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Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

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Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#61

Post by chimeracoder »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #55
chimeracoder wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More importantly twitter profiles are public by default. That's not true for most social media. Maybe, but now logged-out users (or users without an account) cannot see more than the last few tweets on an account. Twitter is a lot less open than it was two or three years ago, and while it's more public-by-default than Facebook, it's less public-by-default than Blogger was.

Wait, what? I don't have a Twitter account, but still follow several people's Twitter feeds. I've never had a problem seeing their full timeline.

Maybe they've changed it, or maybe it's for certain accounts, but I've definitely seen "Log in to view more" when scrolling down.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#62

Post by rublev »

onewaystreet wrote: post #58
laurencei wrote: post #46

I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy. But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel there is a real opportunity for Twitter to streamline its engineering and operational costs? Is there a breakdown available of where/how they spend their money?

They have 3,860 employees.

Doing what? Holy shit.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#64

Post by oldmanjay »

bbctol wrote: post #35
oldmanjay wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the academic community should be charged for access to the data, if there is so much value in there.

For full access to the twitter archive, they are, though a lot of data can be gleaned from what's publicly posted.

In retrospect I should have assumed that to be the case

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#65

Post by riprowan »

laurencei wrote: post #46

I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy. But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel there is a real opportunity for Twitter to streamline its engineering and operational costs? Is there a breakdown available of where/how they spend their money?

I have the same belief. The business could easily be run with a fraction of its current overhead -- IF it was willing to accept a "small is beautiful" existence.

The problem is, "small is beautiful" doesn't get you multibillion-dollar IPOs....

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#67

Post by chatterbeak »

laurencei wrote: post #46

I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy. But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel there is a real opportunity for Twitter to streamline its engineering and operational costs? Is there a breakdown available of where/how they spend their money?

We routinely run 5MM simultaneous TCP/IP connections on a single 12-core box (with Erlang!).

There's no reason for Twitter to need all those employees and all that hardware. If someone can get it at a fire sale price, and reduce it to 100 employees, they can have a nice business.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#68

Post by h4nkoslo »

"Nonprofits", especially when they have associated revenue streams beyond pure donations (eg government contracts), have really odd organizational incentives.

In the context of something like Twitter where selective censorship / megaphone promotion is becoming a core part of their operations, it looks like reorganizing as a nonprofit is just a tax-advantaged way for the board to act how they want without being even theoretically obliged to operate for the benefit of the people that supplied them with the capital to build up their service.

They've been extremely aggressive in purging high-value users on extremely flimsy pretences in what cannot possibly be a revenue-optimal way (unless somehow you think celebrities fighting amongst themselves is bad for user engagement), but if they have a purported goal of something vague like "improving communication" that becomes a non-issue.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#69

Post by pessimizer »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #54
JonnieCache wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>general catalog of human discourse I would contest this. Twitter represents a very narrow sector of society.

A good recent example is the Democratic Primary-Twitter massively magnified Sanders' supporters, and a lot were genuinely surprised that Twitter does not in fact represent the will of the Democratic Primary.

That's not a great example; because Sanders had far greater non-Democratic Party support than the other primary candidate, Twitter was reflecting the opinions of a more general population than the primary would. To say it another way - Democratic primary voters reflect a narrower sector of society than Twitter does.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#70

Post by bunderbunder »

laurencei wrote: post #46

I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy. But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel there is a real opportunity for Twitter to streamline its engineering and operational costs? Is there a breakdown available of where/how they spend their money?

I don't know, but they do seem to need a lot of developers, and developers don't come cheap.

Summingbird and Heron come to mind as quite-probably-very-expensive projects that seem to solve some very Twitter-specific problems. My completely uninformed, biased, pulled-out-of-thin-air suspicion is that said problems are largely self inflicted. It reminds me of Fog Creek's longtime insistence on using their own in house programming language.

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