[kylebgorman]

I'm short Twitter. The fact of the matter is it that Twitter should never have become a multibillion-dollar company. There is no barrier to entry into this space---any competent web developer could make a non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon---except network effects, and those have proved weak due to poor user experience, particularly for new users.

Twitter should have treated itself like a utility, and focused less on the online advertising race-to-the-bottom that it is sure to lose due to the aforementioned poor user experience and negative sentiment about the platform's future; this announcement is only going to continue to contribute to poor impressions.

The other monetization directions they have played around with---namely selling access to researchers and advertisers, and certifying identities of accounts for celebrities and brands---are a much better fit for the platform, and would have sustained a fast-moving company of 50 hotshot engineers. But the constant pressure to get bigger and bigger has served Twitter poorly. I'm sad to say that I think it will be a ghost town in a few years.

[paulpauper]

lol if it's so easy, I implore you to create a Twitter competitor... and to make your challenge easier, instead of it being worth $20 billion, we'll lower the bar to, say, $150 million. It's already been done..every major web 2.0 success has many clones that all tried but failed to gain the necessary momentum and marketshare to become as successful as Twitter or Dropbox, for example. Even Evernote, despite all the attention and funding it has gotten, is stuck in the ruts. Yes, the coding part can be replicated, but getting the users and traction is the hardest part.

[richmarr]

kylebgorman posted that comment 2 hours ago, he must be half way done building his Twitter-but-better by now. I'm on the edge of my seat, I can tell you.

[misiti3780]

to further your point (i think) app.net tried and failed build a competitor:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/app-net#/entity

[jerrickhoang]

> There is no barrier to entry into this space---any competent web developer could make a non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon---except network effects

As a backend engineer, I feel offended by this statement of yours.

[niccaluim]

They did say "non-scaling." Though that's a bit like saying any competent shipbuilder could build a non-floating boat.

[paulpauper]

You got to have balls of steel to short a company like Twitter. I would rather short oil, gas, or commodity companies . Facebook stock, for example, is up 200% since 2012, leaving a lot of shorts burned in the process who thought it was overvalued.

[joncooper]

Are you a professional investor?

[davidcgl]

> any competent web developer could make A non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon

I wish people would stop claiming how they could clone a social media app in an afternoon / weekend.

[metaphorm]

Its a credible claim. Social media apps are a fairly basic kind of CRUD app, and if you forego the complex layers of privacy settings and permissions, monetization schemes, and scalability issues you end up with what amounts to a weekend project for an experienced developer.

Now, social media apps are worthless without the aforementioned features that would have to be omitted to get it done in a weekend, so obviously there's some hyperbole going on with statements like that. However, on a fundamental level its correct. The technical requirements of building a social media app are small/easy and within the scope of what a startup on a shoestring budget could manage if they felt like it was a good business opportunity.

The issues start to pile up only much later down the road. Maintaining scalability after you cross some critical threshold of traffic gets hard, but you don't have to think about that until you're at or near the threshold anyway. Not a lot of barrier in getting started.

[davidcgl]

I agree that if you strip out all the complexities behind what you see on the screen, then yes someone can definitely build a bootstrap-y clone in a weekend.

[talmand]

What do you mean? I fully believe that a competent developer could sit down and make something like Twitter in a weekend. Especially since the concept and what to do with it is already on display for them to copy.

Now, to create a Twitter clone in a weekend when there's no Twitter to go by? Nope.

[davidcgl]

If you boil down the entirety of Twitter into just a CRUD app that allows you to post 140 characters at a time, then yes, you can make that in a weekend.

Well, how about recommended posts / people to follow (ML)? Sponsored posts with a buy button (3rd part integration)? Growth and metrics (data analytics)? A software product is never just about pixels on the screen; and trivializing the engineering effort behind it is insulting to Twitter employees, some of whom are brilliant engineers I know.

[talmand]

I think you misunderstand my point. Your first sentence is similar to what I'm saying. Your second part is not what I'm saying.

[nkohari]

You could create something that looks like Twitter, but you couldn't create Twitter. Ignoring the network effects and scale that Twitter has is ignoring its primary value.

[talmand]

That's my point.

[nkohari]

It's hard for me to get that from what you wrote. It seemed that your point was more that the existence of Twitter means it's easy to reproduce it, but before Twitter, it was difficult to envision a site like Twitter.

My counterpoint is that it's not actually the idea that's interesting, it's the fact that they've convinced lots of people to use it, and have built a system powerful enough to support that scale.

[001sky]

The original comment expressly states a "non-scaling" version of twitter...what is so hard about that? this sub=thread then clearly illustrates what "non-scaling" means and doesn't mean. smh

[qq66]

Making a Twitter minus the scaling and network effects is like playing basketball minus dribbling or shooting.

[Xyik]

lol - so which features are you going to exclude? Is your weekend-twitter-app going to support a feed, favoriting / reteweeting only to your followers / dming only between followers / ability to block / filter / rate-limit users who tweet-spam / mobile app / push notifications / e-mails to new users who sign-up / and various other necessary features an app usually has before it even launches a MVP?

[curiousjorge]

I have to say that for Facebook as well. When the IPFS picks up, we'll have a distributed clone of twitter and facebook that runs on such architecture.

There would be no desire or need for advertisement or money making or tracking people when there are no owners, no benefactors but the people using it.

The end is nigh for traditional SV unicorns that offer no barrier to entry in a distributed and anonymous internet.