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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.

48 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I can hear crying by dontbemad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. Yes, yes, let the hate flow through you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let us return to the times when a stock's value depended on the P/E ratio and not the mythical confidence fairy.

    1. Re:Yes, yes, let the hate flow through you by DogDude · · Score: 2

      Stop it. Next thing you know, an AC will suggest that companies pay dividends again.

      --
      I don't respond to AC's.
    2. Re:Yes, yes, let the hate flow through you by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 2

      Because investors are essentially a small step up from little old ladies feeding quarters into a slot machine?

      --
      Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
  3. Fleeing rats by jbmartin6 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
  4. The sound you just heard is social bubble popping by sinij · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sure, Twitter is most notable failure. Other social media is not categorically different and stock values are equally divorced from reality.

  5. Re:I can hear crying by lgw · · Score: 5, Funny

    Donald Trump has (well, will soon enough) the presidential alert system, so he can message everyone's phone instead. With a piercing alarm, at 3AM, and you can't disable this (unless you root your phone). Trump will be fine.

    But where will the Twitter hate mobs go to get their outrage on? What if a scientists wears the wrong shirt - how will they know to be outraged? How will they live if Twitter goes under?

    --
    Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  6. Re:I can hear crying by Altus · · Score: 5, Funny

    We should be so lucky

    --

    "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

  7. Providing an SJW platform is not a viable business by urbanriot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:I can hear crying by paiute · · Score: 3, Funny

    Actually, this is very bad news. Loss of his Twitter outlet might cause le Grande Orange to take full advantage of the upcoming universal cell messaging push technology being rolled out to use in national emergencies. You want to get five messages every day from the brain of your dyehard leader - with no way to turn them off?

    --
    If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
  9. Re:I can hear crying by darthsilun · · Score: 2

    I'll just turn my phone off at night.

  10. Re:Providing an SJW platform is not a viable busin by mujadaddy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  11. Good by vvaduva · · Score: 2, Funny

    Good...the cesspool of political correctness is blowing up in their faces

    1. Re:Good by Jodka · · Score: 2

      Good...the cesspool of political correctness is blowing up in their faces

      While I don't agree with political correctness either (and do agree with what John Cleese says on the subject) , the Twitter problem is more general than that: Twitter's decision to police speech on their platform at all was the idiot move there. While their customers do reasonably want filters, those customers should be able to collectively create and individually select those filters, or none at all. 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. The Slashdot editors censor and some great points get modded down by unfair moderators, but usually the better posts do percolate to the top.

      Milo Yiannopoulos has made the point that Twitter's most controversial posters are also its biggest draws, so that therefore banning them is stupid for the platform and stupid for business. He's predicted its financial decline on that basis since he was banned on Twitter in July. Twitter stock has mostly hovered under $20/share since, so not down, but not the growth they need.

      --
      Ceci n'est pas une signature.
    2. Re:Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  12. Lol!!! by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Funny

    The analyst said that Twitter's data quality is "horrible".

    Using "twitter" and "data" and "quality" in the same sentence made me laugh.

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
  13. Hate twitter but alternatives seem just as bad by butchersong · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  14. Re:I can hear crying by sinij · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  15. The election is a poor barometer of relevance by Lord+Kano · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  16. Re:Chowdry's a liar though by TWX · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  17. Re:I can hear crying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, if you capitalize TYRANT and all, then it has to be true. Now excuse me, I'm going to go eat an ICE CREAM CONE.

  18. Pollsters were just lying to boost Clinton by BlueKitties · · Score: 2

    Statistical analysis by unbiased machine learning systems, derived via data on social media platforms including Twitter, that Trump would win. The difference between the correct and wrong predictive systems is that one was just left-wing echo chambers regurgitating Hillary propaganda, the other was a genuine unbiased prediction engine. All these departure protests are is more left-wing bullying to manipulate social media into promoting their bull crap.

    http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/28...

    --
    "Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
  19. Re:I can hear crying by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 2

    Seeing as how he's already fucking up relations between the US and China, as well as 'saving' 700 jobs from Carrier, apparently not.

    --
    Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
  20. Twitter as a protocol by hipp5 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I say this as a non-user, so I acknowledge that I might be ignorant on the subject. But...

    I never understood how/why Twitter (or really any messaging platform/app) is a business. I mean, tweeting does actually seem like a useful tool for certain communication needs, but I don't understand why it's handled through a single service. Why isn't the tweet simply a protocol, like email? People would then just build different clients/apps/platforms that utilize that protocol, just like we do with email.

    1. Re:Twitter as a protocol by grumpy_old_grandpa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  21. Re:I can hear crying by Altus · · Score: 3, Funny

    Just think how this will stimulate the economy. People will be constantly destroying their phones... flinging them across the room in disgust. Instant bump

    --

    "In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson

  22. Re:Providing an SJW platform is not a viable busin by sinij · · Score: 2

    Twitter already allows some individuals to engage in "arbitrary amounts of harassments, death threats and stalking". You should have instead said: "If they allowed everyone arbitrary amounts of harassments, death threats and stalking...".

  23. $10 stock = $7.1B valuation by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Informative

    stupid TFA didn't even mention the VALUATION (who cares about the price of a single share?)...should be around $7.1B at $10/share.

  24. Also, there's Gab.ai by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    Gab.ai is a twitter replacement that has started up recently and is collecting a lot of interest.

    Their product advantage - the thing that differentiates them from the rest of the market - is that they enforce free speech. So long as the speech isn't something that's patently illegal in the US, it's allowed on their site. (Disallowed: illegal pornography, threats and terrorism, doxing/publishing private information.)

    Twitter seems to be taking sides with half of it's userbase, and driving the other half away. I've always felt that taking sides in customer arguments (against other customers) was a bad thing, but they're vigorously doing that so I'm sure there's some corporate benefit that I'm missing.

    Gab allows each user to filter out anything they don't want to see, either other users or specific words. This seems like it's the right solution, because it allows people to use the system without seeing things they find distasteful, while not infringing on other peoples' free speech. I can only imagine that people will put together recommended word lists in topics such as pornography, or vulgarity, or meanness, that others can download and install.

    So if you're concerned about twitter shutting down, check out Gab.ai as an alternate system.

    1. Re:Also, there's Gab.ai by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's funny that you call it segregation. Most users call it freedom to move to greener pastures.

      From your self-righteous perspective you might think those "evil bigots" are corralling themselves away somewhere to wither, but in reality, they are flourishing. Brexit, Trump, it will keep happening. They don't need twitter. And when they return, online or in the real world, they will be far more organized and powerful then you ever expected, because you were too stupid and deluded in your little safe space to realize they were growing.

      Nationalism is on the rise. Self-destructive political correctness and surrender to foreigners is being challenged more and more every day. The mainstream media, and the sheep who believe them and their cries of fake news will not enjoy control forever. Misandry, anti-white racism, heterophobia, cisphobia, "born-this-way perversions", Islamophilia and Marxism will end as a result of your blind hubris.

      True freedom and decency will rise again.

    2. Re:Also, there's Gab.ai by GameboyRMH · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Hahaha you wish, your sad little movement is already fracturing and crumbling and retreating into the bunkers, Austria was the beginning of the end for you, expect defeat in France. The alt-right cracked apart on the "heil heard 'round the world" when all the dumb sheep that were blindly following you finally realized that they were indeed being led around by a bunch of neo-nazis, and when it becomes clear that Trump tossed all your promises like a used kleenex the minute he got what he wanted out of them (Lock up Hillary? Drain the swamp? Build a wall? Seeing a pattern? Where's that Muslim ban? You elected a corporatist first and foremost) it will finish off the movement in the US.

      You see, the good news is that it turns out the alt-right actually aren't the new nazis, they're the new KKK, destined to soon be just some frustrated men having sad little meetings and committing the occasional hate crime.

      Nationalism will not simply be marginalized for another 70 years, but will probably be put in the dustbin of history for good, as a concept it's increasingly obsolete and unworkable in today's world, as the UK is discovering.

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    3. Re:Also, there's Gab.ai by Z80a · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Most of the power of the alt-right actually comes from liberals running away from the social justice insanity, and as soon this liberals find some good footing, both alt-right and control-left are screwed beyond imagination.
      I imagine the alt rights will indeed go the KKK way, while the control left will shrink and get more and more insane at a point they will became an actual terrorist group.

  25. Re:I can hear crying by inhuman_4 · · Score: 4, Informative

    The carrier jobs was possible because Mike Pence (the VP-Elect) is currently the Governor of Indiana, where those jobs are.

    As fuck fucking up relations with China, the fact that they are building military installations off the Philippine coast suggests that ship sail long ago.

  26. Enough politics, back to the subject by hodet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have messed around with data mining tweets for sporting events and no matter how I sliced and diced the info it is hard to get anything of value. A high profile event like the SuperBowl will generate tens of thousands of tweets in a 2 hour span. After you filter out all the words like "the", "it", "shit" and "fuck" etc etc etc its just pile of steaming crap. It was fun to fool around with but it was hard to gauge anything from it. Only 1 to 2% of users actually share their geo coordinates. The location field is a mess of "NEW YORK", "NYC", "big apple" and that sort of thing. You could clearly see increased spikes after big plays...but no shit...people are excited so the frequency chart spikes after a touchdown...do tell. I have tried using it to gauge sentiment in my home town on various issues....absolutely worthless.. although some of that might be just me as well.

    1. Re:Enough politics, back to the subject by hodet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  27. Re:I can hear crying by liquid_schwartz · · Score: 2

    As fuck fucking up relations with China, the fact that they are building military installations off the Philippine coast suggests that ship sail long ago.

    Indeed it was a long time ago. I recall thinking when they downed the spy plane by ramming it in 2001 with *no* repercussions that we would be seen as a paper Tiger. If it makes the /. crowd happy, this is a legitimate instance of blame Bush II as he was the president at the time.

  28. Someone is trying to short the stock by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 2

    Keep whining old guys.

    Buying opportunity IMHO

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    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  29. If only its users woud figure this out... by hackel · · Score: 3

    I'm so ready for Twiiter to die. The whole concept-—reducing all content to 140 character sound bytes suitable for a child's consumption, is insulting and doing real damage to the world and people's ability to communicate. It almost single-handedly allowed the election of a tyrant to the highest office in the world. Its users need to learn how to write in *complete paragraphs*, with spacing, punctuation, and everything else that makes language worth using in the first place.

  30. Re:I can hear crying by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

    As much as I think Trump may end up being the worst US president since Buchanan, I can't see how his pissing match with China is anything more than a more vocal version of what Obama has been doing for a few years now. The US Navy has been doing sailbys and flyovers of this artificial island for some time now, which in a helluva more direct way is telling China "The most powerful navy that has ever existed on the planet Earth does not accept your concreted seamount as actual territory." On this particular score I think giving Beijing a frequent and very vocal middle finger is rather important.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  31. Re: I can hear crying by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

    He and George W Bush in the critical months of 2008-2009 basically saved the world from a global depression. Say what you will about Obama, but the fact remains that the US's massive effort to prevent a global credit market freeze up will be seen as one of the most important economic interventions of the last 200 years.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  32. Tech dividends by virtig01 · · Score: 2

    All those tech companies with their famously large cash hoards should have massive investor lawsuits over dividends -- but they don't. Why?

    Because it's more tax-efficient and potentially higher return for companies to reinvest their profits into new development or acquisition. Google's purchase of (and further investment in) Android provided much better use of cash than if they had paid out a $50M dividend, which the recipient would then owe tax on. Instead the shares became more valuable due to the cash generating machine getting bigger.

    When tech companies start paying out a dividend, it's a sign or surrender: "hey, we don't know how to invest this.... you can have it." See Cisco, Oracle, Apple, etc.

  33. Re:I can hear crying by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

    As off the mark as mainstream journalism may be, this need by both the alt-right and alt-left (Bernie's angry supporters) to basically invoke some sort of weird journalistic solipsism leaves me pretty exasperated. We are really reaching a place of post-modernist nihilism, where people are convinced there is no such thing as truth, so therefore they are free to say and believe anything, and that such conduct will have no consequences.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  34. Re:Common sense, at last! Thank-you! by Mandrel · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the first day the service was announced, a lot of us "long timers" in computers and I.T. were left scratching our heads, wondering what the point was in the entire thing? I mean, Twitter was essentially nothing more than yet *another* IM client of sorts, except with arbitrarily short limits on the length of messages.

    Twitter is more than just another IM client. They invented, or at least brought to mainstream popularity, the concepts of the follow and the timeline, which were imitated by Facebook, Instagram, and a number of blogging platforms. Companies and users love the follow, because it realises the ancient mindshare goal of finely-controlled (voluntary) content push, without the clunkiness of channels and email notifications. Once you have permission to push, revenue options open up.

    Twitter is not exploiting this power well. They could be earning a cut of the sales made, valuable insights gained, and joy discovered when the information channeled through their platform helps someone choose a product, make a decision, or find something entertaining. I'm not talking about ads and affiliate links.

  35. Re:Providing an SJW platform is not a viable busin by NoNeeeed · · Score: 2

    The mods' sarcasm detectors appear to be faulty today.

    Every time Twitter comes up on Slashdot someone goes on a rant about how its decline is all the fault of SJWs, safe-spaces or some other perceived PCness.

    The fact that Twitter has never had a viable business model is apparently of no importance.

  36. Re: I can hear crying by lgw · · Score: 2

    The investment banks play only a predatory role in the economy. The economy would not have been the worse for their absence. The difficulty normal, retail banks -- banks in the business of checking/savings accounts and loans and so on -- were having was being handled in an orderly fashion by the Fed. The weak were being culled, but there was no danger of "collapse". The investment banks, OTOH, were on the brink. But they do nothing useful to begin with, so nothing of value would have been lost.

    --
    Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  37. Re:I can hear crying by Triklyn · · Score: 2

    yes, and I believe gitmo is the pinnacle of human rights values.

  38. Re:The Stupid... by Narcocide · · Score: 2

    Fun fact: It is actually against the terms of service of both Facebook and Twitter to sign up by incompletely or inaccurately identifying oneself. And, if they were able to actually properly police that, it would destroy their business plan in mere days because everyone would realize that neither platform is nearly as popular or exciting as the swarms of millions of astro-turfing bots suggest.

  39. Re:Providing an SJW platform is not a viable busin by sciengin · · Score: 2

    This!
    Contrary to the jewish conspiracy, the SJW do exist and they are even more dangerous than most could possibly imagine.
    I saw it firsthand during gamergate where the simple call for more journalistic integrity (really, just not sleeping with the people you report on would have been enough) was answered by the SJW with a torrent of abuse, slurs, doxxing and death threats.
    And of course while we do now finally have at least some integrity in gaming journalism, the SJW also succeeded in tainting this peacful rebellion to make everyone believe that it was about hating women who play/develop videogames, when this had nothing to do with it.
    The evil male mysoginist gamers even donated so much money to a feminist foundation that they got to name a mascot after them, Vivian James.
    Its funny to read the wikipedia article on it and to check the sources: most point to Gawker and its many subsites for "evidence" of women hating, when it was them who were in the center of the debate for more journalistic integrity. Thats like citing "Mein Kampf" as a source for an article on worldwide jewery.