similarly. I just follow the RSS feeds of local theatre magazines nowadays, it's easier, period. Finding info on twitter is a needle-haystack situation and unfortunately I'm incapable of making a binary search as a human.

does any industry really depend on it? Even if you're in the entertainment industry, if Twitter disappeared you would still just go on using every other form of media that's around. TV, radio, magazines, websites, etc. There is nothing special or indispensable about Twitter. It's a totally replaceable product. In fact, it can even be replaced with nothing at all. Nobody needs it.

It doesn't depend on it, they'd move straight over to Insta or whatever by the afternoon. It honestly makes no difference.

I've actually worked on these sort of campaigns, you never just rely on a single platform and pray for traction.

Nobody looks for conversations on Instagram.

The problem with wild success but not insanely wild success is investors that were promised insanely wild feel cheated.

I don't know many people who are actually concerned about that. Sounds like complaining about a win-win situation.

More to the point: investors with irrational expectations are not the kind of investors who deserve to have their expectations met.

I wish we'd consider a multi-billion dollars company as "a wild success".

There isn't some natural law that states "Twitter is with $12bn." It'a valued as such in expectation of future profits. Massive future profits. If it can't sustainably materialise those profits, it loses its valuation (and some of its investors lose their shirts).

Is it really a multi-billion dollars company, though? Twitter has never made money, and it's not clear they ever will make money. A company that can't make money isn't worth more than its assets minus debt.

They have multi billions in revenue. That definitely qualify it as a multi-billion dollars company.

Why do I care about them? They still most likely made more money than I'll see in my lifetime for not doing anything other than having money.

"Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated."

It is for share holders.

Profitable companies aren't bad for shareholders.

Hype > profits if you're trying to find the next sucker to sell your shares to. Especially for companies that don't pay dividends.

> Profitable companies aren't bad for shareholders

They are if the profits were greatly overestimated. Paying a billion for a dollar of profits isn't smart. Not to mention, Twitter isn't profitable. (They lose half a billion dollars a year.)

About a month ago I said I'd find Twitter a possibly reasonable buy at a third its current valuation [1]. To make that work, a lot would need to change. And Twitter's current investors would surely lose.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12710784

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