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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.
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.
Can? Yes. Will? No!
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.
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.
To make any money, they need a much more compelling product. At the moment, a measurable number of people get "all" the followers. 99% of people only get their friends as followers, and maybe not even that many. As such, for most people, the only way to get any attention is to be a troll or whatever - low value tweets designed to inflame or defame. Since your account has 5 followers, you can easily ditch it (or let it get banned) and start a new one.
On the other hand, celebrities and famous/interesting people value their accounts highly. They've only got it all to lose though - they're not trolling or inflaming arguments, they're just posting their own brand of whatever it is they post. They just get loads of abuse from the low-value accounts.
Thus, by accidental design, Twitter has an inherent imbalance - the people you want to retain are the biggest targets of the kind of activity you want to suppress. Suppressing bad activities is as good as impossible because the people doing it think nothing of just rotating accounts.
Possibly the only was for Twitter to 'survive' is to create a reputation system similar to /. karma. However, followers and retweets are about as unreliable a measure of 'reputation' as they come, so they'd need some other tools to get reputation information, and they'd need to make it low-value-rotated-accounts proof too. Not easy to do, but I don't imagine impossible either.
As for the 'co-op' - it's gonna have to be a penny stock before any investors will go for that idea. By that time though, it'll probably be a dead platform - although we'll see, it may fail in the market faster than its users can be convinced to go elsewhere. Certainly, governments are queuing up to find ways to give them higher costs of doing business.
The amazing thing about Twitter is that when you are forced to condense your thoughts into piece-meal slogans you are forced to truly consid
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.
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'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.