201–210 of 320 posts
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.
Seems like a pretty huge change and it's definitely tough to envision!
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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 tak…
Now, as to your eliding of actual malicious intent: pointing the Eye of Sauron at people, when you know-and-can't-not-know that your followers will deluge whoever you point at with death and rape threats, is not, in my book, merely "having rude followers". It is intentionally trying to harm somebody. And this is what Milo did, regularly, on Twitter--while he finally picked on a celebrity who had the social standing to hit back, he would regularly retweet some nobody who never said anything to him to his followers and let the head-hunting commence. You should be judged for that, and you shouldn't be allowed to continue harming people. So yeah, I'm OK with him being kicked to the curb.
But I'm gonna be honest: given the way you're writing about all of this, you should be reluctant to use Twitter. You should leave Twitter. I think that's a great idea. I entreat you to definitely, without a question, leave and start your own thing. And maybe you'll prove me wrong, that this land of ponies is so much better for everyone, instead of just the swarms of abusers--but I doubt it. So go get started! I look forward to seeing it.
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…
From my experience, this type of re-org leaves the resultant company unsustainably top-heavy. I recently left a company who downsized but refused to hire anyone "junior level" because their pivot "requires all stars". And we all know, when everyone is a senior, no one is...
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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.
I'd agree with both points, but only 32% of voters are registered Democrats. Sanders polled far better than Clinton within the other 68%, although amongst registered Democrats, Clinton stayed 15-25% ahead during the entire primary IIRC. On Twitter, in addition to Democrats, there were also Republicans, Independents, Argentinians, and others commenting on the primary. That's the definition of a wider sample.
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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.
What do you think would happen if Twitter didn't exist? You'd probably just email them or something.
That doesn't diminish from the value and buy-in of cell phones and is a bizarre argument to make regarding the value, if any, of twitter.
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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?
Perhaps not Twitter's fault per se, but I don't mind seeing it die a lonely death for the only reason that it gave voice to the truly despicably racist, homophobic and planet hating assholes all around the world.
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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.
If you're comparing some servers in a 4th tier colo with a poor SLA to AWS and pretending that devops time is free, then sure. But if you're actually building something with comparable reliability and availability, then no way. You're going to spend a lot more than you'd expect on extra capacity, a team of service engineers, load balancers, multiple locations, etc.
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.
>general catalog of human discourse I would contest this. Twitter represents a very narrow sector of society.