Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? • Hacker News Board

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#131

Post by ghaff » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:37 PM UTC

nhebb wrote: post #118

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.

I don't know if Twitter has ever spoken about it but the lack of premium accounts has long puzzled me. Surely there are worthwhile features they could offer without degrading the free tier experience. My circles are perhaps atypical but for those of us who use it as a fairly important professional tool, a $50/year pro account would be a complete no-brainer. Maybe there aren't enough people like this to deal with the complications. It seems unlikely they haven't thought about it. But the lack is still surprising.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#132

Post by monk_e_boy » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #126

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?

I totally agree. And the 140 character limit that they are terrified of changing?! It makes no sense.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#133

Post by Klibarchu » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #126

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?

It's the world's Great Peanut Gallery.

Everyone can chirp it up, tweet like crazy, or just go nuts.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#134

Post by nostromo » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

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…

Yes. It also bothers me that quality news sources, like NPR, have fallen into the trap of presenting Twitter as representative of the general population.

They often report about how some group of people on Twitter are angry about something -- as if that matters. Reddit has almost as many monthly active users lately, yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the larger population.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#135

Post by SolaceQuantum » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

sverige wrote: post #126

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?

Twitter gives you the ability to curate yourself a feed from comments of people you deem interesting enough to follow and keep up-to-date with, as far as I know. I mostly use it for my literary pursuits, and being able to follow editors, agents, and authors at the same time with minimal hassle has made twitter very useful to the fiction scene.

Alternatively, in the tech world, it gives you live updates on various developers that people look up to. technologies you want to keep up with, and updates on exciting open source software.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#136

Post by sukilot » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

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.

Do your 5MM connections do anything that garners the attention of CNN and Google realtime search indexing?

Do you have backend data services and data analysis jobs behing those 12-core front-end servers?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#137

Post by losteverything » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

nowarninglabel wrote: post #50

mathattack wrote: post #42

Hard to imagine Twitter working as a non-profit when so much compensation is tied to equity.

Exactly. Most people who work for non-profits do so out of passion for the company and mission because the salaries often are going to be about 80% of market rate. With no equity to compensate with either, you are left mostly with the believers (or the less optimal workers). I'm not sure I see Twitter's mission being strong enough to attract the developers it needs if it were to become a non-profit. Further, while th…

I was going to ask What is it's Mission but then the more important question is Why Is it used?

A straw into someone's brain not knowing if they drew acid, water, colored water or truth serum first into the straw before discharging and reading.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#138

Post by sukilot » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:42 PM UTC

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 two main sins are: being less accessible than you like, and being more accessible than you like?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#139

Post by gaius » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:43 PM UTC

consto wrote: post #117

Shivetya wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Hashtags are everywhere, but it doesn't follow that Twitter is - see FB, Insta, even LinkedIn.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#140

Post by SolaceQuantum » Sun, Oct 09, 2016, 7:43 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #134

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…

Yes. It also bothers me that quality news sources, like NPR, have fallen into the trap of presenting Twitter as representative of the general population. They often report about how some group of people on Twitter are angry about something -- as if that matters. Reddit has almost as many monthly active users lately, yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the la…

Most of the news reporting I've seen cast on individual Reddit communities. I don't think such a thing can be done as easily as twitter except through hashtags, thus the coverage on twitter being more twitter-wide hashtagging rather than sub-tweet communities.