Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#91

Post by jimmytidey » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #81

omouse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter should be owned as a worldwide co-operative at this point, it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses.

I'm endlessly amused by the attitude people get over websites they like. I'm not sure what your personal argument for forcing twitter to be a utility is, but I'm sure it would make me laugh. Care to let me know?

It doesn't sound like you have a particularly open mind on this one, but I always address this question when it comes up on Hackner News because it's something I have strong feelings about.

I'm not going to defend Twitter being a utility (which the parent comment also doesn't mention) but I will say that in general, it's very clear to me we haven't worked out what kind of institutions can best deliver services in the digital age.

It's profoundly dubious that Twitter - a defacto 'town square' for public discussion - is owned by an institution that, at best, has few incentives to make it effective for the purpose which it is widely used.

This is significant in democracies, where the quality of national decision making will be directly linked to the design of the channels in which public debate happens.

The idea that we can take full and fair advantage of the opportunities the web offers exclusively through profit-motivated corporations is flatly wrong.

The fact that as Twitter users we agreed to some T&Cs doesn't mean we can't also wish for a more democratic digital public space - which I assume is what the parent comment is really getting at.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#92

Post by alfalfasprout » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #22

Why would anyone want to buy Twitter? Sure they have a great brand, loyal fans, but pretty much no way to monetizing them. It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Eh, Google buying them makes a ton of sense.

1. Massive access to a social network that can better integrate all their products. 2. Integration with their ad platform (improving monetization enough to make it break-even). 3. They'd own one of the most influential social networks in the world. Google buzz, Google wave, Google + were all massive failures. 4. Integration with things like Google News. They'd be able to understand trends almost perfectly (from both news stories and users).

I think people on HN and the like sometimes massively underestimate why Twitter is so important. Twitter as a big social network like Facebook is never going to happen. Their decision to pursue that route seems foolish in retrospect. Instead, what Twitter has is a smaller group of users that are extremely influential. Moreover, they have the most effective fan-out messaging platform in existence.

I think focusing on monetization/user only makes sense while TWTR is an independent company. Companies like GOOG, MSFT, etc. benefit greatly from the externalities of owning TWTR more than the business itself (consider Youtube, for example).

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#93

Post by SwellJoe » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:54 PM UTC

tarancato wrote: post #75

bernardlunn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is too expensive now for that route

I wonder how cheaper would it be if tweets were removed in, let's say, six months.

This election has proven the value of old tweets; as one candidate in particular has a penchant for making shit up, and then pretending later he didn't make shit up.

That said, I thought about this recently when @pmarca took a break from twitter and all of his tweets disappeared, and I figured, "Well, yes, I follow him and enjoy his tweets...but I never planned to go back and read the old ones." It is a fleeting and temporary medium, like a conversation rather than an article or book.

Nonetheless, I really doubt storage is anywhere near the majority of the cost of running Twitter. It takes a lot of 140 character tweets to fill up a terabyte.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#94

Post by paulmd » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:55 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #71

crabasa wrote: post #18

This is a sad outcome, but once upon a time Twitter had a choice: be the defacto messaging backbone for the Internet or compete with Facebook and be a destination website/app. They chose the latter and rewrote their TOS to effectively eliminate 3rd party development on their platform. An entire ecosystem of companies, products and tools was destroyed because Twitter couldn't imagine or articulate the value of powerin…

We still need the thing that Twitter ought to have been, a public short messaging service. Who is going to step up? What kind of institution could deliver something like that, while remaining open and accountable? A Wikipedia style foundation? My guess is that it needn't be (too) expensive to run, especially if you hand over responsibility for long term storage of the messages to third parties. My PhD (in progress) i…

This is exactly the problem that XMPP is designed to solve. You pick an XMPP provider who you trust, and you can get cross-provider traffic through XMPP Federation. One of the largest XMPP providers is Google Talk, which lets you hook right into the standard GChat.

The problem is precisely that people keep re-inventing the wheel here. We don't need Facebook Chat and all the other deliberately-incompatible protocols that keep getting built out, we just need people to implement XMPP.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#95

Post by jondubois » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:56 PM UTC

Twitter only makes sense for public figures. For regular people, nobody on Twitter gives a crap about what you have to say.

Facebook is fundamentally better because you only get updates from people who you know in real life - When you post something on FB, those people actually care about what you have to say (interactions are bidirectional).

To the average user, Twitter is just a glorified RSS news feed. You read other people's tweets, but nobody actually reads your tweets. The interaction is mostly unidirectional.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#96

Post by mmsmatt » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:57 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #34

rayalez wrote: post #24

Does anybody know why they have never tried to create a premium version? I've just googled, looks like they're making $0.55/user/month [1] I would have totally paid $7-$10/yr for no-bullshit version without ads, focused on user experience instead of manipulating my attention. I bet many other people would too. And I would use it way more actively as a result. Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business…

> Why do neither twitter nor facebook offer premium/business accounts? Because it will cause their ad revenue to plummet. The users with money are the ones advertisers actually want to reach, so if you let them opt out of seeing advertising you'll just be left with an exclusive pool of users who won't buy anything. And no advertiser wants that.

I've wondered about this too, your explanation works for me.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#97

Post by downandout » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:02 PM UTC

This will get downvotes here, because many HNers somehow see value in Twitter. But I'm actually surprised that many people would bid on Twitter at anywhere close to its current valuation of ~$17 billion. Here's one reason why:

Go ask any major affiliate marketing network how they feel about Twitter traffic. Many of them have an outright ban on it - meaning it actually has negative value to their advertisers. It simply doesn't monetize nearly as well as the traffic from other social networks. Much like the average Android user is worth far less to app developers than an iOS user is, the Twitter user base is simply not worth much to people looking to monetize it. That's a huge problem when asking someone to justify a $17B acquisition price.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#98

Post by SwellJoe » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:03 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #31

mrweasel wrote: post #22

Why would anyone want to buy Twitter? Sure they have a great brand, loyal fans, but pretty much no way to monetizing them. It's pretty obvious that Twitter has access to tons of interesting data, I just question if it's anything more than simply "interesting". While Twitter is huge, it's not really ubiquitous enough that you can use it for measuring things like effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Rich people buy assets that allow them to influence the world or simply have it as a trophy. See Bezos and WaPo, John Henry and Boston Globe, Carlos Slim and the NYT. I totally see someone famous buying Twitter just to own it, or another company like Disney who just wants it to break-even. It has cultural and influential value now separate from profit.

Given how many of the valley's biggest thought leaders use Twitter very heavily, I'd be surprised if there weren't a lot of potential buyers. Then again, its value is high enough to shake out a lot of the smaller players, since the buy-in is pretty astronomically huge.

If the valley is an echo chamber (it is), then Twitter echoes louder than most things I can think of. Very few companies have the kind of reach and influence within the valley that Twitter has.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#99

Post by SwellJoe » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:05 PM UTC

jarsin wrote: post #20

mc32 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have difficulty imagining Disney being any better, so I'm curious to hear an argument for Disney.

They will replace all the devs with H1b Visa holders, and then censor any tweet calling them out on their illegal business practice. * Edit removed the word "outsource"

Does "outsource" mean something different now? An H1B holder is someone who has come to the US to work. So, if they're working here in the US, in an office in the US...how is that "outsourcing"?

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#100

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:07 PM UTC

madshiva wrote: post #87

jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, Twitter is up for sale because there are things freely available on the Internet.

Internet was a way to share information, things, it was never for money. Money destroy everything. Human Rights Council have stated "to condemn the restrictions on access to information on the Internet" (A/HRC/32/L.20) http://thehill.com/sites/default/files/a_hrc_32_l.20_english... It's all about ethic and control of the source. If you can check the source, you can't tell if it's true or not and also access to inform…

> Money destroy everything.

That's an analogue to saying that 'tools destroy everything'. Money is just a tool, you can use it for good and you can use it for bad.

The 'old' internet is still there, underneath all the ad-driven cruft, but for some reason the majority of the people active on the net prefer those ad driven services. I'm not one of them but It's hard to ignore the fact that you - and I - are not in the majority here.

As for being able to check the source, that hasn't been true in a very very long time except for scientific publications (and even there you have to check to see who funded the study).