AbsoluteNonce8

Yep! I think they’ve slowly learned to ship over the last 1.5 years.

Gotcha, honestly what I meant by mom-and-pop, I was thinking of growing Twitter just beyond the power user. Similar to you, I don’t believe twitter’s addressable market is as big as Facebook’s. If Facebook’s TAM is N, twitter’s is n where n<N. My main issue with them is that they’re actually 3/5ths of that n. I genuinely think they have an opportunity to make the product more accessible but they really have been not good :(. And I say this as a big Twitter fan!

I think you’re mixing two different things here.

Facebook grew not because of Ad Dollars. It grew because it built an all-star product experience for consumers. It’s easy now to look at Facebook and think of its as Fait Accompli. But when Facebook came about, they arrived in the second renaissance of social networking. You had so many competitors right from incumbents like MySpace and right to upstarts like Friendster, Friednfeed. Literally then no one could predict who would win.

Facebook’s relentless product building made big enough to earn the problems of scale. Remember, when Facebook IPO’d it literally had a blip of ads business.

Both things can be true. But what I’m saying is, Facebook absolutely lights out built an incredible product experience and moat.

Now, they’re finally dealing with problems of scale. Which honestly aren’t due to bumbling per se, but really just come with the territory. Twitter haven’t even gotten their cowboy pants on

I’m really not pro-Facebook. And my slamming Twitter is because they genuinely are bad at building and improving consumer experiences. It’s always fascinating how Jack can have an innovative product org like Square and oversee a bumbling morass like Twitter. So interesting!

You’re exactly on the money. Anecdotally and even talking to ex-Twitter folks, for some reason they entered a glacial period where there really wasn’t any backbone or product authority to ship or improve. I’ll give them credit that in the last 1.5 years they’re getting better, but below average is not good enough. I think Twitter can do more. I’m just not sure there’s a product leader outside of Facebook or Google who can handle that mandate

You’re right! But honestly, Twitter is one of the worst product companies I have ever seen. In the second commenter, I’ve replied with some examples of how they completely fudged it up.

My favorite example is when Twitter said “hey guys, growing users is hard. You know what our North Star from now on is? Monetizable Daily Active Users”

Imagine a social network deciding it’s entire North Star is ad dollars. Pretty damning.

You’re slightly missing my point. I’m not claiming twitter’s niche is bigger. I’m saying for a social network to plateau at 300M users for 7-8 years that’s very embarrassing. Especially when the positioning was that “we’re a Facebook alternative.” For a social network to figure out tablestakes monetization 7-8 years post-ipo, that’s equally damning. The biggest offender is actually the glacial product development that Twitter has. Several Rudimentary features non-existent or canned because of analysis paralysis.

I’ll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter is niche because they completely failed to elevate the product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing for new users.

So Twitter being niche isn’t a victory. It’s an admission of defeat a la segways

1 point by AbsoluteNonce8 0 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]

I think the secret is having some really stellar #2’s. Gwynne Shotwell Does wonders for space-x giving Elon the space to focus on the non-boring next-gen stuff. Jack had the same with Sarah Friar at Square but she left for Nextdoor. He also used to have Anthony Noto doing the company building at Twitter but he left for Square? But honestly, Elon’s probably an anomaly and no one else could match that ethic and sprawl

Not really :). 5 years is a pretty arbitrary, flattering timeline. Twitter is +18% all time growth. Facebook doubled a billion to 2B then to 3B users. In the same time span Twitter plateaud their user growth. Love the product, but the company is horrific in building things.

The 3x growth is only because they finally figured out monetization 7-8 years post ipo and rode the rising Ad wave that lifted all CPMs across Snapchat and TradeDesk.

Overall, pretty subpar stock and pretty grim outlook.