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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?

#181

Post by luhn »

debaserab2 wrote: post #166
slackoverflower wrote: post #157

Twitter's best bet is cut costs by bring employee count down to 100, 50 sales related, 50 engineering and move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability. I think once they become profitable, it opens a lot more opportunities to explore new markets. Right now they are in a scramble to get users. Being profitable and focusing on one thing at a time will do them wonders. Should sta…

> move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability How exactly does that work?

Yeah, that was my one gripe with the comment. If you've already invested in creating your own infrastructure like Twitter has, moving to a public cloud is throwing money down the drain.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#182

Post by eropple »

dominotw wrote: post #178
eropple wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an account threatens to rape Donald Trump, I am 100% in favor of seeing that account shown the door (and, where possible, the person behind it be barred from the service and prosecuted if feasible). Why would I not be?

> I am 100% in favor of seeing that account shown the door What are your thoughts on why Twitter choose not to do that?

The same reason why they only barely combat the turds who threaten people I know personally: it doesn't scale. I would like them to invest much more in doing so.

Can you provide links to these threatening tweets? I will happily report them right now.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#183

Post by pidg »

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?

Interesting that nobody has mentioned (yet) the social aspect of Twitter, for which it was originally developed - like SMS but on the web.

I use it to stay in touch with people I've worked with, other people in my sector who I've met at events, and with friends and acquaintances who live in other places. There's also people I've met on Twitter who have gone on to become friends 'irl'.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#184

Post by inopinatus »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #135
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 dev…

A word of warning. You think you're curating it yourself, but the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased towards finding you an opinion you already agree with.

This is why a) social media is often characterised as a narcissistic echo chamber, and b) why it becomes so rapidly toxic when two naturally opposed communities coincide on a topic.

A wonderful petri dish for anthropologists, but not a medium we'll be proud of fifty years from now.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#185

Post by dominotw »

eropple wrote: post #182
dominotw wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am 100% in favor of seeing that account shown the door What are your thoughts on why Twitter choose not to do that?

The same reason why they only barely combat the turds who threaten people I know personally: it doesn't scale. I would like them to invest much more in doing so. Can you provide links to these threatening tweets? I will happily report them right now.

What do you think Twitter do given consistency doesn't scale currently? Only obvious answer is to unban banned accounts, right?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#186

Post by sdenton4 »

luhn wrote: post #181
debaserab2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability How exactly does that work?

Yeah, that was my one gripe with the comment. If you've already invested in creating your own infrastructure like Twitter has, moving to a public cloud is throwing money down the drain.

OTOH, continuing to develop that infrastructure may be continuing to place money on a losing bet... If they're actually running their own infra cheaper than cloud would allow, they should absolutely keep going with their own. But it's foolish to keep doing something simply because it's what you're already doing.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#187

Post by eropple »

dominotw wrote: post #185
eropple wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason why they only barely combat the turds who threaten people I know personally: it doesn't scale. I would like them to invest much more in doing so. Can you provide links to these threatening tweets? I will happily report them right now.

What do you think Twitter do given consistency doesn't scale currently? Only obvious answer is to unban banned accounts, right?

In no way do I think that. I don't think there is value in letting some assholes back in because you haven't shown every asshole the door. The correct answer is to continue showing assholes the door. You are bailing out the ocean--but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

Now, can you please provide those threatening tweets? I would like to report them.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#189

Post by eropple »

pessimizer wrote: post #79
eropple wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does that follow? "Existing" doesn't strike me as a sufficient prerequisite. Building something that scales is easy. I do it all the time. It's all the non-technical stuff that matters, and open-source/decentralized services don't seem to really be good at that.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#190

Post by stale2002 »

debaserab2 wrote: post #166
slackoverflower wrote: post #157

Twitter's best bet is cut costs by bring employee count down to 100, 50 sales related, 50 engineering and move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability. I think once they become profitable, it opens a lot more opportunities to explore new markets. Right now they are in a scramble to get users. Being profitable and focusing on one thing at a time will do them wonders. Should sta…

> move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability How exactly does that work?

Pretty sure they are already on AWS, also
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