Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 320 posts

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#71

Post by enraged_camel »

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.

>>and a lot were genuinely surprised that Twitter does not in fact represent the will of the Democratic Primary.

Yep, we found out that a small group of DNC insiders do, by controlling the media narrative and conspiring with party insiders to sabotage the campaign of the non-favored candidate.

I mean, let's get real: there is a reason the DNC chairwoman Debbie Schultz resigned.

re: downvotes... everything I've said is factually accurate: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/debbie-wasserm...

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#72

Post by pessimizer »

chimeracoder wrote: post #61
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never had a Twitter account, and I've never seen that.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#73

Post by pessimizer »

meira wrote: post #44
azinman2 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly twitter profiles are public by default. That's not true for most social media.

More importantly to who? To me and all developers that I know, this isn't the most important. A good and reliable API is.

More important to everyone but developers?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#74

Post by darkengine »

peatmoss wrote: post #32

It's worth mentioning that the more principled alternative is GNU Social: https://gnu.io/

I like the idea of GNU Social, but the Twitter-like frontend, Qvitter, is slow and feels clunky. And last time I checked, it still hadn't solved its "spooling problem": offline nodes won't receive updates and won't catch up when they're back online. A post you delete from your timeline might end up still visible on a node if it was offline when you deleted it.

I'm sort of tempted to try writing a UUCP- or NNTP-based GNU Social clone now.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#76

Post by h4nkoslo »

eropple wrote: post #16
seany wrote: post #5

It would only be better if they unbanned everyone and stopped trying to bend the messages sent over the platform. At the moment it seems like it might be better for it to just burn down, so something more open can replace it.

Do you think they should unban people who threaten to rape and kill people because they disagree about video games? If so, why?

What about completely anodyne conservatives like Robert Stacy McCain or Glenn Reynolds, or journalists like Chuck Johnson or Milo Yiannopoulos that at worst pick on celebrities National Enquirer-style?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#77

Post by pessimizer »

imh wrote: post #53

It seems weird to say that twitter discussion was so significant in furthering different causes. From the outside (I don't use it), I've still heard plenty about those events. From the inside, I'd bet it seems like they were the original source for the events, or at least the cause of it getting so big. On reddit/imgur/9gag/4chan/etc, there seems to be an idea that whichever one you are on is the source of whichever…

4chan and reddit have undoubtedly been the source of an enormous number of ideas and trends, though.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#78

Post by bunderbunder »

kharms wrote: post #2

This would be fantastic. Twitter's utility is in its open (inherently less profitable) nature. As a data source for academic study it's unparalleled.

It's unparalleled in that there is very little that's even similar out there.

I'm less convinced of its actual value. The Twitter-based papers I've read seem to all have two things in common: First, they all use Twitter data. Second, they all seem to desperately want to present observations about how people interact on Twitter as being universal, even though nobody seems to be able to come up with a theoretical or empirical reason why that should be the case that's more compelling than, "We we have to pretend it is in order to get published."

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#79

Post by pessimizer »

eropple wrote: post #17
olivermarks wrote: post #13

There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. The open Facebook alternatives never took off though - very hard to get traction against deep pocketed and connected rivals. Doesn't look as though anyone is going to buy Twitter which is embarrassing for them

> There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. Launch, sure. Scale? That's a much harder problem in terms of user acquisition (and if you can do that, you can deal with the technical side of things even as a nonprofit, maybe). I think there's only room for one Twitter. If you don't have 99% of the people interested in that sort of service, you might as well h…

Existing and being architecturally scalable while Twitter is failing or as it fails should be enough to get users.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#80

Post by wineisfine »

meira wrote: post #40

Twitter betrayed all developers that relied on their API, and also helped overthrow legitimate governments and put middle east and ukraine in chaos. Their failure is well deserved and should help other startups to not fuck with everybody while pretending to help (Google and Facebook, are you the next?)

Their API is still quite generous compared to others.

The only thing I blame them is the insane prices for gnip data, which alienates any normal developer outfit that isn't overly funded.

Post reply on HN