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Twitter Is 'Toast' and the Stock Is Not Even Worth $10, Says Analyst (cnbc.com)
Twitter is "toast" as a company and the stock is not even worth $10, according to a research note published Tuesday, following the departure of another top executive at the social media service. From a report on CNBC: The microblogging platform's chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and "take some time off", while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday. Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year. The departures prompted Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, and a noted "uber-bear" on tech stocks, to issue a note on Tuesday claiming Twitter is "toast" and "not even a $10 stock." "Many investors were foolishly building (an) investment thesis based on complete stupidity," Chowdhry wrote. The analyst said that Twitter's data quality is "horrible". Chowdhry said that many pollsters used Twitter data to predict a Hillary Clinton win in the U.S. election but the fact that Donald Trump won shows that data quality is poor. One reason for this is too many fake users on the platform, Chowdhry claims.
Regardless of your opinions of Trump, it seems pretty ignorant to suggest that Twitter shutting down would completely de-fang him.
It is almost like you're implying that the shutdown of Twitter equates to the shutdown of social media as a concept.
Let us return to the times when a stock's value depended on the P/E ratio and not the mythical confidence fairy.
I have to agree with Trip Chowdhry on this. In my experience you don't see that many high level folks leaving a company if all is well.
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Sure, Twitter is most notable failure. Other social media is not categorically different and stock values are equally divorced from reality.
It's been clear to a number of us that Twitter's primary users are more on the social side of the spectrum, lean more to the left, are engaged more in arts and all that, but all of the news snippets over the past year or so seem to come out after the company articulated publicly that they are more or less an SJW platform, that they're going to selectively ban questionable comments under the guise of anti-racism, etc., etc.
Maybe I'm wrong but the timelines literally suggest that Twitter's failure was its political alignment rather than providing a neutral grounds for socializing.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Trump, they're losing tons of money because they don't have a good way to make money.
Besides, even if it did shut down, there's always gab.ai
I think the unprofitable nature of the thing is what is not "a viable business," identity politics or no.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I've tried several Twitter alternatives some in beta some not and unfortunately, most of the things I dislike about Twitter I dislike about them as well. You can join a network that has a strong anti censorship stance and this seems like progress but then you end up with almost unending amounts of hate and vitriol in excess even of Twitter. Even on platforms populated by people on my side of the political isle (libertarian republican types)... it is just unpleasant and unhealthy and gets old fast. I don't know how you take a global broadcast like platform and make it into something palatable.
Doesn't Trump has to at least assume the office before he has means of enacting tyranny? It is still Obama's show for now.
Virtually everyone predicted a big Hillary win and virtually everyone was wrong.
I have a theory about that.
There was a palpable Anti-Trump PC thing happening. Anything that could possibly be interpreted as a Pro-Trump or Anti-Hillary statement could have ended in an online dogpile of people shouting "Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, Transphobic, Islamophobic, Xenophobic" so people kept their thoughts to themselves until they got to the one place where they could express themselves without external pressure, the voting booth.
You can't fault Twitter for misreading the tea leaves just like pretty much everyone else.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
So not having any idea who this Chowdry is, how is Twitter supposed to make money? I don't value their 140-character service, but I at least see what it is. When you limit your message-length to something that a Motorola Alphapager or an SMS message can accommodate then I don't get how you can make money. Users aren't going to pay to send or receive tweets or for any kind of paid subscription, and I see no practical way to do advertising within the platform's current constraints without pissing off users and causing them to stop using the service.
Twitter has already established ways for their service to function without using client software that would deliver ads too.
If you can demonstrate how forwarding essentially telegrams for free can be profitable I'm sure the management at Twitter would love to talk to you.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I suspect that many twitterers were just repeating what they were hearing on MSM.
Is MSM also toast?
The "tyrant" leaves on Jan 20th. Trump may or may not work with Congress, we don't know that yet.
No, Obama is the single best president there has ever been.
The Tyrant enters office on Jan 20.
Consider in comparison the Slashdot rating system: it is primitive and flawed, but its is the right kind of approach and more-or-less sort of works to permit free speech while de-emphasizing crap.
This argument would be a lot stronger if the Slashdot comment sections weren't mostly nonsensical circular arguments and insistence that imaginary "SJW"s were at the root of all the world's ills. You have people in the comments of this very article claiming that "political correctness" is to blame for Twitter's situation (a stock price which, let's remember, means a valuation of roughly $7,000,000,000; that's a problem I'd love to have), with no understanding of how Twitter's business model works (or doesn't) and with no ideas about how the company's political or social views could possibly affect their income.
Twitter's problem is that they never bothered to come up with a way to be profitable in the long-term, because the creators were riding the same wave that a lot of tech startups do: create a thing, create buzz about the thing, and then get bought out and get out of there before you have to figure out the logistics of making the thing long-term financially viable. This has nothing to do with their policies on whether or not you can call someone racial slurs and direct hate mobs on the platform. Even if they were completely hands-off and let people tweet whatever they wanted, Twitter still wouldn't be a good business. The two things are completely unrelated.
Slashdot commenters throw shade because Twitter's views disagree with their own, not because they have any understanding of the actual facts, and that's how it works with everything that's posted here. People who disagree get downvoted and their comments get hidden, even if their arguments are well thought-out and supported by facts. That's not what "working" means, and it's obviously not the right kind of approach, and it definitely emphasizes crap as long as it's the kind of crap that people can get angry while agreeing with, because this audience would rather get their hate on than be right.
Allowing people to say what they think while actually facilitating discussion that leads toward people being more correct (being disabused of false notions, coming to understand where they were wrong, learning new things, etc.) is a very hard problem and I don't have a good solution to put forward, but Slashdot is doing a particularly bad job.
In "The Internet Is Not the Answer" by Andrew Keen *, he points to some of the problems with today's web services: As opposed to the Internet's golden days of public standards and open protocols, today they are mostly centralized proprietary "winner takes all".
And the reason is simple: When Paul Baran, Bob Taylor, Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, et.al. invented their respective contributions, they were often government employees and as such not seeking or able to pursue monetary gains based on their inventions, or vehemently opposed to do so. They also understood that their protocols had to be public and open in order to be widely adopted.
In today's Internet economy, the goal is not universal standards or federated networks (e.g. email, PSTN), but rather reaching critical mass in walled gardens. If you can show you have amassed enough users, your company gets valued billions. IPO, vest, rinse and repeat. So if there was a public social network protocol, you could jump ship, just as you can with a domain and email today. That would not be in th interest of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp . Much better ride the curve till the next bust.
*) Skip the book; it's a long rant, a gets a bit dull, even if Keen is a good writer.
I'm not even sure it has value as a service. Have you ever tried to engage meaningfully on twitter? It's a good platform for celebs to push their endorsements, political candidates to spout their dogma and all matter of people trying to become famous and important by chasing followers, but meaningful interaction is almost nil. Everyone talks but nobody listens. A social network should be social, and twitter really isn't. The most popular only send tweets and don't really respond. In many cases they are paying others to actually do it for them.