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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?

#121

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

treehau5_ wrote: post #90
enraged_camel wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 i…

The silicon valley bleeding hearts don't like to hear the truth when it doesn't fit their narrative or look good through their valley, rose colored, horn rimmed glasses. Even Mountain View coordinated with her campaign. As much as a self serving narcissist Trump is, I find it equally appalling that she gets so much support. The entire Wallstreet transcript scandal once again got buried by Trump-mania. This will be th…

Its hard to tell if such sentiment comes from disappointed people on the far left, or pro Trump trolls concern trolling that Hitlery is the pro corporatist NEOLIB sell out.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#122

Post by adevine »

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.

I'd challenge that interpretation. Lots of Hillary's disproportionate support came from people much less likely to use Twitter (e.g. older black voters), while Sanders' strength with younger voters would be much more likely to show up on Twitter.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#123

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

jessaustin wrote: post #110
pessimizer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe scroll down a bit further?

I'm able to view mobile.twitter.com/joshtpm in desktop Safari, and without an account view at least his previous week's posts not logged in.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#124

Post by dominotw »

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?

>If so, why?

Because they are arbitrarily applied based on ideological lines and what your caste is in progressive caste system. I see tons of accounts asking for Donald Trump to be anally raped but none of them are suspended.

Why do you support this gross and repulsive censorship?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#125

Post by endisukaj »

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?)

Twitter had nothing to do with the wars in those countries. It was just a tool used by people to help them organize. By that logic Telephones and smoke signals should fail/be banned.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#126

Post by sverige »

I've never been able to understand Twitter's popularity. To me, it's like a website's comment section without the attached content. And most of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is only slightly better than YouTube comments, and often worse. I know there are lots of Twitter users here -- seriously, I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, I just don't get the appeal. What am I missing?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#127

Post by bunderbunder »

tootie wrote: post #119
bunderbunder wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not really about whether or not the site works similarly to Twitter. It's about the neat stuff people can build with something like Twitter data. I don't think you could do something like http://blog.idl.ssrc.msstate.edu/?p=42 with Plurk data and get anywhere near the same kind of attention for it.

For that kind of thing, having lots of users is the key feature of interest.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#128

Post by sukilot »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #121
treehau5_ wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The silicon valley bleeding hearts don't like to hear the truth when it doesn't fit their narrative or look good through their valley, rose colored, horn rimmed glasses. Even Mountain View coordinated with her campaign. As much as a self serving narcissist Trump is, I find it equally appalling that she gets so much support. The entire Wallstreet transcript scandal once again got buried by Trump-mania. This will be th…

Its hard to tell if such sentiment comes from disappointed people on the far left, or pro Trump trolls concern trolling that Hitlery is the pro corporatist NEOLIB sell out.

"rose-colored horn-rimmed" glasses should give you a hint.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#129

Post by revelation »

ghaff wrote: post #120
chatterbeak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And frankly, much of the same criticism applies to them. A tiny tiny sliver of their constantly multiplying budget is spent on actually hosting the Wikipedia.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#130

Post by sukilot »

product50 wrote: post #107
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when I see things like $100m in losses Twitter lost $521MM in 2015, $578MM in 2014 and $645MM in 2013. Hundred million dollar losses would be a step forward at this point.

Majority of those losses is because Twitter pays its employees large amounts of stock to retain them. Check out this analysis on how exorbitant Twitter's stock based compensation is vs. Facebook: https://medium.com/@fwiwm2c/stock-based-compensation-faceboo...

So if the stock price collapses, losses will decrease?
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