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

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#121

Post by jarsin » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #99

jarsin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Because it replaces the job of the american worker with a foreign worker.

It's illegal to replace a job of an american worker using H1b Visa's.

Maybe insourcing is a better word :)

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#122

Post by SwellJoe » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:39 PM UTC

jarsin wrote: post #121

SwellJoe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

Because it replaces the job of the american worker with a foreign worker. It's illegal to replace a job of an american worker using H1b Visa's. Maybe insourcing is a better word :)

There's probably a useful conversation to be had about whether companies are using H1b talent to drive down the cost of technical labor rather than to fill gaps in the talent pool (they probably are). But, wrapping up that conversation in misleading language seems counter-productive.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#123

Post by spullara » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:42 PM UTC

mrweasel wrote: post #89

inverse_pi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their revenue is 2.2B.

Fair enough, they have some small way of monetizing, which is 400 - 500 million USD short of covering their operating cost.

The operating cost is somewhat arbitrary and if a company like Google bought them there is almost 100% overlap on the technology and ads side. Only thing that would be twitter specific would be product.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#124

Post by ijafri » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:46 PM UTC

so twitter is basically demanding $100/user...

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#125

Post by grandalf » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

It's interesting that Twitter is discussed in the media very often lately thanks to Trump's tweets, but investors still seem to fail to see the world-changing power of a broadcast platform.

Let's hope that something else emerges post-Twitter that is similarly broadcast-focused, not real-name oriented, and lightweight.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#126

Post by paulmd » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #103

paulmd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

How do you propose to prevent spam and abuse of this open federated chat network?

Realistically it would have to work the same way as spam filtering does for email.

Come to think of it, it's surprising that spamming is not more prevalent on SMS networks, because it's the same kind of federated system. But I guess access may be gated well enough and enforcement strong enough to prevent that.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#127

Post by morgante » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:53 PM UTC

omouse wrote: post #45

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…

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.

> it's too useful as infrastructure to hand it over to some greedy jackasses.

This is an extremely dubious claim and I don't see why everyone is so eager to support it.

What exactly makes Twitter valuable infrastructure? What compelling service does it offer to people and society? What other things would stop working if Twitter were shut down?

All I see is a bunch of people shouting at each other. Most people do not and will never use Twitter.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#128

Post by fasteddie » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 4:59 PM UTC

theli0nheart wrote: post #116

harryh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still remains unclear to me how letting users opt out of making Twitter $0.55/month by giving Twitter, say, $4.95/month is a bad idea. $0.55/month is the mean for the entire userbase. The actual amount for any particular user can be far more or far less (well up to .55 less) than that. Users who are more likely to pay 4.95/month are much more likely to be worth more than 4.95/month in advertising revenue.

> Users who are more likely to pay 4.95/month are much more likely to be worth more than 4.95/month in advertising revenue. Given the paucity of people I know who've made a purchasing decision based off of an ad on Twitter, I seriously doubt that.

Few people think they know others that have made purchase decisions based on online ads, yet here we have a hundred billion dollar worldwide online ad industry.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#129

Post by enraged_camel » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:00 PM UTC

proksoup wrote: post #38

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…

They became the defacto place for public discussion instead. The focus on 3rd party api's hindered that and would have hurt their growth in that regard maybe? Journalism happens on twitter first, it's where famous people talk to each other, not facebook, yeah?

Yes. Journalism is about sensationalism created by out-of-context sound-bytes, which is exactly what Tweets provide due to their 140-character limit.

Twitter is probably the best thing that has happened to low-quality journalism over the past 15 years.

Re: Twitter Is Expected to Field Bids This Week

#130

Post by throwaway40483 » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

the_watcher wrote: post #110

jondubois wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to speculate on what could have been but we shoudn't forget that Twitter actually did exceptionally well for itself. I personally could never have imagined that Twitter would become so popular. I'm still surprised that people are using it (the whole thing doesn't make any sense to me).

It doesn't make sense until you find an active community around a topic you are truly interested in. The NBA is what sucked me in, and it remains 95% of the reason I used Twitter (the other 5% is for when customer service is unresponsive to my chats or emails)

Facebook = people you (grudgingly) know

Twitter = people you want to know