Twitter: It is too late for it to become the giant people expected - noir-york http://www.economist.com/news/business/21707258-it-too-late-social-media-firm-become-giant-people-once-expected-twitter <comment><AUTHOR> There's something so sad to me about the general tech press attitude (let alone the Wall Street attitude) towards Twitter.

Twitter is forever judged by Facebook's bar, using Facebook's KPIs. Nevermind that the average high profile tweet is much more culturally significant than the averge high profile Facebook post. Heck most of Facebook isn't even original content, it's just really slick distribution for content from elsewhere.

Obviously Facebook has cracked engagement in a way that Twitter never has and never will. _But_ , Twitter has cracked public discourse in a way that no other company has period. Think about it, all previous internet fora have imploded as they've grown large, or collapsed into micro-communities like sub- reddits. Twitter has definitely faced challenges with trolling and witch- hunts, etc, but by and large they've put together a super interesting product. The only problem is that it's not going to displace Facebook because it's a different thing that's not quite as big. This demand for growth is also why Twitter's management took their eye off the ball and failed to recognize and improve the core problems that hurt the product and community. It's just a really sad statement on modern business culture that Twitter isn't allowed to be considered a success as a medium-sized company that punches way above its weight among influencers.

<comment><USER2> You're addressing like 10% of the article. The article lays out tons of issues, including:

1\. Shrinking product - this isn't about comparing to facebook, it's about comparing to 2015 twitter.

2\. Unhappy employees - especially high turnover at the top, which is universally a bad sign.

3\. Unhappy users - users spending way less time on twitter.

4\. Unhappy investors - stock price is wayyy down.

5\. Happy competitors - a lot of the "cultural significance" is moving to instagram, snapchat, and others.

Twitter isn't a successful medium sized company, it's a large company that is in trouble. Maybe it will become a successful medium sized company one day, but that process will be painful for a lot of people.

<comment><USER3> It's not so bad to survive as a service for news and press releases. You can't do that very well on Instagram and definitely not on Snapchat. It means Twitter is going to shrink (points 1 to 4) but it will keep paying salaries. Not world domination but still a success.

<comment><USER4> They are losing money, so may be not.

Both pieces of their business model, advertising and users, strongly benefit or hurt because of network effects. As the network shrinks, the value does not drop linearly. This is an assault from both sides. Because Twitter's growth is now definitely flat and likely is shrinking this is pretty bad.

While you can't do X or Y on Instagram or Snapchat now doesn't mean you won't in the future. Clearly both took a big chunk of Twitter's users. Tweeting pictures was previously a large use case. So was tweeting and sharing things with friends. That you can create a video of what happened rather than typing it out isn't necessarily a different product or use case.

In terms of news - FB, Google, Apple are all going after that market hard right now. The mass use case for Twitter probably made this sub use case look bigger than it was - news and instant events. Things could still change, but it is hard to see Twitter out-innovating their problems when they no longer have the social tail winds pushing them forward. And at some point the cash is going to matter a lot too.

Does it make a lot of sense for someone with a lot of users to buy Twitter and try to revamp it? Plausibly, but the brand damage definitely has been done with the growth demographics. That is kind of the mistake Myspace's acquirers have made. At some point a brand goes from valuable to doing just the opposite.

I bought Twitter shares and ended up selling them all once this settled in. There still probably is a threshold where an executive that is looking for value vs growth tries to acquire and you can arbitrage the difference.

Unfortunately the bulk of Twitter's remaining value is probably going to be realized by there competitors as a case study for the survivors - FB/IG, Snapchat, and future players.

<comment><USER5> None of Google, Apple, and FB have any public discourse worth reading, or even readable conversation threads at all. You're comparing apples and oranges.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if a Google acquisition would be a natural step forward? It would tidily wrap up this tumultuous chapter in Twitter's history. And it would finally, at long last give Google something approximating a legitimate social network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is probably an unpopular opinion and for certain I lack the qualification to run a public company of about 4000 people and hence to make snarky comments on the internet.

However it's my common sense that tells me there's something going _very_ wrong with Twitter: let's be honest, their product is a message server with a fancy website wrapped around it and an attached ad-business. There's absolutely _NO WAY_ it takes 4000 employees to run this thing! For comparison Whatsapp had ~ 60 employees when it was bought by FB and Instagram had 13. And I'd venture to say that both of these companies had more data to manage than Twitter has now.

 _Because he is often working at Square, many managers arrive late, depart early and generally show up just to "punch the time card", says one former senior executive who has sold all of his shares._

And my common sense tells me it's probably not just the managers but also about 90% of the engineers. I don't mean to be derogatory towards Twitter employees but I truly wonder what everybody at this company is doing all day. The product is not improving in any meaningful way. The few innovations that they launched were all acquired businesses.

Twitters quarterly expenses are now around 700 million. Let me make a very conservative estimate: It would probably not take more than 100 million per quarter to run the business (including their ad business). Likely much less. Their revenue is 600 million per quarter. If Twitter were a properly run company they could be making half a billion per quarter in profit which they could use to explore new business opportunities, products, or if there's a total lack of ideas, pay out to shareholders. I'd argue that any of these options would be a whole lot better than the status right now.

<comment><USER8> I think it's actually pretty hard to maintain Twitter's infrastructure; the amount of data is huge and the latency requirements are tight.

<comment><USER9> There's a difference between $2.5B/year hard, and $500M/year hard, and between those and $50M/hard.

The front end (tight "amount of data and latency requirements") are probably doable on $50M/year, as WhatsApp was doing something comparable on much less than that.

I know where some of the money went - tens of projects like Bootstrap, which have benefited the community at large, but whose value to twitter is probably not on par with the costs. But that still does not explain even a small fraction of where the money goes.

<comment><USER10> to be fair, an issue with whatsapp is fundamentally inward facing. lose a couple of old messages? you're on the free tier, what do you want? twitter on the other hand - a publicly liked and massively supported tweet/twitter account disappears or starts having malfunctions and the whole service is maligned. "free speech is being threatened" etc etc twitter has been used for mass protests/revolutions because of it's reach and stability. do you think whatsapp would have done the same? they were still transmitting plain text between users and it was trivially easy to view someone else's texts for quite some time

<comment><USER9> I disagree. There are whatsapp groups of hundreds of members, some used for political action. If they indeed lose messages, people notice.

I'm not sure why you bring up plaintext (it is irrelevant, regardless of Twitter still being plaintext itself).

Engineering wise, the user-visible side of Twitter is more or less as complex as the user visible side of whatsapp. Both can be done on very modest hardware with modest operations if they are properly done. Whatsapp was lean (and probably still is). Twitter never was.

<comment><USER10> apologies i brought up plaintext as an example of a thing messaging clients should fundamentally not do but whatsapp never got around to fixing until it became a real issue for them, hell p2p encryption was only done this year

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maddening how incompetent Twitter is at strategic thought. They have arguably the most politically and civically important property on the internet but wish they were Facebook.

Twitter is a Bentley in a market that wrongly thinks it should be Honda. The value of a network is as much the value of its participants as it is size. __There is nothing wrong with Twitter, quite the opposite __

Twitter 's key users are making, reporting and breaking news. The second and third order effects of this are enormous, far surpassing Facebook.

The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to compete in the social media gutter.

Uuuuugh....

<comment><USER12> > The perceived monetization "problem" is painfully and frustratingly easy to > rectify if Twitter would simply embrace their role and stop trying to > compete in the social media gutter.

I'd love to hear you expand on that point

<comment><USER11> Okay, expanding... revenue currently based on broadcast value alone. No value is being extracted from communications loops, redirected communications, related content, drill downs, prioritized versions of the aforementioned items, filters (including location-based filters) or monetized karma (eg. Reddit gold). All of these can be accomplished without polluting the UI or purity of the tweet. Additionally, the highest value network members have got to be cultivated, incentivized for tweets, interaction with other network members and tolerating the occasional flame. A mesh networked solution should be in the works with a moderation-bridged pipeline to the conventional twitterverse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with Twitter is that the demolished their developer ecosystem. The attacked the very developers and companies that taught people how to use Twitter and developed solutions that made it a viable use case. Without those myriad of solutions built upon it, Twitter is a very basic SMS broadcast medium. It has a sloppy unsegmented home feed full of noise and its mechanics are horrible so it does a poor job of burying hate.

With that in mind, the numbers show. The people that get it are on it. Most of the rest of us just see glimmers of it embedded in news articles. Sadly, it is too late to reverse this. Trust has been lost.

<comment><USER14> Twitter had to kill their ecosystem in order to make any money on advertising. There was just no way to sell ads if so many users were going to be using 3rd party clients.

You may be right that killing off the 3rd party ecosystem hurt their usage, but from a business perspective, there wasn't any point keeping it if it was damaging their business model.

<comment><USER15> Not really. The vast majority of their ads are in the timeline. I don't see why they couldn't just serve those to third party developers. If the third parties try to block or prevent them then you revoke their API keys. Done.

<comment><USER16> I dunno, I think to do that they'd have to have an Apple App Store level of oversight on their third party devs products, which would be about as restrictive to the devs as the changes they actually did make, plus prohibitively expensive for Twitter.

<comment><USER17> That's not true at all. As someone who had multiple Twitter API apps killed by them, I would have welcome app store level review processes. Limiting tokens (killing any popular app) and killing games that let you tweet easily because they are too much like general purpose clients like they did was just ridiculous. The best apps I know, like Foursquare, just switched back to asking users for username and password at the time because the token limitation basically broke integration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I believe the problem with Twitter, as it's always been, is that it's just too polarizing. Either people get it, or they don't. It's not general enough, the mechanics of hash tags, nonsensical short messages, retweeting, the signal to noise ratio is horrible, coupled with an often confusing interface, don't allow for the second half of the adoption curve to ever happen. For such a simple mechanic, they make it difficult for a lot of people to just "get it".

I've got multiple accounts for various projects, my own personal account, and I still don't see the value in it for me personally.

<comment><USER19> For those that do "get" twitter, can you tell why it's useful? I've been on twitter for about 5 years now. I go through phases where I visit just about every day, and tweet a decent amount, trying to find the worth. And I can honestly say I see almost no value at all. I'm really trying hard to cross into the "get" category, and it just isn't happening. Lately I've been considering closing my account and being done with it.

The signal/noise ratio is _horrific_ , and the insistence on 140 characters is far more aggravating and frustrating than anything. Nowadays I see people dividing their thoughts into 8+ tweets (prefacing each with 1/8, 2/8, etc) and I just shake my head.

<comment><USER20> Nothing on the Internet delivers news faster than Twitter. Every other platform is either too slow (websites with CMS's and editors), or too filtered (Facebook or chat apps, on which posts are private by default).

If you want to know what's happening _right now,_ Twitter will give you better results than anything else, including a Google search. Tweets famously beat an earthquake from Virginia to New York, fulfilling an XKCD joke. And it's almost all searchable by the public in real time.

So that's one thing: it's a close as you're going to get to a real-time tap in the zeitgeist.

Another use is comedy; you get everything from corny puns and "dad jokes," to multi-year character humor arcs, to biting political humor, all in one place, as fast as you want it.

Another is the ability to drill down into a wide variety of subcultures. Various niches within politics, programming, sports, finance, etc. all have robust conversations going on constantly, and many of them internationally.

Candidly, it took a long time for me to get Twitter. Ultimately for me the secret was to follow a bunch of folks I might like, see what they said, unfollow the ones I didn't like, and then follow the folks who the others (the ones I kept) retweeted.

I spend more time on Twitter now than any other social network or app. And I only really started "gettting it" a year or two ago.

<comment><USER10> this is pretty spot on, for people who like being "in the know" twitter is like your favorite publicly available and easy find-able crack "oh hey what is that guy from the scrubs tv show doing nowadays" "he just tweeted about a charity/podcast thing he's doing tomorrow we should check it out" as much as snapchat/facebook etc are "innovating" with their live video and infinitely desirable ephemeral messaging, twitter remains the way to get info right now without having to dig too deep into a social graph

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brian-armstrong Twitter makes me think of a public good on the internet. It's fun to imagine it being funded by tax dollars instead of investment money, with no ads whatsoever and 1/20th of its staff size. The priorities would have to be different entirely, but I think it would be for the better.

Actually, I can imagine a few internet properties that might make more sense to be run like this. Some things just don't really make sense when you try to do them for profit.

<comment><USER21> It should have been an open protocol all along, like email or netnews.

<comment> brian-armstrong I'm curious, do the federated twitter clone protocols scale? Has anyone tested them at twitter peak loads?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Twitter is a really strange company.

I find so much value in it, mostly in the form of tweet deck with multiple columns giving me real time "news" on multiple different subjects/companies.

Yet, I don't pay for it and I can't see why anyone would pay for it. Advertising doesn't seem like a viable business model as I have yet to see any add that is of any value what so ever from the main site.

Can anyone make the case that within 2 years Twitter isn't owned by one of Google, Microsoft, or Facebook? With Steve Balmer's large investment Microsoft seems like the leader here.

Or one of the big media companies, though I like this idea less as I can't see them wanting to subsidies the company forever.

I mean what is Twitter's business model?

Can they really make a go of advertising?

I mean they've done prety well so far but IMHO I wouldn't be surprised that the ad money they've made so far is from people who feel like they need to advertise on Google and Facebook and Twitter. And once they get a few year of data to show which ads are actually helping, the twitter ad money is the first to be yanked.

Do the go the financial markets model and sell their data/firehose? Does that generate anywhere near the amount they'd need?

If/when the advertising dollars go away, what does Twitter do? Or is Twitter banking on being able to compete directly with Facebook and Google for ad dollars as an equal?

<comment><USER23> Twitter can sell high speed access to all tweets, and their costs should be really low. Long term it could be a midsize, but profitable company as long as they don't get into debt.

<comment><USER24> They already do this [1]. They used to sell this access to 'value-add' data analytics resellers as well, but in 2015 they acquired one instead [2] and stopped reselling it [3].

[1] [https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/firehose](https://dev.twitter.com/streaming/firehose) [2] [https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data- ecosystem/](https://blog.gnip.com/twitter-data-ecosystem/) [3] [http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/04/11/twitter-cuts-off- firehos...](http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/04/11/twitter-cuts-off-firehose- resellers-as-it-brings-data-access-fully-in-house/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Twitter is really only useful for following influencers, famous public figures, popular people, however you'd like to describe them. There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent users. Everything people go to Twitter for therefore can be done without having an actual account yourself; everything is public, so why have an account other than to curate a list of things prominent users say.

Which might not even be a bad model if you think about it. To have it be the premier "find out what they said" space, without the hoopla from idiots, trolls, etc. Would people pay to visit a site like that? I'm not sure. Would there be a way to monetize that sort of experience? I think so. Just my $0.02.

<comment><USER26> > There isn't that much of a reason for a more normal user with a few hundred > followers (maybe) to engage on it other than interact with more prominent > users

I think you've misjudged the value of Twitter for a normal user.

In my experience as one of these "normal" users, Twitter's major use case is like Facebook before the "adults" (older people) and extended family showed up. You can type out whatever you want, and your Twitter buddies will see it (often a different circle than your Facebook friends).

Because messages are so short, interaction is much easier. Discussions take place in 140 characters rather than paragraphs. Sure, it's less deep than Facebook, but it's also satisfyingly immediate.

It's also a lot more possible to make new friends over Twitter than Facebook. It's relatively normal to interact with people you've never met before, whereas on FB that'd be a big faux pas outside of a post in a common-interest group.

All the brand stuff? Powerful users and influence and news? Not super relevant for a pretty decent swath of users (although it is pretty funny when I subtweet a utilities company or something when I'm having an issue and they send me an official DM). I personally do not follow any major brands or celebrities, although occasionally I see them through retweets.

<comment><USER24> > _Twitter 's major use case is like Facebook before the "adults" (older > people) and extended family showed up. You can type out whatever you want, > and your Twitter buddies will see it_

I'm in the twentysomething, white demographic, and in my circle of friends we used Twitter in such a way around ~2009-2011. But we've all moved on to Tumblr, Instagram, and then Snapchat.

Tumblr has better discoverability of people whose content you may legitimately enjoy, and endless reblogging is encouraged and not a faux-pas, which is a great way to fill your "timeline" when you have nothing to say, or a great way to counterbalance personal posts that all implicitly solicit your friends' attention (however briefly).

Instagram flips the 'attachment' and the 'tweet' into 'image' and 'caption', and people like visuals. The image either provides aesthetic gratification on its own, or it's a social icebreaker used to carry the content in its caption. Snapchat is used the same way, with the added benefit that Snapchat is private one-on-one by default, friends-only on demand, whereas Instagram makes your entire timeline public or friends-only per your choice.

Between these three services and the ever-present Facebook, the need for Twitter is not so great -- since we've subsumed every other usecase in a service that does it better, all that we use Twitter for is to broadcast stuff pseudonymously to the entire world, hoping it garners some likes. It usually doesn't. It's not particularly fun to shout into the ether; so Twitter doesn't even do that function well.

<comment><USER26> I think we have different use cases, despite being in the same demographic.

You speak of using Twitter "in [your] circle of friends", but I'd say about half of my "Twitter friends" (mutuals who I regularly interact with) aren't within my "friend circle." My high school circle keeps in touch with an FB group chat, and the occasional Snapchat. My college circle keeps in touch with some FB and Instagram posting. Twitter is a different beast.

 _> Tumblr has better discoverability of people whose content you may legitimately enjoy, and endless reblogging is encouraged and not a faux-pas, which is a great way to fill your "timeline" when you have nothing to say, or a great way to counterbalance personal posts that all implicitly solicit your friends' attention (however briefly)._

For me, this is a negative. I don't WANT endless reblogging filling up my page. I like seeing content created by the people I follow, even if it's all personal posts, which I often enjoy more than other sorts of content.

Twitter also has a real-time aspect that Tumblr does not. Many people use queues on Tumblr, which, to me, would completely defeat the purpose of having a "feed." Just let me browse individuals' queues at my own leisure.

 _> Instagram flips the 'attachment' and the 'tweet' into 'image' and 'caption', and people like visuals. The image either provides aesthetic gratification on its own, or it's a social icebreaker used to carry the content in its caption_

I very rarely see people having actual conversation on Instagram. I enjoy seeing the content, but I doubt that I'd ever meet someone completely new over Instagram unless I had an OC art/photography/etc account.

 _> Snapchat is used the same way_

I don't think that's true either. Instagram seems to be carefully considered and orchestrated photos, while Snapchat is quick, low quality and one-off. It's a conversational way of using images (which is clever), but it also requires more investment for each conversation.

 _> It's not particularly fun to shout into the ether; so Twitter doesn't even do that function well._

This is my main point of disagreement. I personally DO find it fun (or at least cathartic) to shout into the ether, when that ether is a loosely anonymous group of quasi-friends (with a couple actual friends tossed in there too). No other service provides this.

I also like seeing the raw, real-time stream-of-thought posts. Facebook and Instagram are too curated, Tumblr is too rebloggy and non-real-time, and Snapchat is too personal/one-on-one.

Anyway, hope this justification makes sense. Obviously if you don't see a use case for it, you're not under obligation to use it. I wouldn't use it either if I had a really solid local social circle, but in lieu of constant online interaction with actual friends, Twitter works well enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have always felt Twitter could do a better job doing recommendations. Sort of help me find things I like better. Not just content. I have really started to like Four Square automatically giving me tips when I walk into places. It seems like Twitter should know more about what I like/dislike perhaps even more than Facebook, Amazon, and Google considering I have actively told it so.

Going back to Four Square... Twitter also really doesn't leverage geo. Why the hell doesn't it show me tweets near me in real time? That would be pretty damn useful. It could be the event engine. I can't tell you how many times some body says to me "I have this great idea for startup that shows you cool things happening right near you" ... and yet twitter could have this now.

<comment><USER28> I run a twitter feed with tweets about my local area, and gave up on using their geo stuff entirely to find relevant content... It's quite ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Streaming live events with partnerships can be big for them. They streamed the NFL Thursday Night Football game last night and quality was impeccable (aside from my Bills getting the L). Much better experience IMO than Facebook's attempts at streaming sports.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think the core problem is that Twitter should be a protocol, not a company. There's just no need for there to be any servers: users could send messages to one another, each running his own agents.

Since the Twitter experience doesn't _need_ the Twitter corporation, there's always going to be friction and centrifugal force.

<comment><USER31> Even as a protocol, there'd still need to be some means of governing the distribution, storage, and retrieval of tweets. A simple P2P network would make it much harder to gain a foothold when nobody is mirroring your content.

I think Twitter the corporation could make a viable business of filling that role by selling access to infrastructure for the protocol to developers of end-user applications and various data hounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> All sorts of very mis guided comments below. Here are some points:

1/ Im an advertiser I can tell you that big brands still love the platform (and spend heavily) 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful? 3/ Balance sheet has $1bn+ 4/ NFL deal is huge, ditto bloomberg streaming 5/ Product needs to ship much quicker than Facebook does to stay relevant 6/ It is the only place that has nailed real time properly, if there is a bomb in a major city you will hear it first on twitter no where else has this edge, nowhere 7/ The worlds most important people are on this platform and readily accessible in most cases, not true on FB in terms of accessibility 8/ 80% Gross Margin business 9/ Needs to stay independent and ramp up advertising spend once logged out tweets ad product rolls out 10/ True reach of Twitter is almost 1bn users when we consider tweets appearing on TV, off the platform, in newspapers etc. This is comparable to FB

Some of the ignorant stuff people are saying about all the employees is disrespectful.

WhatsApp and IG when they were acquired were making very little money, if they had stayed independent and no one acquired them they would not be running today (they would exhaust the capital chain). WhatsApp maybe was making £10ml a year but was losing money; IG was making £0. I can tell you with certainty if they were independent and around today the growth would be stalling and there is a high chance they would not be able to continue raising venture money, it is very easy to grow products to 1bn users when you add FB growth's team which is best in class to an already solid product.

Twitter has been generating solid revenue from around 2009/10 (someone correct me if im off here) and big brands love it and there is lots of data I have seen to support the value to advertisers around the world.

Twitter does however need to tell its story a lot better afterall a Tweet means many different things to many people, its just not as easy to communicate as Facebook to an outside but this doesn't mean it is not valuable or should not exist independently.

<comment><USER33> _> 2/ Revenue is $2bn+ a year, how is this not successful?_

It's not successful because their expenses are $2.6 billion a year which _exceeds_ the revenue of $2.2 billion collected.[1]

This means they lost $450 million. They have no profits. They've _never_ had a profitable year. In short, if you spend more than you make, you're not financially successful.

Why do many people think companies like Twitter and Spotify (also $2 billion revenue and still losing money) are _" successful"_ ?!? I'm guessing the confusion happens because observers don't understand the difference between _revenue and profit_.

[1][https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWTR&fstype=ii)

<comment><USER34> Is there a breakdown somewhere of where those costs are coming from and what they can probably knock out to hit profitable? It's only a few, hundred million over revenue. I mean, that's a big problem but I've seen rebounds from worse when better management came along.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> noir-york Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community?

Regarding monetization: Twitter creates a lot of value - but its hard to monetize because the value is primarily positive externalities. News media benefits by publishing news on twitter, celebs reach their fans, politicians use it as a campaign tool. And Twitter makes very little from all this.

The irony: while telcos are fighting hard to avoid becoming commoditized dumb pipes; Twitter _by design_ are a dumb pipe ferrying tweets.

<comment><USER35> > Real-world friends are the basis for your FBK graph, work colleagues are the > basis for Linkedin. But Twitter? What's the community?

Your political network ? Fans network ?

In which case, it is most useful for celebrities or wannabes but not for regular people.

<comment> noir-york Indeed. If twitter is for news, then the people who create the "news" \- politicians, celebs, artists, journos - are the foundation of the network.

Most of us live mundane lives and while events in our lives may be news to friends (marriage/births/etc) there is already a network to share that kinda news: fbk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Twitter, deep down, has the exact same problem as Blogger or Reddit or Livejournal or Tumblr. It's ultimately a community where people post text posts. This is notoriously hard to monetize. But it has another big problem that doesn't manifest as strongly in those platforms: the pressure of virality.

Twitter has managed to attract quite a number of VIPs, 'influencers' who draw followers to them and generate traffic and interest and engagement. These are your celebrities, your media personalities, industry and academia people who are very important in their fields -- people who either have a Wikipedia article, or a blog, or a Youtube channel. These are the people who buoy Twitter, so these are the people who were most likely to get a Verified mark. Being on Twitter allows you to feel close to them, like their posts, reblog them on your feed, so you can project to your friends that you like this person and feel an affinity to what they do. These influencers also provide a natural place for promoted content, which has so far been under-utilized.

But somehow, Twitter has been saddled with the misconception that anyone can be famous with just a single tweet -- it's true that this can happen because it happened multiple times before, but when people join with the expectation that this may be the case, everyone loses. Maybe it's in analogue with Instagram, where if you post a Really Attractive selfie or take an incredible photograph, you may indeed accumulate a bunch of likes; but this aspiration doesn't translate nearly as well to quick-reply threads branching off of some influencer's post, which is the only way for an average person to attain enough eyeballs to have a shot at their post going viral.

This creates an incentive structure where no one truly wins:

\- Influencers have attract a lot of traffic, but a lot of it is people trying to be clever

\- Low-activity people -- the long tail of Twitter -- are either unaware of what's going on, or are caught up in the post flurry

\- The leftover group is people aggressively looking for their 15 minutes of fame

This also explains the myriad articles about people who "don't get Twitter" \-- they join and expect to accumulate followers naturally, despite not being notable on their own right or offering exceptional content. Sorry, you've been misled. Twitter will amplify your social reach, but it won't create one for you.

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't get why the board OKed having a part-time CEO. It just seems like a bizarre thing to do. Was there really no credible candidate who was willing to run Twitter full time?

<comment><USER37> Twitter at its most basic has a product problem and not a revenue or sales problem. I think for product problems founders have a unique perspective and legitimacy to make tough decisions. My guess is that the need for this founder perspective coupled with the fact that Jack was the only founder who was even partially available led to the decision of having him on as part time CEO.

<comment><USER38> being the CEO of even a small firm is a 150 percent time job.

I still find it hard to believe the Twitter board couldn't find anyone who didn't already have a job.

<comment><USER39> Yeah it's a pretty bad sign for your company when even the founder is like "this kinda sucks, I'm going to a better company that actually makes money."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Any way to fix the title? The 'the' after 'for' looks like it ought to have come after 'become'.

<comment> noir-york Apologies for the oversight! Cannot find a way to edit the title. Pointers welcome

<comment><USER40> It appears to have been fixed, so hurray!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> OK, here goes.

Twitter was _Great_. Yes, with a captial G. In 2008/9 up until, let's say, 2012 (or even 14)?

It got a lot of early adopters, it got groups together on it (real groups, people that meet in real life), it was a medium of conversation.

It still has some important aspects, some discussions work great there.

But I think people moved onto other platforms and most (of the cool people) left.

Twitter (company) needs to go beyond Twitter (the product). Fb knows this better (while moving the product forward, but it's visible they're reaching a limit there as well)

Both Twitter products, Vine and Periscope offer an inferior experience to Instagram videos and Fb live. (Especially Vine. It seems as bad as a Java plugin)

<comment><USER42> How much of this is a fundamental behaviour?

Not people moving from Twitter because Twitter is bad and Snapchat is good, but because Twitter is old and Snapchat is new?

Same drive to try newer programming languages and frameworks, same drive to join new startup companies, same drive to throw out and start afresh in lots of domains, same drive to leave this bar and try another.

I see this presented along with "online communities die when they can't block trolls", and "eternal September", and "small communities are more close-knit".

But maybe once it gets old, large, established, you have habits of interaction, same people you talk to, an established persona to keep up, a post history, it gets stale and it feels like work.

If you're a service, you can keep customers long term by offering good service. If you're a brand, you can keep customers long term by staying out of their way and not messing up and giving them reason to reconsider.

But if you're a meeting place, if you're a look and a feeling, if you're a venue for nothing in particular - well, fashions change and online, anywhere else is just as convenient to go to.

<comment><USER24> Some of it is fashion, some of it is 'eternal september' \-- but not all. Frankly, for a lot of Twitter's usecases, other services came along that met that usecase _better_.

First, Facebook introduced statuses. Most people's Facebook friends were people they knew from real life, so for announcing stuff to people you know from real life, Facebook was where the network was. Later, Facebook allowed each post to be toggled as fully-public, friends-of-friends, or friends-only (with 'custom' afterwards), allowing you to tailor each post to a particular audience. Twitter posts are still always-public or always-private, depending on how you have your profile set. When Facebook introduced IM, the real-life friends circle was forever lost to Facebook, leaving only weaker, or strong- but-online-only, or professional connections to Twitter.

Then Tumblr surfaced, being a snazzier LiveJournal with reblogs. The reblogs serve as both social signalling and icebreaking, to show people things you like or find interesting, to fill out the parts where your page would be otherwise empty or too heavy (full of personal posts) -- it's basically amusing smalltalk. Tumblr was much better at this than Twitter and provided better discoverability.

Then Instagram arrived with the emphasis on a picture, with the social expectation that it's self-made, somewhat curated, something you won't regret later. When Snapchat showed up, it provided an 'unfiltered' alternative to Instagram.

So between Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Snapchat, there isn't much room for Twitter anymore. For those using these four other services, Twitter is probably the place with That One Friend Who Uses Twitter, or a place where you go to try to be witty and clever, but no one reads your tweets anyway. All your friends are elsewhere because the others are _objectively_ better at a particular aspect of what Twitter was once used for, and so are VIPs and celebrities at this point, who've built up presences on every single platform, so no one is missing too much. The only people on Twitter I could possibly care about are tech bloggers, journalists, actual news outlets, or similar, and I don't need to be logged in to consume that content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ok, points for the Economist's title 'Twitter in retweet.' That's some fine pun-crafting right there.

No comment on the service itself. I love it. It's one of the only methods of public one-to-many distributed communication that actually works well and stays relatively balanced (mainly due to the limitation on message length and size). I hope another service with a similar dynamic pops up in its place should it collapse.

</comment><comment><USER44> Twitter's huge value is the ability to follow without needing a follow back (friend relationship).

However they need to find a way to offer both short and long form content while doing this. It's crazy they haven't tried anything else yet. Perhaps there is an opportunity for communities to form naturally as well but again they haven't given this any thought.

So many things they should be trying, its too bad. The concept is amazing but they are butchering it.

<comment><USER45> _> Twitter's huge value is the ability to follow without needing a follow back (friend relationship)._

Facebook also allows this. (Didn't always, but they do now.)

<comment><USER46> Doesn't that defeat the purpose of any privacy settings they have?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Same for Apple two decades ago. Yeah they never went anywhere.

Which spontaneously makes me think, maybe this CI stuff is the wrong way to go. Maybe a big-bang release every year where you can make a marketing statement "imagine if" "now you can" sort of thing.

In fact, as part of the minority 40+ contingent on HN, I'd _love_ if all services I used released updates only annually and I could know precisely what they are.

</comment><comment><USER48> Twitter is a great service for broadcasting information. Celebrities connecting with their fans bypassing press and other middlemen, that's huge value for them and they love it. Public officials making emergency and other announcements, custom tags for large events.

The average celeb promotion, public dept or event budget can easily afford to pay twitter for engagement and value adds like analytics or any other value adds they can come up with for these profiles. They just need an excuse to pay. Forget ads, focus on this.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've still never encountered a single person who posts to twitter except as part of their job or to promote themselves or one of their projects. Supposedly these people exist in their millions but I've no idea where they're hiding. Are they mostly schoolchildren?

<comment><USER50> I do (I won't post a link because this isn't self advertising, but my username is the same as it is here) – I work for a software company, I have my own company too (but I'm a procrastinator) – Twitter for me is to opine on political news or news I'm otherwise interested in (chemistry, psychedelics, etc) – none of which have anything to do with my job (and my employer would likely frown upon it too.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The Economist has a knack for getting on the case of sectors / companies whenever their price is at an extreme - and being wrong. It's actually a good contra-indicator, as we've seen with oil, shale, gold, more recently Deutsche bank, and now Twitter.

<comment><USER52> _It 's actually a good contra-indicator_

My all time favorite wrong call of theirs came in 1999. Oil had dropped to $11 and they were predicting that it could hit $5:

       a "normal" market price might now be in
       the $5-10 range. Factor in the current
       slow growth of the world economy and the
       normal price drops to the bottom of that range.

Of course, oil did just the opposite, climbing to about $140 per barrel over the next decade.

[http://www.economist.com/node/188181](http://www.economist.com/node/188181)

<comment><USER51> totally agree. They're infamous for this front page call. Remember when they also were lauding Gordon Brown for selling half of Britain's gold for an average price of 270?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Twitter lost me when they dumped on their ecosystem. The changes made to the platform in recent years are obvious grasp at straws rather than anything revolutionary. It's clear that investors have become Twitter's main concern – to a point where even something like a paywall or subscription wouldn't surprise me.

Twitter does not need to have as many employees as it does, and has them solely to rise to some zero sum pissing match.

</comment><comment><USER54> This reminds of something Aswath Damodaran pointed out a while back, that software companies that rely on advertising are collectively overvalued, in that they would need to altogether capture more than 100% of the market in order to justify each individual valuation. So any failure to "exceed expectations" results in a seemingly unreasonable drop in market value. [1]

[1] [http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2013/10/when-pieces- dont-...](http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2013/10/when-pieces-dont-add-up- micro-dreams.html)

</comment><comment><USER55> I would have liked to see Twitter become the product that Slack is now for many people: great direct message and group message capabilities, fun interface, great API for enabling bot integration, etc.

</comment><comment><USER56> The one thing that surprises me is that twitter isn't doing better given how unrelevant the facebook adverts are compared to the twitter adverts.

I find twitter adverts to be on a similar level to Google ads. I might not be interested in the adverts right now, but often the promoted tweets are at least relevant.

Facebook on the other hand gives me adverts about adopting a pony to celebrate my dead father.

</comment><comment><USER57> Twitter is important, useful, and will never be as big a business as Facebook.

The problem is that they can't admit this and are pushing to be something they cannot be. Thats why they have so many product managers showing each other powerpoints, each of whose responsibilities are so small that no forward progress can be made.

</comment><comment><USER58> It is interesting to me to hear how many say it doesnt have value to them. For me one aspect alone is worth it and that is real time news. It makes everything else look archiac.You can also scan a wide range of peoples opinions and find varied sources and angles fast.

</comment><comment><USER59> Reading all this, I miss Jaiku. Google miss social in the same was MS miss the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER60> I wonder if their deplatforming of several well known but controversial public figures played any role in the fall of twitter. If you say something unpopular or un-pc we'll ban you. Note how reddit almost went into a similar death spiral around the time they upped their standards of what is deemed "acceptable" speech. Note I'm not expressing my opinion here that hate speech is a good (or bad) thing, merely noting a correlation. May not be causation, but an interesting data point nontheless.

</comment><comment><USER61> Twitter should've been a protocol.

<comment><USER62> NNTP 2.0

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> ...And they destroyed their 3rd party app/developer ecosystem which would have helped their growth.

</comment><comment><USER64> It's a pity this article didn't but I assume it'll be interesting to compare Twitter with its copy cat Weibo in China, who went public Q2 2014, 6 months after Twitter, and started to see profit quarters since Q4 of the same year.

</comment><comment><USER65> Twitter should do what Odeo did. Odeo was failing, they started working on other ideas. One of those sideprojects was... Twitter. In the same spirit of experimentation and discovery, Twitter should work on tiny sideprojects and make more small bets.

</comment><comment><USER66> Twitter is loosing users because of lack of innovation. They aren't adding necessary new features. Even the existing investors aren't happy.

What features should they introduce. any suggestion?

<comment><USER67> Twitter is being told to be Facebook, when in-fact it needs to follow an entirely different paradigm, because it's intrinsically a different product. If Twitter is judge by what Facebook judges Facebook for success, it'll always fall short.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> You want the global conversation to take place on Twitter. Tweets can run on an event, at an event, and when live streaming or restreaming an event.

</comment><comment><USER69> I love the title. Economist article titles are an endless source of word puns. Someone should start a thread just to post the best Economist titles.

</comment><comment><USER70> What is Twitter doing wrong? This is an interesting question.

Answers posted so far:

\- it's polarizing... this may be true, but would simply mean a smaller market, not an existential risk.

\- they demolished the dev ecosystem. I totally agree with this, and think it was dumb. They thought they were Facebook. But I don't think this fully explains why their core product isn't a big success.

\- they don't have a strong enough business model. This is a bit of a tautology - we wouldn't be discussing it otherwise - but not having a strong business model does not explain why the core product doesn't _feel right_.

And that's the thing, you look at Facebook or Instagram and everyone "gets it". They may not _like_ it, but they understand what it's about.

But Twitter doesn't feel like that. It doesn't feel intuitive. It feels like a mess, like a lot of different use cases rolled into one big disorganised poorly designed app.

I read a bit about Twitter's history and my theory is that the problem stems right back to the beginning, when there was an argument amongst the founders about whether Twitter was for "micro-blogging" or for "news" (for some definition of what is newsworthy).

Both these seem like good ideas. We're all interested in our friends' opinions on various things, and what they're up to right now, and add to that the opinions and activities of people we choose to follow because we respect them and find what they say interesting, that sounds like a compelling product.

Likewise, keeping track of all the news on a variety of topics from many sources, hearing the news unfiltered from the actors involved, that is another very compelling product. Put me in direct contact with Elon Musk about what's happening at SpaceX, let me tweet Sam Altman to ask him something about YC. Cool.

It's interesting to consider that clearly selecting one of these use cases would solve many of Twitter's biggest problems. If you're following your friends and some famous people's microblogs, why not enforce real-world ID? If you're after the latest news, do you really need to be able to spam or message everyone? Both situations allow for a reduction in trolling and the negative behaviours that have made Twitter (as one unforgiving observer put it) "the cesspool of the internet".

Problem is Twitter doesn't set out to do either of these things, because it can't decide what it wants to be. So it has compromised and floundered with no clear vision. How can the employees work effectively if they don't know which way to row?

The solution for Twitter _would_ have been to split into multiple services/views/subsystems, or abandon the least interesting one to a sibling startup or a competitor. As Sam A puts it so brilliantly: "focus + intensity". Still time. Not much time.

</comment><comment><USER71> Diaspora* on the other hand continues growing, even if not rapidly.

</comment><comment><USER72> Time for someone to build the Facebook to Twitter's MySpace

</comment><comment><USER73> Twitter _is_ a giant.

Facebook is an anomaly.

It is matter of perspective.

</comment><comment><USER74> The submission has 140 points at this very moment. I find it ironic :)

</comment><comment><USER75> There is a typo in the title that completely fried my neural circuits for a full 5 seconds or so.

> It is too late for the it to become giant people expected

Should obviously be "It is too late for it to become the giant people expected"

(Sidebar: I hope this isn't what it feels like to be dyslexic, it wasn't fun!)

<comment><USER76> Apparently the typo has been fixed now, but I still find it confusing to parse --- I parsed it as "It is too late[something unclear], "(giant people) expected" and wondered what exactly giant people had to do with Twitter.

Perhaps "It is too late for it to become the giant _which_ / _that_ people expected" can break the natural inclination to parse "giant people" as one noun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> First, the article is dumb, twitter is already a giant. Twitter is bigger in social media than facebook because it is open to the public, while facebook is a gated community.

Second, "the problem with twitter" as commentors have been saying, is that Twitter is a glorified instant messenger, and they have done everything wrong.

They're a giant corporation with too many employees. They have a huge overhead cost for servers and offices and electricity and so on. And their only product is social media, for free.

This is the era of ad-filtering. Substaining a company on advertising is a dead model, it will never work again. It's dying slower in some areas than in others, but rest assured it is dead. Furthermore, nobody using twitter wants to see ads. Users will aggressively persue means to eliminate ads from the "social" experience.

Twitter is the digital equivalent of opening a number of sports arenas and inviting everyone to come in to mingle, without ever charging admission fees. Eventually, the power bill and lease is going to shut them down.

This is a reality check. You cannot make money by giving things away for free. You can make money from free products, but you have to do things to monetize it, for example selling expert support for free software.

Commentors keep comparing Twitter to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are exactly the same in one way, neither one makes any money from social media. Facebook is profitable because Facebook is not a social media product, it is a portal product that offers social media. Facebook makes money from selling "microtransaction" games, which are a huge ripoff, and using their enormous size to convince business owners that investing in advertising is somehow worthwhile. Again, nobody wants to see ads during their "social" time.

Social Media is not a business. Social media is a chat room with a slightly re-defined UX. You cannot make a profit from social media without charging admission. It is impossible.

In the post-advertising era the only way businesses will be successful is if they produce products or services of actual real-world value to their customers. Parasitic businesses, middle-men, advertisers, they are all going to die. And good riddance. Money should be earned by the creation of value, and nothing else.

<comment><USER32> "Substaining a company on advertising is a dead model"

A Deloitte report explained FB has created $40bn of economic value across the world. Let me explain to you how:

\- People are selling shit on social all day everyday \- Every organisation markets themselves using social \- social media is where most attention on mobile is \- All social media platforms make ads \- Ads are charged on CPM (Cost per 1000) \- Trillions of impressions are served, therefore billions of ad dollars flow to the platform, billions with a b \- All these businesses have 100s of millions if not billions in cash on their balance sheets

For the record these ad products have kept 1000s of people in advertising jobs around the world and helped around 3 million advertisers spending billions collectively sell shit online.

<comment><USER77> Computers and the internet are relatively new, compared to advertising. The ad-blocking era is only about 5 years old.

Give it time, you will see that I am right.

Again, facebook is not a social product. Facebook is a portal product with a social feature. They're not competing with Twitter, they're competing with Google and Microsoft. It is apples and oranges.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a better word than 'dashboard'? - <AUTHOR>

I originally came up with this question in trying to come up with a product name with coworkers, but we had a really difficult time coming up with a word other than 'dashboard' for a collection of graphs, widgets, etc. <comment><USER2> "Dash" comes to mind. In cars, people in the U.S. would say, "Throw it on the dash," or "Put it on the dash," meaning "Put it on top of the dashboard." The "it" might be a a map or some kind of parking tag or whatever needed to be in- reach or easily visible.

</comment><comment><USER3> Instrument panel (from cockpit terminology; ships may have their own term, too)

If users can directly interact with it: control panel, communications center, control center.

If it is more to impress than to communicate: Christmas tree.

<comment><USER4> > If it is more to impress than to communicate: Christmas tree.

Or "kitchen sink".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes: "Tableau de bord" ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> Overview?</comment>


Yuri's Night: Bay Area 2010 - <AUTHOR> http://ynba.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone gone to this in the past? What was it like?

It looks like I am going to be in the Bay Area for much of April so maybe I'll see you there. I'm a big fan of the Glitch Mob. [http://theglitchmob.com/mp3/The_Glitch_Mob- Nalepa_Monday_Rem...](http://theglitchmob.com/mp3/The_Glitch_Mob- Nalepa_Monday_Remix.mp3)

<comment><USER2> It's a crazy mixture of burning man, a music festival, and a nifty tech fair. It's a great blend- watching the burners and the non-burners (... like my parents) interact was awesome.

I was one of the organizers two years ago (which was the last time it was at Ames). Even though the day of was sort of frantic for us, I had a blast. Music everywhere, things throwing fire, lots of great geeky exhibits. And it's all in and around some hangers just off the Moffett Field runway!

I'm not directly involved this year, but many of the same people that ran it then are working on it now; I expect it to be awesome again this year. Hopefully my mass of positive adjectives encourages you to check it out this year. Heh.

Some nifty pictures (not mine):

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacemansam/2422866234> (NASA Ames Center Director Pete Worden in costume as a Soviet general!)

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/smashz/2412213920>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/unknown8bit/2482966738>

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/keturah-jj/2466351237>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Alternative link: [http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/events/2010/yuris_night/ind...](http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/events/2010/yuris_night/index.html)

Don't forget to bring your costumes and art installations.

</comment><comment><USER3> good luck reading that website on the iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER4> Get rid of flash. Your site is unreadable and unindexable by google.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the comments, we are updating the site right now and the next roll out will not be flash on the front page and will be iPhone and mobile device friendly!

Please give us more feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah, the celebration of our lack of a manned space program!

Perhaps robots can show up and drink some oil.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is planned by NASA itself, so they probably take a much less cynical look at space travel. Out of things to be celebrating, Yuri Gargarin's trip to space is a pretty good one. It also makes as good an excuse as anything for having a music festival.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Official website is www.ynba.org</comment>


Vinod Khosla: Venture capital has less sexual harassment than other industries - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2017/7/20/16007348/vinod-khosla-venture-capital-less-sexual-harassment <comment><USER2> My impression is that both Vinod Khosla and Peter Thiel have very little credibility in the Valley. I wonder if Khosla discussed his controversial lawsuit against the State of California at the Commonwealth Club?</comment>


Ask HN: Who is (back to) working in the office? - <AUTHOR> What's different?  What's the same? <comment><USER2> We are tentatively supposed to go back to the office in mid July. We have a few floors in a fifteen story office building. The plan is to bring a reduced group in with those who need to stay remote still having that option. Masks in all common areas but I'm assuming not in your cube.

I don't think this will work. I don't believe it's possible to have safe offices until Covid19 is completely out of the population.

I suspect they will cancel these plans before they go into place or within a month of starting back up.

<comment><USER3> > until Covid19 is completely out of the population.

My understanding is Covid19 is similar to the common cold coronas. It will stay in the population for the next several thousand years.

<comment><USER3> Just want to add. The return to "normal" is when a majority of the world population is infected. Not when the virus is starved of hosts. Host starving has never been successfully achieved against corona's, even in the ancient times before motors and easy world travel were around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> non-entity I'm working part time (2 days a week) in office. It's a lot quieter, as were only starting with around 25% of people back in office.

<comment><USER4> What are the details? Are people wearing masks in the office?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Dotbun.com - A random bunny for your viewing pleasure - <AUTHOR> http://dotbun.com <comment><USER2> While you can still edit the post title, you might want to explain what it does. Cute website!

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call. I also added a comment explaining some stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I got a turtle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? Did you get the static link by chance?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd been wanting to make a little website from scratch to teach myself about raw components of the web. I wanted more than static HTML, so I figured I'd throw in some php as well.

As for the domain name? ...this was a result of a fun train of thought. I was thinking about the slashdot name, and how is was chosen because of how it sounds when said out-loud (ach tee tee pee colon slash slash slash dot dot com), so I went looking around to see if any other fun "dot" domains were open.

The first one I found was dotbun.com.

I just had to come up with something to put on it...

Since 'bun' is often used to refer to especially cute rabbits, I decided to grab some rabbit images and show them randomly.

Over the past day, I added a static link creator and refresh button, and most recently added embedded mp4/webms.

\--- The implementation:

I grabbed images and videos from reddit.com/r/rabbits, and ran them through a shell script that gave them short, sequential names and produced webp copies using cwebp.

I then use php to select a random file.

If its a still image (png/jpg) it produces html that will attempt to show a webp picture, with a fallback to the original format. I also made the static links the original format, to make them more accessible to hotlinking and sharing.

If its a gif, it displays it without fallback (since webp doesn't handle moving images).

If the random file is a video, it instead generates a <video> tag that is set to maximum size without affecting aspect ratio, centered in the screen. I use the tag <video autoplay loop> for gif-like behavior.

\--- Performance/Modernity:

The server backend is nginx, with a letsencrypt HTTPS cert.

I used media selectors to make the website somewhat responsive. If your horizontal size is below a given limit, the static link and refresh buttons are enlarged and moved from the corners to the top and bottom of the page.

By opportunistically using webp, and relying on php pre-processing with NO javascript, I got a 100 on both desktop and mobile according to google's pageSpeed insights: [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=dotbun.com)

\--- To-dos:

* CDN. This is a big one, as this thing is running on a VPS, which may not handle high traffic terribly well (Let me know if you see timeouts or other server problems). I will probably put this behind cloudflare free tier.

* About page. Basically this post's content, formatted nicely. I expect to have something done over this weekend.

* Upload. Allow people to submit photos. This may be a bit much for my scope, however, so this is not a hard goal.

* Analytics. I want to use matomo, as my goal is to have as close to zero 3rd-party requests as possible without compromising on a modern design, and the "on-prem" option should work.

<comment><USER3> I have two buns, so I can appreciate this... but.. the website does not work in Safari. I am not a safari user, but when you share it on iphone Messages the default browser to open links is Safari.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I don't have a good way to test on Safari. I'll see if I can find someone to help me with that.

<comment><USER4> The issue seems to be the webp format. I was also not seeing images on an old firefox version. You should use a picture element, so that you can provide working fallbacks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, I've gone ahead and replaced the css background-image with a <picture> element, with fallbacks:

<picture>

<source srcset="files/webp/file.webp" type="image/webp">

<source srcset="files/file.jpg" type="image/jpg">

</picture>

Let me know if that works.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Another take on how Google is one trick pony  - <AUTHOR> http://www.webjives.org/another-take-on-how-google-is-one-trick-pony

<comment><USER2> I drew the same conclusion some time ago:

[http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/07/06/google-and-news-ltd- are-...](http://clubtroppo.com.au/2009/07/06/google-and-news-ltd-are-in-the- same-business/)

Like Microsoft, Google are stuck with the spaghetti cannon strategy. Fill the cannon up with projects, fire, see what sticks.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the max request rate before being banned on HN - <AUTHOR>

I've developed an API for HN http://api.ihackernews.com.  I need to throttle requests to news.ycombinator.com to a level that doesn't hurt HN or result in the banning of ihackernews.  Do you know the rate? <comment><USER2> There's not a simple answer, because there are multiple limits, but if you poll once every 30 sec you should be ok.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll need to lower my rate limiter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cache your data and hit google instead of HN. That's the best way to solve this. Google can handle the traffic with considerable ease, HN is only one server that has a lot better things to do than to serve up multitudes of automated requests.

Btw, I like your API idea, it would be neat if HN had an 'official' one.

PG is quite responsive in email, maybe you could ask him directly about the maximum rate? I believe the search.yc guys do it once every 15 minutes or so.

</comment><comment><USER4> Now this is great! I've requested such api, and so have many others, a few months ago. It somehow needs more publicity...</comment>


The Man Who Would Build a Computer the Size of the Entire Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/docker/1

<comment><USER2> Hi everyone, I'm the guy featured in this article. Now that the dust is settling I thought I might answer a few of the most frequent questions.

> _So what does Docker actually do?_

Thanks for asking!

From the project homepage: _Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale, in production, on VMs, bare metal, OpenStack clusters, public clouds and more._

There's a nice high-level overview on [http://www.docker.io/learn_more/](http://www.docker.io/learn_more/) , and a really cool interactive tutorial on [http://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/](http://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/)

I also encourage you to join the IRC channel (#docker on freenode). It's extremely active and the people there are super nice. They will get you up to speed in no time!

> _Why is the press talking about Docker when the kernel developers did all > the real work?_

Press coverage is not a zero-sum game. Does it hurt Linux and its developers when Docker gets attention? Or does it further establish Linux as the ubiquitous software infrastructure that it is?

There's no question that Docker wouldn't be possible (or would be much less useful anyway) without the work of countless kernel hackers who implemented and hardened namespacing and control groups. We also owe a lot to Junjiro Okajima, the author of AUFS. I don't believe we're doing any of these people a disservice by building cool stuff on top of their code, open-sourcing all of it, and getting a lot more people excited about the combined result.

> _How do I buy an article like this on Wired?_

That's not how press works. Based on my experience, here's how to get quality press coverage.

First build something people want. As more people use it and express their excitement, journalists will take notice. They will then contact you for details and if they like what they hear they will write a story.

> _I was going to try Docker, but it 's so hyped now that it doesn't seem > legit anymore_

Really? This reaction makes me so, so sad.

Speaking on behalf of everyone who has contributed to Docker in one way or the other. _ALL WE ASK_ is that you evaluate the project based on its merits, instead of how fashionable it is.

Tell me you hit a bug. Tell me it doesn't solve a real problem for you. Tell me the documentation isn't clear, or the code is not clean. But for the love of god, don't tell me your criticism of a project is that it's _too_ popular, and therefore no longer a trendy thing to use. Please tell me that is not what the hacker community has come to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone explain how a little wrapper around LXC gets major magazine articles and hype, whereas the people who've been doing the real hard work for years get no attention at all?

<comment><USER4> Wired is the Cosmo of tech journalism.

<comment><USER5> I read this comment when this story was on the front page, and it's occurred to me ask, what would you consider the antithesis of Wired? You know, something you'd recommend someone read...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do startups cope with pressure to perform? The pressure must be immense on the dotCloud/Docker folks. They have been active on HN responding to questions and comments, but having such publicity, Wired and HN driving traffic and questions, on non-production/beta software (docker) must be hard. I guess you just keep going like you always do.

In several of my personal project, I have noticed that once you have a following, you try to keep the standards up and only release quality, things start to take longer, and longer, because you do not want to let anyone down. I have felt real pressure to perform, and my projects are not anywhere near their level!

<comment><USER7> I can only speak for myself, but I feel that if you aren't in a place where there's tremendous pressure to perform your focus should be on getting there as soon as possible. Part of that pressure comes from the vibrant and active user and business community surrounding Docker.

The amount of work ahead of us is minuscule in comparison to the amount of work we'll have ahead of us in a year, and so on. However, scaling appropriately to become an organization that can handle those demands is really, really hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain, briefly, how Docker works? It seems to be getting an increasing amount of buzz lately and I'd like to understand what's going on. All I hear is how you can wrap software in a container that will run anywhere -- not a very helpful explanation. Docker's own website is surprisingly light on specifics... all I know after reading it is that it will, indeed, run almost anywhere! (but how?)

<comment><USER9> [https://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/#](https://www.docker.io/gettingstarted/#)

Try the tutorial, if it still doesn't make much sense to you, then it's probably not something you need to worry about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get it. I don't see how Docker makes service management any easier than using a plain ol' VM. The steps involved feel about the same to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> See: Daedalus, Icarus and Helios.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Ex_characters#Artificial_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_Ex_characters#Artificial_intelligences)

</comment><comment><USER12> way to GO.

<comment><USER12> seems someone didn't get it.

<comment><USER13> We get it, but it's just not that funny. Also, I think I would consider Go truly successful when people _stop_ feeling the need to point out every place that it's used.

<comment><USER12> well, is not that successful yet. that's why it's nice to see a big project using it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


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eBay Xmas listings reveal UK consumers selling iPads, keeping Android tablets - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/26/ebay-uk-consumers-selling-gifted-ipads-keeping-android-tablets/ <comment><USER2> > Of course, with the lower average selling price of an Android tablet, it > could just be that people see less of a financial incentive to sell their > gift, or perhaps fewer were given as a gift in the first place.

In other words, this article is bs and this observation means nothing.</comment>