Twitter reports grim growth numbers, Wall Street reacts accordingly

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Please Twitter don’t poop out now, Trump needs to continue re-tweet’n racist rants from the crazies that follow him.

[note sarcasm & schadenfreude]

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Wait a minute… you mean, I was supposed to be using Twitter?

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You can’t make a down feather bed by collecting dandelions.

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and surely stock market valuation is the best way to measure the true value of a communication medium used by 300 million people…

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When one of the ideas floated is to change the defining characteristic of the platform (character limits) you know something is seriously wr

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r.i.p. usenet

long live the next iteration of usenet

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Usenet was actually useful.

Twitter is more or less worthless, though I did see it’s use as a news network. Only its more of an alert system to tell you news is out there, not actually provide any depth.

Great for celebrities to stroke their egos.

Anyway. I am going to focus on positive energy and blessings on everyone. And no, I’m not into butt stuff.

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I had to check investopedia to find out exactly what it is that Twitter does to earn money, and it doesn’t seem like a very sustainable business model.

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Arguably.

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In theory fewer users is good news, as it will reduce their quarterly outlays.

Wow. Directed to thread generally…

Hey Grampa, thanks for your opinion on Twitter!!! I’ll be getting off your damn lawn now…

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I could never figure out how it could be useful to me - beyond one-liners anything worth saying wouldn’t fit in the 140 characters. It’s like using bumper stickers as a communications medium.

The only real use I found was for localized crowd-sourced news - like, “what was that boom” and “what are all those sirens” - that is what it was good for (to me YMMV) because usually a bunch of other people were asking the same question.

Which is all well and good and did work (?) on a small scale for years but as soon as they went to Wall Street and were beholden to shareholder value - well, you’ve got to feed the Kraken somehow even if it means dismemberment.

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uhm… twitter is a global instant communication tool. some people just don’t get it I guess. Maybe that is what has happened, it has reached a saturation point with people who get twitter.

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The greed of capitalism. If there isn’t 10% growth every year and 15% increase in dividend returns for investors over the previous year then the company is a failure and needs to be immediately devalued, broken up, and sold at a bankruptcy sale.

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It did lose a little less in 2014 than in 2013, but if the business model was to sell red ink they would be very successful.

Twitter (and Facebook) are illustrations of Gresham’s Law, that bad money drives out good. As they expand the quality of the product declines. In manufacturing you can expand successfully because the more of an identical product you make, the better you can get at making them. But in anything supposed to have content, in general, the more you expand the lower the average IQ and creativity of the content producers. In both the US and the UK the paid-for TV networks produce better content than the advertising-supported ones. The conclusion should be obvious.

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I made the mistake (again) of updating the twitter app that had worked perfectly fine just because I was curious, it’s so much more invasive now, like a letting agent. I feel dirty everytime I use it (the bad kind of dirty). “Here’s some posts that we specifically wanted you to see!” Back. “Did you like this? Y/N” Back. Where’s the button to say that I don’t like being asked stupid questions?

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I think that what you describe is what being ‘monetized’ feels like.

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Technically in economics, “Monetizing” actually means using something as currency, not making money out of something. I’m afraid this one is probably going the way of “disinterested” thanks to Wall Street.
However, “monetizing” is correctly used for Internet selling space, since it gets used as a de facto currency, passing through many hands between pixel and Google. And like all de facto currencies, it is subject to inflation. Which is a lot of Twitter’s problem (and Facebook’s.)

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If a service is free then you are the product, they say. The data we surrender is what is bought and sold, we are the monies!

Milhouse: I can’t go to juvie! They use guys like me as currency!
Chief Wiggum: Yeah, they’ll pass you around like… like currency, like you said.

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