[patelh]

Drivel. Nothing directly actionable. If a CEO has to be physically in his office to successfully run the company, he has done a poor job in building leadership under him/her. Jack is doing what he should be, finding new growth opportunities. Milking the users with more Ads will just piss off users for short term gains.

[throwawaymath]

With respect, what you're saying doesn't address the main thrust of the letter. The nine hour time zone difference between Dorsey and Twitter HQ is only one component of the "drivel", as you put it. Frankly it's just the rhetorical opener to the main point.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether Dorsey should be CEO. But I think the author's concerns are more varied and more cogent than your rebuttal would make them seem.

What are your thoughts on Dorsey leading two tech companies at the same time, Twitter's share performance over the past several years, and the political waters Twitter has to navigate?

[georgeecollins]

Are you kidding? Twitter is a tech company with a great brand and a monopoly platform that has a stock that performs like a mall chain. The rate of product change is so slow. There are so many opportunities for growth that are not advertising.

Seriously, if you can't push out a CEO for under-performance in this case, when can you.

[_8j50]

The rate of product change at twitter is something every company should learn from!

Devs like new features a lot more than users do. Users feel disrupted by new features. Users don't open up their favorite app and say "gee whiz,I wonder what new feature there is today". Users don't even think about twitter, they think about tweets,replies,likes and other users. You focus on what matters to users, not what matters to devs and everyone else who does not get the user base.

Imagine feature-creep at their scale! Twitter is the most tolerable mainstream social media network I know of for many reasons -- all centered around their resistance to change and refusal to follow the trends at fb,instagram,snapchat,linkedin,etc...

Repeat with me: you don't need more growth if everyone is happy and you already have a steady and growing profit. You want more growth of course but you don't need it. You focus on what you have and need first then you consider your wants and features...very slowly.

[_k8si]

One example of a feature that I (a user) would love to see get a little love is Lists.

I use them frequently, but Lists are not well-designed at the moment. I can't see if I've already added a user to a list, the "update" is weirdly different from that of the main timeline, there are no aggregations/stats/summaries and AFAIK, there is no interaction with push notifications. They do nothing on the platform to draw anyone's attention to the feature.

But Lists are great! I can pare down my feed to a curated set of users who are all talking about the same thing -- I have an NLP list, and ML list, a "politics" list, etc. I can follow other people's curated lists too. Twitter is huge, it's awesome to have some path to a smaller cohesive community.

It's really weird to me that they would have a feature "above the fold" on the main menu of the platform that seems so dusty and under-utilized. What's the deal? Do they not have enough engineers over there or something?

[ISL]

Why should the product change? It is perhaps the most-successful one-to-many broadcast system in human history.

[georgeecollins]

I agree about its success, but I think you could build off of that.

Have you ever used other twitter clients? Why shouldn't the official client have at least some of the features they offer?

Let me ask the HN community! Can anybody here suggest a feature that they would like added to Twitter?

[amflare]

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. "Better" is subjective anyway. Any change with make some people mad, and no change will make others mad. If your product is stable, that's about the best you can hope for. No need to keep tweaking it out of boredom.

[georgeecollins]

Seriously can you think of any tech product that doesn't get new features every couple years?

[amflare]

stable !== static

Its like a car, you don't keep pressing the accelerator further and further to travel down the road. You find the optimum location to maintain a safe speed. If something changes, like the road turns, you adjust the accelerator until you are once again safe. If you stayed static, you'd probably fly into a ditch. If you are unnecessarily pumping the pedal, your speed would oscillate unpredictably, and any number of consequences would occur.

[buboard]

sure you can pull a digg and expect more money, but actually lose your users to a competitor. i 'd definitely quit twitter if it starts doing things like what facebook did to FB-page owners by holding their audience hostage for ransom. I think twitter, like reddit, inherently don't have high monetization potential because their format doesn't appeal to the massive audiences which flock to fb / instagram

[georgeecollins]

>> but actually lose your users to a competitor

Twitter would be incredibly hard to supplant at this point.

[buboard]

if they pull a facebook? i m off, and i m sure many, many will.

[patelh]

There is no real comparison. Twitter is unique in its market (where it makes money). You can't really compare it to Facebook.

[spsful]

That is also true. I did agree with the author's position that Dorsey should not be the chief executive of both Square and Twitter. That's probably his strongest case towards removal.

But your point about Twitter's uniqueness is also valid, and something I hadn't seriously thought of before. Around the time of their IPO, I think the general analyst consensus was that Twitter would not make money and their stock was not a buy. It makes sense because their product is wholly different from the suites offered by Facebook or Google, the companies this article and the commenter compare it to. Perhaps the other stakeholders understood this aspect of Twitter and didn't expect large returns from day 1.

[patelh]

I am not sure I agree with the author on how many companies a person should be able to run. Depends on the success of the companies themselves. Look at Musk.

[ronilan]

I think you meant drivel.

And here is a fine example of how to dribble (via twitter): https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/120241814211214540...

[patelh]

Yep, thanks for the correction.

[arcticbull]

With that attitude why even have CEOs? Company’s been built, it should just run itself. Let’s just have CEOs step down as part of the IPO process. Literally nothing could go wrong. I’m proud of how Apple was able to dig itself out in the 1990s all by itself through the will power of the board and executive team. I mean what with Steve’s many South American getaways.

Jack spends half days at two companies and as such isn’t able to meaningfully administer either. And from that platform he’s going on vacation to Africa for 6 months. The line about the real issue being not that he’s going away but rather that he’s coming back is devastating but not far from the mark.

[patelh]

No, I didn't say they aren't involved at all, but they don't need to be involved with day to day operations once they have consistent flow of revenue coming in. They should be finding ways to unlock the next growth multiplier not sitting at a desk in SF worrying about operations.

[arcticbull]

I mean sure, but running around Africa for 6 months yelling about Bitcoin hardly seems relevant to Twitter's operating model.

[patelh]

If in 6 months he has found that next growth multiplier, people won't care where he was, but in 6 months if there is no meaningful strategy derived from the exercise, there will be cause to rethink his role and he himself will see it.

[arcticbull]

Fair but there’s no meaningful strategy now, either.