Twitter Is 'Toast' and the Stock Is Not Even Worth $10, Says Analyst (cnbc.com) 284
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.
Yes, yes, let the hate flow through you (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.
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If you're talking about BlackBerry investors, they're one step down from little old ladies feeding quarters into a slot machine.
Tech dividends (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 inves
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Fleeing rats (Score:4, Insightful)
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The sound you just heard is social bubble popping (Score:4, Insightful)
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Remember MySpace, digg, orkut, Google+?
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The Unicorns will be next though, not Facebook.
Providing an SJW platform is not a viable business (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Providing an SJW platform is not a viable busin (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
Considering that SJW is the new Jewish conspiracy, communist agenda, liberal media, Muslim menace, boogie man, and does not exist as such, I have to believe that your ideas are incorrect.
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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
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If ads didn't work for Facebook, they could still charge users $3 a year and be solvent. Reddit is scraping by with subscriptions and gifted "gold". Maybe if Twitter tried $.025 a year they'd be able to stay up.
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Explain how Trump exists so "bigly" on Twitter if it is such a rabid "SJW platform".
It's still used by celebrities, record labels, television shows, etc., to broadcast a message to the people that still effectively utilize said platform which, according to Edison Research last year, is 7% of the American population (which is what I assume you mean by 'bigly').
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It's interesting that you view "not being a horrific racist" as a political alignment.
Either you're intellectually dishonest or you're not aware of Twitter's shenanigans over the past year where they'd allowed horrifically racist commentary like "white people must die" or anti-Christian commentary yet banned the accounts of white people who communicated even the lightest of philosophical questions on race or religion.
It's either all racist or it's not. It's either all anti-religious or it's not. Twitter became a selective judge and jury as to what constituted as racist based on the race and/or religion of the source and target.
Maybe they've cleaned up their act since the summer, when you could easily find #BlackLivesMatters quotes that literally cried for the death of white people or from other groups crying for Allah to kill people... but the damage is already done. Twitter's actions stated 'this is who we are, this is who we support, this is who we don't support.'
Good (Score:2, Funny)
Good...the cesspool of political correctness is blowing up in their faces
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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 [youtube.com]) , 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 k
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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'
Lol!!! (Score:5, Funny)
The analyst said that Twitter's data quality is "horrible".
Using "twitter" and "data" and "quality" in the same sentence made me laugh.
Hate twitter but alternatives seem just as bad (Score:5, Insightful)
The election is a poor barometer of relevance (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.
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Saying Twitter data are poor is misleading. Twitter would render a popular vote if all tweets were taken in aggregate, and in that case, it would have been correct. Now if they are blocking by state and got it wrong, it's still more of a function of who uses Twitter.
Pollsters were just lying to boost Clinton (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... [cnbc.com]
MSM also predicted a Hillary victory (Score:2, Insightful)
I suspect that many twitterers were just repeating what they were hearing on MSM.
Is MSM also toast?
It's badly run. (Score:2)
This is what happens when you arbitrarily ban people because you don't like them.
It spawned gab.ai. Now they hint that they might ban Trump. Which means he would go to gab and take a lot of his 10million folowers with him.
Twitter as a protocol (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.
Re:Twitter as a protocol (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.
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Common sense, at last! Thank-you! (Score:2)
The previous poster, "hipp5", may not be a Twitter user, but it sounds to me like he understands it better than most regular Twitter users do!
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. I grant that there's a certain amount of value
Re:Common sense, at last! Thank-you! (Score:4, 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.
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Exactly. Email is a protocol. Hotmail is a business.
$10 stock = $7.1B valuation (Score:4, Informative)
Enough politics, back to the subject (Score:4, 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.
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Maybe if there is value to it as a service, it needs to go the non-profit route like Wikipedia?
Re:Enough politics, back to the subject (Score:5, 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.
Someone is trying to short the stock (Score:2)
Keep whining old guys.
Buying opportunity IMHO
If only its users woud figure this out... (Score:4)
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.
He has it backwards (Score:2)
hyberbole (Score:2)
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.
Twitter has had issues with monetization, but the idea that the platform is somehow flawed because some idiot used it as a source polling is nuts. You can't determine an election from reading tweets.
Twitter differentiated itself from other social sites by embracing simplicity and mobile. The simplicity of twitter has also hurt it, because it keeps failing at expanding the platform beyond tweets making it a poor growth stock since its user growth has stagnated.
Re:I can hear crying (Score:5, Insightful)
It is almost like you're implying that the shutdown of Twitter equates to the shutdown of social media as a concept.
Re:I can hear crying (Score:5, Funny)
We should be so lucky
Also, there's Gab.ai (Score:4, 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 [gab.ai] is a twitter replacement that has started up recently and is collecting a lot of interest [alexa.com].
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.
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MeWe is another one as well. It isn't as popular, but has some decent groups on it.
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I think the claim that Twitter is driving people away is overrated. Most of the accounts I'm aware of that were cut were engaging in outright abuse/insults of others. A lot of people think they're right in abusing others because of some claimed moral position. I actually think Twitter has done a good job with how to handle it.
I *highly* doubt that Twitter is going away any time soon. Maybe the organization will change in some ways - I hope they aren't acquired - but there are tens or hundreds of thousan
Re:Also, there's Gab.ai (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.
Re:Also, there's Gab.ai (Score:4, 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.
Re:Also, there's Gab.ai (Score:5, 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.
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Hell, I'd bet that the other social media outlets like Facebook and Reddit would start a bidding war to become Trump's new official mouthpiece. I'm sure that they is good money to be made in selling ads to his followers.
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Time to start looking at Twitter's patent portfolio. Gonna be a whole lot of "on a network" patents that can be used in East Texas to extort cash.
Re:I can hear crying (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?
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I just go into my iPhone's settings and turn those alerts off with a simple slider.
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If it's a US phone, you can turn off weather alerts and EAS alerts, but not presidential alerts.
Re:I can hear crying (Score:4, Funny)
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There's a way to turn them off. I don't need my phone that badly.
Re:I can hear crying (Score:4, 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
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Now, stick with me here, because
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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.
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Clearly the Clinton Crime Family is behind the destruction of Twitter! Oh when will the murderous Clintons be dealt with?
Oh, and Chy-na!
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The election is over. Can everybody please STFU about politics for at least one day?
No. The trolls who now own slashdot have determined that the days of discussing CPUs, OSs, gadgets, computing platforms and the like are over, and in its place, discussions about politics, Trump, Clinton, climate change, Uber, et al are worthy substitutes
Re:I can hear crying (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I can hear crying (Score:5, 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.
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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.
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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 s
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Which is one of the reasons why artificial islands are not accepted under Maritime Law as being actual territory. They are ultimately transient. If China were to abandon this island, within twenty years it would be back under water. It takes continuous import of materials and shoring up to keep artificial islands built atop reefs and seamounts usable. They are not land save in the most temporary sense of the word. It's like calling a bridge land.
Carrier, IN, Pence & Trump (Score:2)
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.
Actually, no. When Carrier first announced that relocation, Pence did contact them and ask if there was anything he could do to keep them there. They told him that it was a result of federal taxes and regulations that made them make this decision.
The difference after the Trump election is that he had his people look at them, and saw that Carrier's parent company United Technologies had millions or billions in government contracts. He used that, as well as other things as bargaining chips. While Pence
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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.
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washington, lincoln, and roosevelt, both, would like a word with you.
certainly not the worst, but by no means the best.
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William Henry Harrison is obviously the best President. He didn't fuck up anything and refused to kick Democrats out of positions in the government. What a fine President!
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Worse, be a US citizen of Japanese descent.
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Ah, the sweet clear clarion call of ideological purity. Unless someone is 100% "good" (according to my way of thinking), they are 100% evil.
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yes, and I believe gitmo is the pinnacle of human rights values.
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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.
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All Bush and Obama did was hand a couple of trillion dollars over to bankers. Single largest looting of a nations treasury in world history. Had they instead simply allowed all the investment banks to fail: the world would have kept turning, the sun would have risen, and people would have found a way to accept payment from one another. Oh, it might have taken a couple of weeks to become efficient again, to route around the damage, but commerce would have gone on with barely a hiccup.
But no, we paid nearl
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The world kept turning and the sun kept rising during the Depression, but it still remained an incredibly hideous time for large parts of the world, so avoiding such economic collapses is an awfully damned good idea. And yes, some bad people effectively got rewarded, but the greater good and all of that.
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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.
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And then the gold standard kooks come out of the woodwork.
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No modern economy is going to peg to gold anymore. The day is done. Find another hobby horse. This isn't a "left vs right" matter, this is a "sensible vs irrational" thing.
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Re:Chowdry's a liar though (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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