The Value of Twitter ⇥ lefsetz.com
Kia Kokalitcheva of Axios covers Twitter’s latest earnings report:
The company now has 328 million monthly active users, up by 9 million since the previous quarter, and growing its daily active users by 14% since the year-ago quarter.
Though it beat analyst estimates, Twitter’s quarterly revenue dropped to $548 million, down from $717 million the previous quarter, and an 8% year-over-year decrease. However, the company managed to shrink its quarterly net loss to $62 million, its lowest in the past year.
So celebrate the company that is driving the zeitgeist, where all stories get started, where those addicted to news live. Newspapers come second. TV is a comparative joke. And everybody worth their salt in either medium is right there on Twitter, whether it be Rachel Maddow or Margaret Sullivan.
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We want people to make us think. We want to know where it’s all going and what it all means.
And there’s no better place to do this than on Twitter.
If you’re an information junkie, there really is no better place to be today than on Twitter. In the ten years that I’ve been a member, I’ve had my constantly-updating feed always open on my desktop. It’s nothing like any other platform — including, by the way, in the amount of harassment experienced by its members.
Steven Levy of Backchannel interviewed Jack Dorsey on a wide range of topics including Twitter’s harassment problem:
We recognized that the very nature of the product was giving unfair advantage to people who wanted to harass. So we needed to change the product experience. We made it a priority last year, but to be very frank and honest, we only shipped one meaningful thing all year. So our progress is not something that we are proud of.
Why was that? Why did you fall short?
A variety of reasons. We recognized that at the end of the year, in December, and we just took on a completely different mindset. We had people drop what they were doing and really focus on this as an issue. And in the past three months we’ve been shipping every single day against this, and I think have made meaningful progress, [even though] it’s not felt as much. We also, in the previous year, put a lot of burden on the victim instead of taking the burden upon ourselves So we learned a bunch in that past year around how slow we were, and we just completely shifted our mindset.
December? December? Who would have thought that filling leadership and technical roles primarily with white men would make Twitter really bad at prioritizing and executing anti-harassment policies and features?