Slashdot Mirror
Can Twitter Survive By Becoming A User-Owned Co-Op? (salon.com)
What's going to happen now that Twitter's stock price has dropped from $66 a share to just $18? An anonymous reader quotes Salon:
A small group of shrewd Twitter users and shareholders have come up with proposals to fundamentally restructure the way Twitter is controlled, to turn the company into a public service by removing the need to feed investors' ceaseless appetite for hitting quarterly growth benchmarks... Sonja Trauss, a Bay Area housing policy activist, and Twitter shareholder Alex Chiang proposed earlier this year a resolution for the company's recent annual shareholder vote to promote ways to get Twitter users to buy stock in the company, such as offering ways to buy shares directly through the Twitter website and mobile app. If many individual Twitter users each owned a small piece of the company, then they could participate collectively (through the annual shareholder voting process) in steering the direction of the company.
The idea makes sense from a labor standpoint. Twitter's value comes from user's tweets, which provides the backbone for digital advertising revenue. Twitter also sells this user-generated data to third parties that use it mainly for market research. This bloc of user-shareholders could theoretically overtake the control major institutional shareholders...have over the company. Because a lot of owners of a few shares of the company would have little to lose if the stock price doesn't grow or wavers, Twitter would be less beholden to meeting Wall Street's often brutal expectations.
The idea makes sense from a labor standpoint. Twitter's value comes from user's tweets, which provides the backbone for digital advertising revenue. Twitter also sells this user-generated data to third parties that use it mainly for market research. This bloc of user-shareholders could theoretically overtake the control major institutional shareholders...have over the company. Because a lot of owners of a few shares of the company would have little to lose if the stock price doesn't grow or wavers, Twitter would be less beholden to meeting Wall Street's often brutal expectations.
That isn't a Co-op. It is just trying to sell stock to individual investors. These people have no idea how public companies are run. Unless you own a significant portion of the shares you aren't changing anything.
so.. solution to their problem is to eliminate profit motivated shareholders in favor of...
if the users own the shares, won't the company still need to... IDK make money?.
Exactly. Twitter has never generated a profit and loses money every year. This proposal changes nothing. Twitter is still a useless turd.
Charge uses a penny per Tweet. That makes as much sense as this idea.
What a sense of ownership that must feel like!
after all they spend most of the time telling me what some fuckwit on twitter thinks about something. or a celebrity fuckwit thinks about something else.
easier than doing some research and writing some content, eh?
Perhaps I'm being cynical here, but it almost sounds as if someone wants to unload his shares in Twitter onto the only demographic dumb enough to buy shares in Twitter.
Honestly I wish Twitter would just die and not be replaced with anything like it. I think society would be much better off in the long run and the media on the internet would stop acting like the opinions of nobodies who live in their parents' basements were crucially important. But on to the point at hand.
There's nothing in this plan to stop institutional investors from buying up large numbers of shares and effectively gaining control and doing exactly what the proposers are trying to stop. It's hard to get people to pay for something they get for free and I just don't see users of Twitter being willing to pay to save it. There are 725 million or so shares of Twitter stock available. That requires an awful large number of people to buy 2 or 3 shares each. That's an unrealistic goal.
When it reaches 18 cents/share, then it's only worth $130 million, which would be a lot more doable.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Can? Yes. Will? No!
Most likely I will be modded to hell but I cannot understand the point of Twitter: I just cannot compress my thoughts to 140 characters. Also my brains cannot process such incomplete ideas anyways: when I'm reading tweets and I feel like my brains want to implode because I feel like I'm not getting the data I want to get. IOW, most tweets are basically the bait for proper pieces of information.
So, what's twitter then? A service where you can publish news titles or share significantly downsized photos? Enlighten me, please.
How the hell does twitter lose money? Why does it have 2500 employees? What the hell does it spend $3 Billion a year on?
The problem with twitter is cost containment. The folks running it don't know how to run a business, they just know how to court investors.
I'm not calling for draconian MBA cuts that would gut the company, but I am generally curious on why they're spending ~$800 Million per year (2015) on RnD. Their product is already made, they only need a few people to make micro improvements to it. I don't see how they can justify spending the entire market cap of AMD in a year (2015 numbers).
Cutting the RnD budget by 3/4ths would cut the redline in half, and would have no impact on their core product.
I think MBA's running tech companies typically kill the company. But in this case, twitter really needs one of those slash and burn old school industrialist from non-tech industries.
No matter who owns Twitter, they still need a reliable revenue stream to keep the lights on. Getting users to buy shares will only make them lose money if the company goes the way of Yahoo.
"Twitter would be less beholden to meeting Wall Street's often brutal expectations."
Like making money?
Given their "$18.31" stock price. Call when they drop below $0.02 per share.
They are a for-profit business no chance in heck of going to any kind of co-op, sorry. Investors won't be on-board for that.
I *SO* want to see the lamest of all social media disappear off the face of the earth! =D
I may be alone in this, but I get enough value out of Twitter that I'd pay $5 a month for it.
Twitter has basically replaced RSS feeds for me. I follow my favorite journalists, some non-profits I support and the feeds of some hobby websites. Not only do you see all their new posts (just like an RSS feed) you can communicate back to whomever is posting.
Being able to interact with local journalists is great! I'm on a non-profit board and it's enabled us to get interviewed on local radio shows and gotten articles written in the local paper. When those same journalists write about other organizations in the region, we've used Twitter to reach out to those organizations and form a more traditional line of communication.
I don't know what it is about Facebook, but it's just not as good a solution as Twitter. Facebook comments to news articles are even worse than Twitter comments imho. Plus there's tons of quality stuff that gets posted that Facebook simply doesn't seem to put in my feed. At least with Twitter you end up seeing everything.
I hope Twitter finds a way forward. I think it really is a good resource, all things considered.
It's good enough for GSM short message service and the like. Remember it started as a cross-media thing.
Remember Ryan on The Office with his WUPHF, also doing pagers and faxes?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The shareholders are currently pushing for arbitrary growth marks because they can ... and because they are now in a guaranteed can't-fail model as people turn to twitter to find out what the POTUS is rambling on about tonight. If the whole company imploded this afternoon they would be bailed out by the government. The shareholders might as well insist that Twitter start funding a mission to Mars at this point, the US Government wouldn't allow them to go bankrupt.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
We've had this discussion before. There is just no need for Twitter to have more than 50 employees, in which case they would be rolling in money. Nearly 4000 employees, scattered over I-don't-know-how-many international offices? Stupid.
It was probably growth in an attempt to pump the stock price. Without the unrealistic VC expectations, Twitter wouldn't have a valuation anywhere over $100 million, and probably not that. But then - given what Twitter actually is - it really shouldn't be valued that high anyway.
A valuation of $50 million for a 50 person company would already be very good. They would have a stable business, and be quite the money spinner. But that's not good enough. The MBA and marketing idiots only have one word in their vocabulary: "growth". A business without growth is something they seem utterly incapable of comprehending.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I hate it when the middle schools let out for summer. We get never ending childish questions like the above.
Kid, the answers to your questions are a google and some studying away.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Twitter is actively banning libertarian and conservative users because they are getting too close to the dark evil truth about the people who run and own Twitter. Like CNN and ABC and NYT, it isn't about money anymore. Gab.ai is picking up all the banned users and is sworn to destroy the Left. Do the homework, you'll learn about all of it.
Why not just let users verify his or her identity and (probably some real-name policy too--but that isn't popular around here so I'll shush), and for a fee issue certs for digital signatures on email?
OMG facts!
What's going to happen now that Twitter's stock price has dropped from $66 a share to just $18?
Well, I hope the price drops to $0 and the company dies, taking the site with it.
Twitters R&D goes to two primary objectives. 1) Filtering/censoring, and 2) Data mining.
I'm amazed it's that much money myself, but we know that they have invested heavily in those two areas. Those same two areas happen to also be why their stock has tanked. People distrust the company, and going co-op won't necessarily change either of those two issues.
Twitter should die, just like most of the propaganda outlets in the US should die. Since fringe groups send them scraps, it's a very slow and painful death.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I don't think listening to "activists" will help twitter in any way
The economic problem Twitter faces is that it is not beholden enough to the expectations of Wall Street, and instead tries to cater to particular political and ideological sensitivities.
Nevertheless, I think having Twitter be owned collectively would be a solution to that problem, probably in the sense that death is a solution to the problem of illness.
Although essentially, "going-co-op" might be fine-and-dandy for the *users* of Twitter and probably the shareholders have little to lose at this point, it's essentially gonna be a death spiral of a tech company.
Stock is the currency in which startups pay their rockstars. The exodus has already begun. Many folks who might have some inkling of a new good ideas in the company in a death spiral probably leaves for greener pastures. Keeping or recruiting any rockstars will involve throwing lots of stock (sweat-equity) at them in the hopes that it might go up some day, but someone has to pay to keep the lights on in the meantime (that's the investors taking the risk, for those that think money grows on trees).
Slow growth companies make nice family owned businesses (or a co-op), but in the tech field, it's a death sentence to not be able to attract people with the next big idea. It's like a family-owned farm where the kids go off to make their mark in the big city. Maybe a one loyal son (or daughter), might stick it out, but without fresh blood or fresh ideas, the corporate farm down the road will eventually eat their lunch. Remember, twitter w/o innovation is basically SMS/MMS. In a few years, it's gonna be looking even more long in the tooth (remember twitter w/o pictures and video?). With a co-op we are looking at an IRC like structure (I wonder why more people aren't using IRC mobile clients)...
If microblogging turns out to be important for society, then decentralizing it somehow is necessary. We can learn from the mistakes of email and xmpp/jabber as well as the success of DNS on how to design robust systems that are not centrally controlled and do not depend on the viability of any one business entity.
I suspect 10 years from now we won't use Twitter. And in 20 years we'll have forgotten about them, as we've forgotten about Myspace, ICQ, Alta Vista, GeoCities, Ask Jeeves, Angelfire, and to some extent AOL. I stiill run into teenagers that don't understand that while Google didn't exist when I was using dial-up, there were other places on the Internet we could go for information. I don't even bother trying to explain CompuServe, Delphi, Prodigy, TSN/INN, and others.
PS - Prodigy was around in the mid-80's to mid-90's and it was a graphic environment and you used the mouse to follow hyperlinks. It was in wide used about 5-10 years before graphical web browsers and it needed very little bandwidth to work (it was tolerable at 1200 baud). It wasn't a "world wide web" though, you lived only in Prodigy's walled garden, but it was a nice garden. (The TV show Halt and Catch fire reminds me a bit of this era)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Does anyone on either side really want Trump on Twitter.
Perhaps everyone should leave Twitter until Trump is Banned!
Well, #covfefe was free and enjoyed it more than most movies, games, TV shows, meals, etc.
I'm no stranger to social media or technology. I can enumerate good reasons for Usenet news, Reddit, Facebook or Instagram, but Twitter just seemed to be an endless stream of drek designed to make you nervous and interrupt your day 4000 times if you wanted to keep up.
I don't know how they expect to make money from it, either.
Twitter has never generated a profit and loses money every year. This proposal changes nothing. Twitter is still a useless turd.
That is logical if you believe that nothing should exist unless it makes a profit. It's the sort of attitude that is slowly destroying the internet and turning it into purely a virtual shopping mall.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it