[AbsoluteNonce8]

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.

[wpietri]

What's your evidence that Twitter's market is significantly larger?

Non-tech people sometimes ask me whether they should get on Twitter. I ask them why they might want it, and very often my answer is, "No, don't worry about it." And that's coming from somebody who uses Twitter enough to have two separate accounts plus a Twitter bot (sfships).

Twitter, like HN, is a niche social network. [1] Twitter's niche is much larger, of course. But I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to FB, whose target market is "anybody with friends or relatives".

[1] Technically, I'd call it a multi-niche network, in that it gets the most publicly active segment of people in a whole bunch of social groups. For example, tech people is has are the sort most likely to write books and articles, speak at/go to conferences, etc. But if you're the sort of workaday programmer who punches a clock at a bank and pays no attention to the industry, Twitter doesn't do much for you.

[AbsoluteNonce8]

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

[wpietri]

I agree with you that Twitter's feature velocity has been terrible. Although in the last year or so they've definitely been trying more new things, so maybe they've finally fixed the internal barriers to that.

But I'm not getting what you think "Twitter for the masses" should be. The current value prop is something like, "globe-spanning discussion around hot topics". Fewer people care about that than "keep in contact with family and friends" or "look at pretty pictures". I don't see a mom-and-pop version of Twitter in the same way that I don't see a mom-and-pop version of the WSJ or the NYT. The mom-and-pop version of the NYT is perhaps USA Today, but that's not an expanded product, just a different one.

[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!

[aeternum]

Twitter is a great idea ruined by terrible UI. It's clear that people do want to listen to what famous people have to say, and they want to hear it directly from the person, not a PR team.

If only the UI let you do things like follow a thread, set up proper notifications, and made at least some attempt at filtering out the spammer/scam replies.

[wpietri]

Those all strike me as very much advanced-user features, so as much as I'd enjoy using some of them, I doubt they'd make much difference to general-audience growth.

And I think you're being unfair about the spam/scam replies. Twitter has made great improvement there in terms of downranking/hiding junk replies. It'll never be perfect, but it's at the very least much better than it was. I have to go a long way down in most threads I look at to see that stuff if it appears at all.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

While I agree that Musk’s hockey stick stocks mean removing him would piss of the people who could remove him, removing Dorsey because twitter isn’t a great stock seems weird. Stock matters for fundraising and for compensation, and as long as that stuff is working, the rest of the stock considerations should be secondary. Obviously they aren’t secondary to investors and investors have disproportionate power, but it still seems stupid.

[AbsoluteNonce8]

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.

[sflicht]

> love the product

Seems to me that everything good about the product was present pre-IPO and it has only gotten worse over the years. I still use it but I find the interface/functionality strictly less pleasant with each design change.

[AbsoluteNonce8]

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

[whimsicalism]

It's funny how the same people who are very pro-privacy will crap on Twitter for not taking the same aggressive anti-privacy stance as FB.

[AbsoluteNonce8]

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!

[whimsicalism]

And FB isn't bumbling? I have a much better experience on Twitter and far less intrusive targeting of ads/following you across the web - which is where FBs monetization happens.

The growth discrepancy has a lot to do with FBs innovation on the tracking component of things - advertising is what drives profit for these companies.

[AbsoluteNonce8]

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