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

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#251

Post by AndrewKemendo » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 12:45 AM UTC

Merad wrote: post #242

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with Twitter, IMO, is that it's a fire hose. Let's say that I decide to follow John Carmack. I'm interested in his thoughts on technical topics and especially articles or posts that he may have written. Instead, I get all of that plus* the inspirational quotes he posts every morning, his political opinions, his thoughts on current events, etc. None of which I care about, and none of which (AFAIK) Twitter…

Is there a comparable service that has a public/private feed? I guess Facebook wall posts would be the closest, but you can't publicly follow people there.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#252

Post by Godel_unicode » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 12:56 AM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #155

csallen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's the only thing I've seen from them in this domain. It's just woefully lacking imo. I don't want to pick people to follow individually... I want to pick entire communities of people to follow.

So essentially lists created using social graph algorithms. I probably wouldn't use it personally but I can see how it could be useful.

> I probably wouldn't use it personally but I can see how it could be useful

This describes virtually every announcement I've heard from twitter.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#253

Post by Godel_unicode » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 1:00 AM UTC

dapz wrote: post #198

eveningcoffee wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because you don't (and probably can't) know that this model is accurate? Also, there are a lot of populations which are not present on Twitter at all, and more which are not present in meaningful numbers.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#254

Post by bogomipz » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 1:06 AM UTC

nowarninglabel wrote: post #52

bogomipz wrote: post #36

I am curious what the mechanics of this would be - take thee company private and then apply for classification as a 501(c)(3)? Looking at the guidelines I'm guessing the type would they be a "private operating foundation"? https://www.501c3.org/what-is-a-501c3/ Just as one example 501c's are heavily regulated where politics are concerned. Given that Twitter is utilized heavily by politicians as well as political camp…

Sure they could still do it as long as the company itself remains non-partisan, but they just couldn't take money from politicians or political campaigns. They would have to find some other sort of donor capital to sustain their operations.

I would think that the donor capital would also be needed to purchase all outstanding shares. So I guess with something like the Knight Foundation or the Kroc Foundation or something with a similar sized endowment could conceivably accomplish this.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#255

Post by Godel_unicode » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 1:08 AM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #127

tootie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is attention the goal? I've been struck by the number of articles and research projects that are some version of "we got lots of tweets and graphed them" and have totally failed to go the "so what" step.

Why should we care about this project? If you want to use this to find power outages using Twitter, why not just do that directly with e.g. grep (also, more importantly, are these outages about which the utility company doesn't already know?). Having big data (related: 12 Million lines of text isn't big) isn't cool in and of itself. Doing things which help with that data would be cool.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#256

Post by Godel_unicode » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 1:12 AM UTC

DigitalJack wrote: post #19

paulcole wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a data source for academic study it's unparalleled. Does that actually mean it's valuable? Just because something's one of a kind doesn't mean it's worth that much.

The phrase "x is unparalleled" implies uniqueness by virtue of the value it provides. GP is basically saying twitter has accumulated a vast wealth of social data that is immensely valuable to the research community.

I think you (and many others) have this relationship by the wrong end. Things which are valuable are frequently rare/unique, whereas there are many unique/rare things with no value whatsoever. As others in this thread have implied, the lack of ability to monetize is strongly correlated with a lack of real value.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#257

Post by Godel_unicode » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 1:13 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #85

Tempest1981 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The media is clearly benefiting, with many stories backed by a Donald Trump tweet. But if the tweets weren't free to begin with, they might not be as newsworthy.

> the media is clearly benefiting Journalists certainly are. Getting quotes was hard work. Now it consists of trawling Twitter. Not sure if this has been a boon or bane for journalism, however.

> Journalists certainly are

In the short term, anyway. The substitution of Twitter-trawling for actual journalism and research is doing immense damage in the long run.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#258

Post by Godel_unicode » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 1:17 AM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #184

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ...the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased...

That depends entirely on how you use Twitter.

Find people you know or have heard of other places and think are smart/interesting/important/etc. Follow people they retweet. Repeat. Meet Kevin Bacon.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#259

Post by dpark » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 1:17 AM UTC

beemanners wrote: post #241

dpark wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy that claim at all. No way you're building private infrastructure for 1/5 the cost of Azure or AWS. Or even 1/2. 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…

You're severely discounting the very large margin those companies take. It is not hard to build a medium sized infrastructure, with quality, cheaply - if you have access to expertise. This usually means hiring a few infrastructure jockeys from the larger companies. Your SLA will likely be better than with public cloud.

You should absolutely build a public cloud competitor if you believe your numbers. By your numbers you'd make a minimum 100% margin and as much as 400%.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#260

Post by mzw_mzw » Mon, Oct 10, 2016, 1:19 AM UTC

mavdi wrote: post #56

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.

Not to mention all the worst speech-policing neo-Puritans that San Francisco has to offer.