Dusk approaches when Twitter sheds its desire to leave a mark on humanity
Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing.
Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today.
My guess is that, for the people who poured in all that money, "leaving a mark on humanity" was not the primary reason they opened their wallets. They opened their wallets because they expected to make more money by doing so. They were making investments, not charitable contributions. And at some increasingly near point, those people are going to want to see a return on their investments. That means that, barring an acquisition, Twitter needs to find a way to turn a (hopefully large, from the investors' viewpoint) profit -- and sooner rather than later.
Why would you ever have thought things would be otherwise? Twitter is a company. Companies that don't make money usually don't survive. The best case scenario is that they get bought out and operated as a vanity project by a deep-pocketed patron, the way a lot of magazines are. But a magazine is a much smaller and cheaper-to-run enterprise than a centralized, global real-time communications network. Whose pockets are deep enough to run Twitter at a loss indefinitely?
If you organize yourself as a for-profit corporation, and take on investors, at some point you have to bring in more money than you burn. Otherwise you will at some point have to scale back your ambitions, because you simply will not be able to afford them anymore.
Twitter, in other words, is meeting its destiny. Maybe that destiny is not to make as big a "mark on humanity" as people wish. But without all the money they took from those investors who are breathing down their necks now, Twitter would never have been able to scale up to where it is today at all. And that money came with the condition that Twitter would at some point figure out a way to pay it back, with interest.
Yes, but the problem with Twitter is they took too much money.
You don't need to have $1Billion dollars in financing to offer a service like this -- this is what the likes of app.net are teaching us.
A $50million Twitter could have "easily" sustained it's vision/objective without having to cannibalise it's entire ecosystem.
However someone promised the moon to a bunch of financiers and now they have to deliver above and beyond of what Twitter could have been, or should have just been.
As far I'm concerned that is the story of Twitter, a company that took the money and ran.
> "You don't need to have $1Billion dollars in financing to offer a service like this"
Sometimes you do. We've seen a dramatic amount of "overfunding" of social media startups, and I have a theory why.
When your business model doesn't involve well, actually making money at its core, you end up in a position where you have to staff up massively so you can pursue an enormously vast range of monetization strategies in the hopes of finding something that sticks.
How many people on Facebook do you think are working on the core product - as in the Facebook that end users interact with on a daily basis? How many instead are working on a enormously numerous systems that Facebook hopes would make them monetizable? Ad platforms, billing systems, support systems, analytics systems, etc etc.
So yeah, Twitter as defined as "that thing where you submit strings of 140 chars or less and follow others doing the same" probably didn't need $1bn to get off the ground. Twitter in the "this might actually make money" sense though, probably isn't THAT overfunded.
It's like a rocket. Most of the fuel in a rocket goes towards lifting the rest of the fuel. Likewise, Twitter needs that level of investment to scale to the point where it can make a return on that level of investment.
This is a good analogy. But with 800m raised in 2011, arguably when they were close "escape velocity" already, its also a fair point to wonder if destiny could have been any different with less $$$ weighing them down.
What I always found curious about Twitter, despite its massive concurrency requirements, is how low quality and short-lived the content is. Outside of charting historical trends, there's very little value in mining historical Twitter data - it's only the real-time part that matters. Theoretically, they coould just delete all content older than x days - and I doubt that many would notice.
1bln is funding is unreasonable, both from a technology standpoint (Twitter does go down, btw) and from a "let's figure out a way to monetize this" standpoint.
1) No, but I know that the difference between $50M and $500M+ would change my outlook in terms of who I need to satisfy dramatically.
2) Don't like App.net? Pick Reddit vs Digg, same case. One managed to "get by" with a core team, the other took a ton of money, hired a bunch of folks, made a bunch of promises, and tried to shoehorn their original vision, the one that got them established in the first place, into something completely different. Reddit, makes money and is sustainable -- it just didn't need to make that much money -- as a user that's fine by me, and the reason why Reddit "won". If only Digg was happy to "just" be a $50mill website...
3) Twitter is what it's users/supporters made it to be. Its service/value was understood from the get-go, and in turn, it's popularity grew for that same reason -- ppl understood it's vision and supported by building upon it -- hence cannibalizing your core base by knee-capping your API, probably isn't the best way to go.
4) My vision of Twitter is fine, like many others, I think it's got something to do with SMS-web-mobile-140-characters-distributed-micro-messaging-or-summin? Does it need to be more than that?
The wrinkle in #2 is that once you decide to take conventional venture funding (as opposed to bootstrapping, or fundraising through angels, incubators, etc.), you really don't have the option to just be a small, sustainable business anymore. VCs don't want to invest in small, sustainable businesses, they want to invest in aggressive plays that have the potential to blow up into something huge.
> Taking in that sort of money raises the stakes dramatically. Nobody loans you a billion dollars to build a $50 million/year business.
That was OzzyB's original point: Twitter should not have taken big VC money. They took too much money. From his first post:
> someone promised the moon to a bunch of financiers and now they have to deliver above and beyond of what Twitter could have been, or should have just been.
Not to mention well over 100mil/yr in salaries alone (prob more like 150-170mil with benefits, taxes, and generally high salaries in SF, glassdoor shows avg salary 120-130k)
It's not that much, actually. Some of us have processed 50-70 million transactions per day on a much smaller infrastructure (25..40 AWS boxes) - quite often designed and deployed just days prior to the massive traffic spike, with fancy features like real-time fraud checking etc.
It's not that hard to do what Twitter does. At least, with the amount of financial backing that they have, I don't expect them to be failing in a spactacular fashion periodically.
The reason for the mismatch is that it's not 70 million transactions a day. It's potentially 70 million times the average number of people that access each tweet, which is probably more like 100+, plus all the polling that twitter applications do even when there are no new tweets, as well as all the ancillary stuff that's required to run something like this (spam filtering, API servers, etc).
Yes. Yes, on average, a given tweet reaches ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE. Do any of you folks even listen to yourself? Even if you change that to "users" instead of "people," since so many twitter accounts are robots - even then, 100 users on average for every tweet is ABSURD.
> the polling that twitter applications do even when there are no new tweets
Polling with no new tweets is far easier to optimize than polling when there are tweets. So just discount this almost entirely in your roughshod analysis.
> spam filtering
Have you been on twitter? We all get spam and see fake accounts trying to get at us regularly. Try mentioning you're on a diet on twitter and see how many followers you rack up. If they're filtering spam, they're not filtering it well, so I hope they aren't burning too much cash on it.
> API servers
API servers are frontends that use dramatically fewer resources than the work the backends have to do. If Twitter's frontends are costing them much money, again, they're wasting money.
I don't see what's hilariously off about that? If you look at the average number of people that a given real person follows, 100 probably isn't that far off. I'm not saying those are actually read by a human, but associated with that many, sure.
My point was that the grandparent was probably an order of magnitude or more off counting 70 million new messages per day as 70 million transactions per day.
I'm not saying they're doing things well, but it's pretty naive to think that you could build Twitter's infrastructure with <50 AWS instances.
You think the API is a trivial matter of spinning up some front end machines? From that presentation linked to above, they were getting 6 Billion API calls per day, or 70k/sec.
Besides that, all of these numbers are 2 years old, and according to those slides, they were growing at about 10x per year. It has probably slowed, but those numbers may all be much bigger now.
I have no idea if Twitter is over-funded or not, but App.net has yet to have to service anywhere near the level of simultaneous traffic that Twitter deals with daily. App.net services 20,000 users (http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/09/07/off-slow-start-...); Twitter services 140 million (https://business.twitter.com/en/basics/what-is-twitter/). Twitter went through severe growing pains to reach the point where it could handle that much traffic; there's no reason to believe App.net won't have to go through similar issues if/as it grows.
Any centralized system that has to support tens or hundreds of millions of users in real time is going to be seriously expensive to operate. There may well be a point at which it's simply economically infeasible to do it without splitting the expense into tiny slices borne by lots of different parties, the way we do for email.
> Twitter went through severe growing pains to reach the point where it could handle that much traffic; there's no reason to believe App.net won't have to go through similar issues if/as it grows.
Actually, there is: app.net could just observe what twitter did.
And twitter didn't have to go through it either; There's discussions going on about that since 2008 when their uptime suffered outage after outage; here's something I wrote 2 years ago, for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b2u6t/twitter_o... and I had given that same answer before several time in other forums.
> Any centralized system that has to support tens or hundreds of millions of users in real time is going to be seriously expensive to operate.
And yet, reddit which is much more complex, and of comparable reach (I don't have time to google the numbers right now, let's say it has 1/10 of the audience), costs much less than 1/10 of twitter's operational costs. And is profitable.
> There may well be a point at which it's simply economically infeasible to do it without splitting the expense into tiny slices borne by lots of different parties, the way we do for email.
Actually ... I suspect gmail can easily handle the entire world email infrastructure, cheaply and reliably. They already handle a two-digit percentage of the world email accounts.
For sure, facebook can do that - they already do it (although it is simplified email).
The reason email is sliced is not a problem of scale - it is a problem of control.
edit: removed half a sentence that was there, and which was written earlier.
If you think you could have replicated Twitter with 300K of hardware and software 2 years ago, surely it would be even cheaper now. Why wouldn't you go to Twitter and offer to do it for them? Even if they paid you three million dollars it would give them massive savings in headcount and operational costs.
I'm sure there's at least one technical person high enough there who is aware of how inefficient their implementation is, and how much better it can be. And I suspect that person is unable to do anything about it, despite being in a way better position than anyone on the outside.
But ... the real question, is even if I brought it in a turn-key and backward compatible setup for them (that is, they pay $3M, I install stuff, we flick a switch, and everything just works) - would it be worth $3M to them?
I suspect the answer is: Not worth any kind of risk or hassle to save $10M/year (or however much it would save them; if it is more than $10M/year, I'd be surprised).
I don't know how they spend their money, but I'm willing to bet that running the service is less than 10% of their expenses. (Of the money spent to get e.g. win95, or a new drug, to market, r&d costs are usually no more than 5-10%)
I think Twitter hasn't been a lean organization in years, and they took too much money to "reboot" themselves as a lean.
I think Twitter is already dead, it just won't acknowledge.
I think this "mark on humanity" talk is rubbish. I mean, what does that even mean? Twitter is just a service that allows people to connect and publicly talk to each other on the Internet. That's it.
There have been previous, less successful iterations of the same common idea. Twitter hit critical mass in terms of it's user base and has created neat and unique nuances that make it's version of human-human communication on the web innovative and fun and successful. Kudos to them. It's the social network du jor for fast communication. But there will eventually be other iterations in the future. Some more successful, some less. Perhaps some new incarnations from Twitter itself as they evolve their product over the next decade.
If Twitter has a "mark", it's that they created a way to "flatten the world of communication" and take discussions to a realm where everything and everyone are drawing on the same board at the same time.
But in the end, these are all services that facilitate human interactions that have existed for thousands of years. We've just taken those interactions and put them all on an even plane at the same time, and exposed them in a way that is amazingly accessible.
So when we talk about "Twitter changing the world", I get confused. It's always humans that change the world, we're just using a different vehicle and techniques to get there. So... Rhetorical flourishes and hyperbole aside... How was Twitter changing the world, and how is it not anymore...?
> How was Twitter changing the world, and how is it not anymore...?
Twitter was a utility. Now it's ABC. It could have changed the world in the way that, you know, the web changed the world. But instead it's changing the world in the way that cable news changes the world. That's what's so bizarre about Ev Williams to me. He's so damn talented but he doesn't give a shit about anything but the flip. It's true of so many founders these days; everyone worships Steve Jobs and not enough worship Tim Berners-Lee.
I honestly have no idea what this means. Twitter is still a utility for communication. ABC is a content provider, not a utility.
>> " It could have changed the world in the way that, you know, the web changed the world."
I am also scratching my head at this statement. Perhaps you could elaborate, I have no concept of how Twitter could have changed the world in the way that the World Wide Web did. WWW was an astronomical leap in the way we perceive and use the Internet. Twitter has been a revelation for many average consumers who did not take advantage of the social nature of the web as many people had previously, but to compare it to the creation of the WWW itself is--in my view--a little far-fetched.
>> "But instead it's changing the world in the way that cable news changes the world. "
I again respectfully have no concept of what you are talking about.
And finally, generally: All this hand-wringing about Twitter irrationally eschewing it's mantle as the savior of humanity and as the last true final hope for a social web and social networking services in general (or whatever values you are projecting on this company)....
Wow... I mean seriously guys? We're talking about closing down a few client-side API's among other things.
Don't you think this hyperbole is getting just a tad out of touch with reality?
But to rephrase slightly, is that the exception that proves the rule?
[nb - I don't disagree with your point, but what is missing to encourage more things in this direction? Wikipedia is another utility example, but again is so rare]
I completely agree with everything you've written except your "but here's the thing" should have been an "and here's the thing". We're all on the same page here.
Yes, that's reality. Yes, it's unfortunate and we wish it wasn't so.
I love Twitter the medium. I wish Twitter the company would find a way to monetize without taking this route. I like to think that I would have done something different in their position, but who knows.
At least from my point of view his comments weren't meant as a criticism of twitter so much as a neutral observation. He also didn't seem to be disparaging the monetization of twitter, but simply making a prediction for its evolutionary path he sees it following.
Founded by a hacker-idealist who wanted to bring people and technology together like never before. The experiment worked wonderfully at first as millions of people flocked to Facebook's revolutionary platform from around the world. Soon, questions of profitability came into the picture, forcing executives to compromise ethics for additional revenue. Chaos erupted and millions began to question their loyalty and wonder about their safety/privacy. Over time, the platform has become overgrown with ads (that are rarely clicked), spam (that embarrasses it's victims), and scandals (that frighten even the most loyal users). Fear of extinction due to unexpected competition has pushed Facebook to become even more aggressive by inflating the value of the company to astronomical proportions, acquihiring dozens of startups, and raising billions in an IPO. Today, the future of Facebook is in the air. No one knows how the variables will compound and what this corporate gene sequence will evolve into...
I perceived inGen trying to re-create complex organisms and arrange them into a simple system, and not being prepared when the consequences of chaos unfolded. I love the movie but it leaves out much of the discussion of complexity and chaos found in the book. You ever read the books?
I actually just re-read the book with my son. It holds up really well considering it's age. The complexity and chaos stuff maps, I just don't see the parallel between the idealistic Zuck wanting to change the world and inGen trying to make a dinosaur theme park.
The parallel is both were trying to do something considered 'impossible' and doing it on the grandest scale possible. John Hammond wanted to clone extinct animals, Mark wanted to create a network for millions of people. Both projects are incredibly complex with a lot of variables and the consequences of miscalculation could be disastrous. Chaos is the underlying theme of it all...
To be fair to John Hammond, I'm not sure creating a (albeit massive) social networking service is in the same league as reverse engineering 65+ million year old, fragmented DNA strands, then bringing the dinosaurs not only to term, but healthy adulthood, and finally housing them in a multi-billion dollar facility on a leased island.
Facebook has roughly 4x as much source code as Jurassic Park did, and probably can't be run from a single room for up to three days with minimal staff.
Also, if say, Facebook Profiles breaks down, the profiles don't eat the users.
Keep in mind, it was a movie and the metaphor was constructed around chaos/complexity. If you read the books, Hammond actually needed an entire other island, Isla Sorna, to produce batches of dinosaurs and allow them to mature. Most of the embryos did not reach maturity. He also had a much larger control room on that island to oversee the main island.
If your Facebook data gets exploited, it could affect you in big ways.
Twitter already said that most people access Twitter through their web ui and mobile apps. So even if they were shutting their whole API down, it wouldn't have such a negative effect on their usage growth. The only thing that's happening is that devs won't be able to build toys around Twitter, but Twitter doesn't care as most people don't use nor need these toys.
Some of us devs just have to admit that we are not that important to the success of Twitter, at least, not anymore. It's also not a charity so they need to make money somewhere, I don't really see the problem here.
"Twitter already said that most people access Twitter through their web ui and mobile apps."
My problem with this stance is the same problem I have with so called "browser share".
I am not beholden to a single interface. I'm human. I'm dynamic. I move and change.
That means sometimes I use the website. Sometimes I use the mobile app. Sometimes I embed Tweets on a website. Sometimes I use a website's embedded tweets to follow them instead of following them on Twitter. I send photos and tweets from apps, and I consume tweets from multiple sources.
Twitter is almost as ubiquitous as water for me, the ways I consume and use it in my day to day. There is no single one size fits all interface to Twitter in my workflow, only Twitter the service. Because if there were, if I had to go to the website and only the website, or the app and only the app, I wouldn't use it. I don't use things that get in my way. You either fit into my workflow, or you don't.
And I'll miss the Mac OS desktop client if the rumors are true, because the website doesn't have a simple way to switch between multiple Twitter identities if I'm running a personal Twitter, a brand Twitter. And also because they bought Tweetie only to, eventually, kill it. But we've had this discussion before.
Does anyone know the actual percentage of users that access Twitter through third party client applications? And what users are currently getting out of these apps that would make them annoyed enough to quit the service if they were forced to switch to Twitter's app/web interface?
My gut reaction is to agree with you that the Hacker community is overreacting to getting screwed over and that Twitter will go on fine without us. But without any facts about how popular and widely used these third party apps are, my opinion is really just a guess.
This is just my own testimony, but there are numerous features in tweet bot which Twitters own app doesn't even attempt to provide. Such as conversation threading in both directions (twitter only let's you see In Reply To). The app is also quite a bit more polished and better behaved (Twitter Mac triggers my discrete gpu, Tweetbot doesn't). Twitter Mac doesn't even support gestures.
As for the website... Twitter loses all its value to me if I have to open a browser every time I want to read content.
I wonder what impact all this Twitter-hate is having on Twitter's HR department. I say this because I don't think shutting off third-party clients will hurt the company that much. If it makes it difficult to attract the best talent, that's a different story. Look at what happened to Y! over the last decade.
Twitters open source contributions to Scala are superb and I would jump at the chance to work there based solely on that. I couldn't care less about API access restrictions compared to the effort and attention they clearly put into engineering...and honestly who would?
I think there's a faction of engineers who want to work on interesting (which can be hard) problems, and those who want to work on interesting products.
I believe this is demonstrated clearly by the jobs pages for both Apple and Google. From Apple:
* Every detail matters… It matters all of the time. That’s how we do things at Apple. The result is some of the best-loved products in the world.
* Simplicity isn’t simple... It means rethinking every customer experience until the clutter has fallen away — until all that remains is what’s essential, useful, and beautiful. That might be a new product feature that delights even die-hard fans.
From Google, specifically an interview with Google employees about work there:
* ”... love to work on challenging projects”
* ”... love being faced with problems that were not ever solved before”
* ”... you hear people talking about algorithms and coding and programming languages”
* ”... it was just a pleasure being interviewed by smart people and being given a lot of puzzling questions”
I used to work at Google, and I joined there during a period when I wanted to work on interesting (i.e. hard) problems. I left to work on interesting products.
> "I think there's a faction of engineers who want to work on interesting (which can be hard) problems, and those who want to work on interesting products."
In my experience this only describes 10% of the programmer population. The rest don't really want either, they just like the benefits and the paycheck.
They also don't work at Twitter, Google, or Apple, not many do anyhow.
Actually, I don't think the distinction really exists. Some people like to crack hard algorithmic problems, some people like to crack hard systems problems, others like to crack hard markets, or hard product verticals. It's all part of the same thing - people like to accomplish things that are hard to do and interesting to try.
Agree that this only matters to 10% of the population. And yes, I'm totally oversimplifying it by creating only two categories. As to whether the distinction really exists, I personally believe that it does -- and the best anecdote I have is looking back on my reasons to leave Google. When I joined I wanted to work on hard/interesting problems, and when I left I wanted to work on interesting/impactful products.
I'll agree to disagree on 'largest'[1]. But there's a huge difference between 'largest' and 'only'. Which is what grandparent implied.
[1] I lied. I can't sell you a bridge because I suck at it. But somebody will. To you and your friends. Let's talk again in 10 years. Sigh, when did I get so cynical? Then again, it's not cynical to see the feedback loops between who you work with and what you work on and the million other seemingly minor details that go into liking what you do. Yeah, maybe I'm ok. The comparison to suckers is entirely unfair; for that I apologize. It's just the circle of life.
"Very true. Along the same lines, Google+ is the Major League Soccer of social networks. Other countries have very successful soccer leagues that happened organically. The US tried to manufacture a soccer league, and it spent a ton of money in doing so. It so happens that the most talented athletes in the country prefer sports that are already popular. The most interesting people in the league are has-beens from Europe. Still, nothing wrong with being the fifth or sixth most popular sport in the country." -Diego Basch
That's an absurd report considering that NBA/NHL arenas hold about 18-20k people max while most MLS games are played in Football stadiums that can hold 65k+. The fact that MLS still barely wins in attendance per game is pretty sad.
is it? or maybe, unlike other startups, Twitter is willing to make the changes necessary to adjust course and reinvent itself? Google cut Buzz and Wave. They were both great initiatives that never took off. You can't throw good money after bad money. I think developers are important but the users experience is paramount and if to maintain that they need to adjust their service, so be it.
Seems like the only logical reason they are doing this is because they are in the start of an acquisition. They have to prove some type of revenue stream (ads) and restricting users to the twitter site/app will help them guarantee the made up numbers.
A different question is, who would want to buy them? Twitter, who should know their network better than everyone else, is still trying to figure out how to best monetize it. Who would want to take that task on?
In the old days, I'd guess Yahoo! would be in the running, but since they have a history of buying popular sites and then letting them wither, I hope Meyer isn't going to fall for that again.
I would be surprised but not totally shocked if either Microsoft or Apple bought Twitter. Tight integration into OS and devices + the huge critical mass of active social users + the social and cultural relevance of Twitter would be assets for them.
Facebook already has a social network. Google already has a social network. Apple's probably not interested in running one post-Ping. Who else is going to purchase them at a price their investors - who've sunk over a billion in VC $ - wouldn't balk at?
Have they really had over a billion in investment capital? I realize they may have had investment rounds valuing the company at 1bil+, that doesn't mean they were given a billion dollars.
I've heard a lot about twitter's support for third party apps. I have never encountered one of these apps myself. When I see quotes like "the world of third-party developers", it suggests that there is a large number of applications somewhere that I'm missing. What are these apps?
TwitPic, TweetDeck, Klout, Twitter's own iPhone app was once Tweetie (a 3rd party app), Hootsuite, Favstar, here's some more http://socialmediatoday.com/node/295232
I'm with you. And as both a consumer of Twitter using various clients, and as an implementer of Twitter-based services in production applications: Their recent API changes have had absolutely zero impact on me. shrugs
Really can't agree with where Twitter is going with their API cutoffs, a year ago, I would've sat down for an hour or two just to build in a Twitter tweeting function into whatever software I was writing.
It was an easy, no fuss way of getting social media into software. Facebook caused me no end of bother, its API was (still is?) an 'it exists, and here's the calls, good luck buddy' affair.
Now, I'm not sure the functions I used would pass the API ToS.
Who remenber Color raising 41M for craps?
I remember back then someone saying: "They invested in the team, that still make me laugh. They funded smart people, now they have enought cash to build something that will make money". I'm looking forward to seing this.
Twitter is such a disapointment for me and i'm looking forward too to see their first profitable year.
Interesting observation. It seems that Twitter might shrink into nothing eventually, and possibly then be infinitely valuable (assuming all this shrinkage makes it more valuable).
Look, I understand the sentiment, but here's the thing.
Twitter only exists as we know it today because a lot of people have poured a lot of money into it. Without that money, Twitter would be an impossibility. It simply would not exist, at least not at anywhere near the scale it exists at today.
My guess is that, for the people who poured in all that money, "leaving a mark on humanity" was not the primary reason they opened their wallets. They opened their wallets because they expected to make more money by doing so. They were making investments, not charitable contributions. And at some increasingly near point, those people are going to want to see a return on their investments. That means that, barring an acquisition, Twitter needs to find a way to turn a (hopefully large, from the investors' viewpoint) profit -- and sooner rather than later.
Why would you ever have thought things would be otherwise? Twitter is a company. Companies that don't make money usually don't survive. The best case scenario is that they get bought out and operated as a vanity project by a deep-pocketed patron, the way a lot of magazines are. But a magazine is a much smaller and cheaper-to-run enterprise than a centralized, global real-time communications network. Whose pockets are deep enough to run Twitter at a loss indefinitely?
If you organize yourself as a for-profit corporation, and take on investors, at some point you have to bring in more money than you burn. Otherwise you will at some point have to scale back your ambitions, because you simply will not be able to afford them anymore.
Twitter, in other words, is meeting its destiny. Maybe that destiny is not to make as big a "mark on humanity" as people wish. But without all the money they took from those investors who are breathing down their necks now, Twitter would never have been able to scale up to where it is today at all. And that money came with the condition that Twitter would at some point figure out a way to pay it back, with interest.
That point is now.