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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?

#191

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

zanny wrote: post #112
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.

OStatus appears to be de facto deprecated. The new hotness is evidently pump.io, JSON Activity Streams, and the W3C Social Web Working Group [1].

[1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#192

Post by wott »

dfeart3453465uf wrote: post #3

Twitter is the odd one out. While others built walled gardens, twitter kept the gate open. We now have a general catalog of human discourse for the last decade. Record of great tragedy, revolutions, elections past and future. It would be shame if this was bought and locked up by some gardeners.

I wish Twitter's walls were higher, so that they keep the shit they produce inside and it does not contaminate the worlds of journalism, politics and even real life.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#193

Post by quickly »

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.

I'm intrigued that you're unfamiliar with the idea of a sunk cost.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#194

Post by quickly »

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.

I'm intrigued that you're unfamiliar with the idea of a sunk cost.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#195

Post by h4nkoslo »

eropple wrote: post #167
h4nkoslo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can't speak to McCain or Reynolds. But Johnson isn't a journalist; he is a bog-standard harasser in his own right. Yiannopoulos got a lot of cover for a long time because he is, under a technical and squinty definition, a journalist--and one who has a history of using their base of followers to threaten people. Where his eye settles, where he encourages actions, shitfloods of death and rape threats follows. I'm OK…

So you've gone from

"Twitter mostly only bans people throwing around death threats"

to,

"well this one guy once wrote some bad stuff under a pseudonym in another forum, and this other guy has rude followers"

Do you see why people might not exactly trust Twitter's commitment to being a content-neutral platform, or why they might be reluctant to give them huge amounts of free content and network effects that can be taken out at a whim?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#196

Post by XorNot »

sdenton4 wrote: post #186
luhn wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a fairly highly probability this is true?

AWS/GCE are not cheap. They're cost-effective for certain classes of use-case, but beyond a given scale, or with certain base-level requirements, you're way better off colocating a bunch of a machines.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#197

Post by wott »

logicallee wrote: post #104
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.

the problem is that by other metrics twitter is doing pretty well. There are very important people who will engage you in conversation (such as here) and ask you to DM them on twitter. That's insane.

Ask you to what? Deathmatch?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#198

Post by dapz »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #162
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…

I heard one of the "big data social scientists" to claim that they can now replace the population with the sample (as this is what the Twitter really is) because of, you know, big data.

If you have a demographic model of twitter users and appropriately re-weight, why is this a bad approach to take?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#200

Post by beemanners »

quickly wrote: post #193
luhn wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm intrigued that you're unfamiliar with the idea of a sunk cost.

Generally, at any scale over ~500 computers that run continuously, investing in private infrastructure is going to be 1/2 to 1/5 the cost of public cloud, including people costs. The real levers for improving engineering spend are around complexity of your actual serving software, which doesn't depend on / isn't really influenced by who you buy your computers from.
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