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

111–120 of 320 posts

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#111

Post by komali2 »

chatterbeak wrote: post #67
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.

If Twitter only needed to serve the states, sure. But they need to sync servers globally and provide decent bandwidth to every corner of the developed world. That's a big $ technical problem.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#112

Post by zanny »

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

We already have the ostatus protocol / and GNUSocial as the open replacement to Twitter. The reason it doesn't win is because Twitter has all the users.

If Twitter became an OStatus node and was interoperable with the GNUSocial network it would basically be a second smtp in terms of universality of information conveyance.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#114

Post by lovamova »

bunderbunder wrote: post #78
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 em…

Similar like in Sublevel?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#115

Post by Zigurd »

No, because you would not build it that way. You could say the same about Facebook. Diaspora already exists, as well as some other distributed social networks. If any of these alternatives prospers it may be because the idea of Twitter should be implemented as something other than an investor-owned venture.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#116

Post by [deleted] »

pessimizer wrote: post #69
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#117

Post by consto »

Shivetya wrote: post #29
paulcole wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a data source for academic study it's unparalleled. Does that actually mean it's valuable? Just because something's one of a kind doesn't mean it's worth that much.

that is my concern as well, if it truly was so widespread and useful I doubt they could turn a profit, however its real market is apparently much smaller than people suspect. twitter simply cannot reach people who don't go looking for it, it would need to basically just randomly show up on your instant messenger unbidden, it has no universal connector like radio and tv which are everywhere. then the last issue is the…

> twitter simply cannot reach people who don't go looking for it

I'm not so sure. Hashtags are everwhere both physical and digital, companies want to to start tweeting about their event/product/etc. As for a direct connection, how often have you see a tweet embedded in a news article, or displayed on live TV?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#118

Post by nhebb »

Rustydave wrote: post #12

How about charging users?. Like monthly plans etc.

Instead of charging all users, they could offer premium accounts that allowed longer posts, did not display ads, have private circle-like channels that you could post to for closed conversations, etc. They haven't expanded the feature set to take advantage of these opportunities, though, so senior management seems to lack the imagination to drive it towards profits.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#119

Post by tootie »

bunderbunder wrote: post #78
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 em…

There's thousands of sites serving the same or similar purpose. Twitter is only unique because it has a lot of users.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#120

Post by ghaff »

chatterbeak wrote: post #67
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.

As a point of reference, even the Wikimedia Foundation had almost 300 staff and contractors as of 2015. This is admittedly a lot fewer than Twitter employs today. However, I suspect that even a minimalist Twitter without sales, etc. needs more employees and would have more of other types of costs than Wikimedia.
Post reply on HN