Twitter Is Cutting 9% of Its Global Workforce (adweek.com) 90
Twitter is planning to lay off 9 percent of its global workforce, as the ailing San Francisco tech giant struggles to please Wall Street despite beating earnings expectations. The company officially announced the cuts today in its third-quarter earnings, days after reports began to surface of the impending cuts. AdWeek reports: According to Twitter, the majority of the reductions will take place in its sales, partnerships and marketing divisions in order to "continue to fully fund our highest priorities," according to a letter to shareholders. However, the earnings also came with some good news. Total monthly active users grew for the second consecutive quarter to 317 million users, gaining 4 million over the past three months since its second-quarter results. Daily active users also increased, rising 7 percent year over year. Twitter's revenue totaled $616 million -- an 8 percent increase year over year. Earnings per share totaled 13 cents, beating expectations of 9 cents per share and $606 million in total revenue. However, the company reported profit fell by $103 million.
Some twitter jobs are safe (Score:2, Insightful)
Bet they keep the shadowbanners and censors on payroll.
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This is funny. I just read someone commenting exactly the opposite. Seems like Twitter is everyone's boogeyman.
and some aren't (Score:2)
Dear Employee, we regret to inform you that we hav
e eliminated your job. Please sign the provided no
n-disclosure termination papers. Thank y
[reply] [retweet] [heart] [...]
We Know. (Score:1)
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
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Projection much? That's not what OP said.
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No less than most other entertainment - and more than a lot given how its used to spread news.
I mean really - just about everything except farming, housing, and medicine could be considered "superfluous" industries depending on how persnickety you feel like being.
Re:What is this Twitter thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean really - just about everything except farming, housing, and medicine could be considered "superfluous" industries depending on how persnickety you feel like being.
Fight Club covered this topic pretty well "What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra" Most products and services are solving "first world problems".
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Fucking noob.
"Is it good or is it whack?"
Que surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The company's hemorrhaging money.
And no company in their right mind would buy them at the artificially (insanely) inflated price they mistakenly think they're worth.
They've been getting negative press as a bastion of partisan censorship, further alienating users.
So they have to shore up the bottom line somehow..
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I hate to be a pedant, but.... fuck it. Actually, I love being a pedant!
The Verizon/Yahoo deal has not gone through yet. In the wake of the massive hack (known about but hidden for years) and FBI backdoors, the $4.8B figure is being renegotiated down.
Re:Que surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not surprising - Twitter is a dot-com bubble company a decade after it happened.
That was the ORIGINAL problem with many internet companies. They could find out how to draw in lots of users and get popular - they just couldn't find a way to actually make any money from it.
Depending on the site, SOME companies can make enough off ad revenue to be successful, but Twitter has never managed to do so. And I'm not sure it will work there. With their format of limited post length and being largely a spew of conciousness they've to some degree attracted a userbase that has a short attention span. It's hard to effectively put ads in front of them.
There are plenty of internet based companies that have figured out how to thrive - Amazon, Ebay, Netflix, Google, etc - but I'm not sure Twitter will last. If it goes away I don't think there will be too much of a problem though. Social media as a phenomenon will likely continue just fine. Facebook (who also runs Instagram) is operating in the black.
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Why buy at a premium now, when their balance sheet is a total mess? Wait for the inevitable implosion and buy the assets for pennies on the dollar. Jettison the horrible management and integrate it into your existing offerings.
You buy healthy companies. Unhealthy ones get scavenged and parted out.
They need more censorship (Score:4, Funny)
Twitter is obviously failing because they have refused to make Twitter a safe space from fascist Nazis like:
1. Trump.
2. Anybody who doesn't support Hillary (with the exception of Bernie supporters who converted by the deadline set forth in form 402-33R6).
3. White racists... oh wait, I should have just said "all white people with the exception of those we approve of".
4. Non-atheists*
5. Homophobes (e.g. anyone not gay).
6. Cisgendered
7. Gay people aren't really gay because they don't think what we tell them to think (looking at you Milo & Thiel!)
8. Any racist sports figures that don't flip the bird or at least kneel during the National Anthem.
* MUSLIMS ARE AN EXCEPTION (assuming you are violent that is).
I think that after these impure hate-mongers have been burned off from Twitter that the safe space will flourish and all problems will be solved.
Re:They need more censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously you are being funny/sarcastic...but this is exactly why I left Twitter.
I made the mistake of calling the Twitter attack on a man a 'witch hunt'. Some poor guy made the mistake of defending the land-a-spacecraft-on-a-comet-guy during the whole shirtgate incident. Hundreds of level-headed concerned citizens went after that guy, including doxxing him. I believe my comment was, "Hey...this is turning into a witch hunt. Posting his personal details is not cool."
Which evidently was the worst thing I could have said. The attacks on me were fairly relentless...because 'witch hunt' is an attack on women, blah blah blah.
Twitter is a cesspool of bullshit. Where the more far out into safe space you get, the more popular you are.
I for one would like to see Twitter burn down.
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"Well, witch hunts were indeed an attack on women."
Sure but apparently going as a witch for Halloween is still cool, while black-facing and other similar stuff ain't.
Re: They need more censorship (Score:1)
Not on university campuses it isn't. It's cultural appropriation of a pagan religion.
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Re:They need more censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
Think you mean Twitter doesn't want you as a customer unless you're willing to drink the kool-aid and engage in ideological groupthink.
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No, I mean Twitter doesn't want you specifically as a customer. I'm surprised you haven't already gotten the message. They're telling you, "It's not you, it's me. So GTFO."
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No, I mean Twitter doesn't want you specifically as a customer. I'm surprised you haven't already gotten the message. They're telling you, "It's not you, it's me. So GTFO."
Oh I'm not a customer, never have been. Neither have you. People that use it are a product being sold to advertisers, and when you operate on such a model you want nearly everyone to use it. Otherwise, it collapses around you in a pile of burning pain...kinda like how it is right now. I'm surprised you fail to get even this most basic premise of running a business like that.
Of course it doesn't want him as a customer... (Score:2)
It's users are a PRODUCT.
Or to put it in modern doubletalk - it's users are CONTENT.
Frankly, Twitter is long overdue at that elephant graveyard where MySpace's bones are currently being bleached in the sun.
It's outdated technology and a form of communication stemming from the fact that a decade ago teens had no money for their SMS messages, no money for or access to smartphones and no access to free WiFi everywhere.
Now it's just a tool for vapid parasocial interaction with celebrities and a place to go if y
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WOOOOOSH
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I encourage everyone to go over to gab.ai and check it out. Kick the tires. Enjoy the "free speech and expression" and come back and tell us what you think.
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So, you went through the trouble of getting in line for a gab.ai account, then signing up for an account, then logging in, before enjoying your freedom of speech?
So why not sign up for a Slashdot account and login so your opinion can be taken for more than pure horseshit? You know, like an adult.
Cutting Workforce (Score:2)
If this is indicative of eminent failure (Score:3, Interesting)
Ermm.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Everyone expected them to crash and burn. Turns out they just crashed.
Beating expectations isn't such a good thing when your finances are under water. They spent $2.5 Billion to make $2 Billion. That's a loss. That's why they're letting 9% of their staff go (and also why pretty much everyone that recently came forward to buy them ran away).
With profits of $600 million it still sounds like they could work off the debt gif they engage in some painful cost reduction measures like layoffs. It seems to me that Wall Street rates anything other than a freakish runaway success like Google as an abject failure.
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[...] expecting profits to do nothing but rise year after year is dumb.
Dear Main Street: That's the Wall Street model. Now bend over and pay the piper. Sincerely, Stock Analysts
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You can beat expectations all day long if the expectations are sufficiently low. Beating expectations doesn't mean shit if you are still expected to lose a shitload of money, and you can't convince anyone else to give you more money. It just means you lost a little less than the "analysts" thought you would... but you still lost money. If you are losing money, and nobody is looking to loan you any more because you've been a giant money pit your entire existence with large earth-mover sized equipment dump
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Twitter is way too big (3900+ employees?) (Score:3, Insightful)
According to this link, back in 2015 Twitter had 3900 employees. Yes, 3900! https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
What the hell do they need that many people for? Twitter at best could easily function with under 100 employees. 10 in sales, 1 engineer, 1 developer, and 88 managers. /sarc
Realistically, the company could downsize by 80% and streamline their system. They don't need that many people for "microblogging".
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Re:Twitter is way too big (3900+ employees?) (Score:4, Insightful)
Twitter at best could easily function with under 100 employees
Curious what your basis is for that analysis? Is it an in-depth knowledge of Twitter's infrastructure, research initiatives, and regulatory needs? Or is it an armchair analysis consisting of "twitter is basically text messaging on the Internet, so it can't be that complicated."
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WhatsUp had something like 50 employees when they were acquired by Facebook.
They ran on 30-50 servers, had 800 million users, of which I think 100 million or more logged in at least once a day.
They also managed to edge-out a (small) profit from very early on.
But of course, it was also founded and headed by an Ukrainian immigrant who came to the US with little more than what he was wearing and probably knows a thing or two about how to run something on a shoestring - a quality that is certainly missing from
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Twitter does more than just run their website. They also do:
Both of those are complex projects involving native code on Android and iOS. Crashlytics also has support for OS X and possibly others.
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Gab.ai basically just recreated twitter on a shoestring budget...
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Gab.ai basically just recreated twitter on a shoestring budget... [emphasis mine]
Twitter had 8 employees in 2008, what's your point? Link [statista.com] Could any IT person worth his or her salary copy twitter's functionality with 7 other people's help? Yeah, I would hope so. Could those 8 people scale that company to from 0 users to a public company with 300 million users? No chance in hell. I'm not saying I know what all 3xxx people at Twitter do or if they are doing anything "useful", but I still question op's logic of how he came up with 100 workers. That seems a little light, and is most lik
Reap what you sow (Score:5, Insightful)
If you bought shares in Twitter, you invested in a company that...
- Allowed people to be as abusive as they want provided they're not white
- Allowed ISIS to have a presence
- Allowed witch hunts to take place against users including doxxing and death threats
- Gave up info on people for following the wrong person
- Allowed people to create massive blocklists that slandered them as "harassers" that ran on the logic of "You followed the wrong person"
- Dishes out bans for no reason, and refuses to give up those reasons
- On that note, banning people for being republican.
- Has ignored European Freedom of Information requests
- Added a timeline that, let's be honest here, is used to hide users and tweets
- Censored multiple trending hashtags relating to leaks
- Banned users for repeating or retweeting offensive tweets, but not the original poster
- Didn't ban a guy posting CP until the hashtag demanding his ban was trending worldwide
Is it any surprise that in light of these repeated mismanagements and double-standards that Twitter's share price has been going like a bouncy-ball? I wouldn't want to be associated with them.
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Allowed people to be as abusive as they want provided they're not white
On that note, banning people for being republican
Got an example of either of these? I'm familiar with the rest of the points you cite, but not these.
I follow a lot of people of color on Twitter, and the amount of abuse (and I'm talking about stuff that would get them *arrested* if they did) they are subjected to is just mind-boggling.
And then there's the (non-white) guy I follow who got banned twice because he happens to have the same (very common) last name as the head of ISIS. The only thing that stopped that was when they gave him a check-mark. So I
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I think you're grabbing the elephant's tail here, and proclaiming you've found a snake. Twitter is full of people being abusive just like this (and worse) and not getting banned. Most of them are white (or eggs). Again I follow a lot of black folk who end up on the receiving end of that kind of crap, and they have a devil of a time trying to get their abusers banned too. Sure Milo got banned, but he's really a case study in just how prominently, gleefully, unremorselessly abusive you have to be before any a
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It makes more sense when you realize the US is arming ISIS in Syria to overthrow and replace the government, which turned to long-time ally Russia for help.
This is like saying all math makes more sense when you divide by zero. That's quite true, but you can't divide by zero.
There are hundreds of little factions fighting in Syria, the two biggest of which are ISIS and Assad's various loyalists. Those two biggest sides hold completely disjoint territories, and do not fight each other. They aren't exactly allies, but they aren't enemies either, and in Syria today that's as close as you come to being allies. Their meer existence helps each other out, both in mili
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There's also the Peshmerga. Not only are they decent fighters, they produce very nice scarves.
What do Twitter employees DO? (Score:1)
I am not here to flame the utility value of Twitter. I admit up front, I simply don't get it. Some people do. Cool to be you.
But whenever I look at that website, it looks about the same to me as it did about 5-7(?) years ago when I first heard of it, and everything everyone says about it, suggests that it does the same thing.
I suppose maybe its popularity has risen (?) so maybe there have been some bitchin' back-end scaling projects. So we're probably not really talking about just one or two programmers. Ma
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what these people do in the course of a day?
They manage other people.
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"I use Twitter to follow climate and energy issues, a little politics, and some fiction writers. If it were to disappear, I would definitely miss it, as it's a minor but useful tool for those purposes. "
They'd return to using email newsletters, like they did the 30 years before, just without char limit.
Sell your stock before the election (Score:2)
Total monthly active users grew for the second consecutive quarter to 317 million users, gaining 4 million over the past three months since its second-quarter results.
I'm sure that's long term growth and not just due to some temporary factor like interest in the coming election.
Well that's for the birds! (Score:2)
It's hard to swallow being laid off, Hopefully these employees will migrate to a new job quickly.
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You know what? You're on the right track...and sadly, this is the first comment I've seen regarding this. (I don't blame the others- this hadn't crossed my mind either)
Yes, there are real people losing jobs. That is a complete bummer. I feel bad for them.
But I still hate Twitter, and I hope they just go out of business entirely. Maybe the techies there can land a good job in some other company- I hope so. I don't want tech to die...just the garbage that is social media.
A millisecond of silence for th
There's no reason for twitter to exist (Score:1)
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it was only fairly recently that it evolved into a system for shilling for Hillary or Trump, and calling people cunt.
"continue to fund their highest priorities" (Score:1)
...censoring views they don't agree with?
They're also killing Vine (Score:3)
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno... [bbc.com]
Most of this was Vine (Score:1)
And a few other acquisitions that weren't profitable