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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?

#271

Post by paavokoya »

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…

  quality news sources, like NPR
NPR is CNN marketed towards psuedo-intellectuals by replacing common terms with sophisticated sounding vocabulary. Most of the pieces that discuss topics I am heavily familiar with are shallow and often misrepresented.

I say this as someone who really wants to like NPR and struggles to find any unbiased news source.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#273

Post by dredmorbius »

peatmoss wrote: post #213
darkengine wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the idea of GNU Social, but the Twitter-like frontend, Qvitter, is slow and feels clunky. And last time I checked, it still hadn't solved its "spooling problem": offline nodes won't receive updates and won't catch up when they're back online. A post you delete from your timeline might end up still visible on a node if it was offline when you deleted it. I'm sort of tempted to try writing a UUCP- or NNTP-based…

I understand that Twitter is an impressive piece of engineering given the scale and instantaneousness at which it operates. On the other hand, it does kind of boggle my mind that microblogging should be as difficult as it is. UUCP or NNTP are really interesting suggestions. They are protocols of the old net that seemed to scale very well and long ago solved many of the kinds of issues I'd expect to see with something…

Keep in mind that the Old Net, particularly in its heyday (pre-1993) was small. A few thousand nodes. A few million users perhaps. Usenet at the time was ~50-500k users according to a guestimate from Gene Spafford. Microsoft conducted measurements in the early 2000s suggesting a few millions of users IIRC. Marc A. Smith and others:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/picturi...

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#275

Post by misnamed »

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.

Bonus: non-profits can still make tons of money for their founders and operators. People think it means 'no profit' but that is totally off base.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#276

Post by misnamed »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #144
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 is not like random comments section, because you can build your own network of interesting people by following only what genuinely interests you. There are a lot of great people on Twitter working on products you or I use every day that share good commentary or tease what's coming, curate links that I'll probably be interested in reading or share a "heads up" if there's something to be vary of, reporters foll…

> you can build your own network of interesting people by following only what genuinely interests you

See that sounds great in theory but in practice I have never figured out how that actually works. Any tips?

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#278

Post by dredmorbius »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #148
Scarblac wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, do you mean the Dot-com bubble turn of the century or something that happened around the turn of the 19th/20th century?

Oh yeah, we have had another. Fin-de-siecle 19/20th century. Basically oil barons went bat shit crazy and owned everything and everyone, railways, oil etc. Whilst less pronounced in the US, most "modern" nations brought energy supply into strongly regulated industries, often price controlled I hope / assume / fear that the (personally identifying) data industry will go the same way

What specific examples of nationally-controlled or regulated oil industries do you have in mind?

As of 1900, the major oil extractors were the United States, Russia, Romania, Austria-Hungary (Bóbrka field), the Dutch East Indies, and Peru. Canada had some operations.

Not on that list: Persia (1908), Venezuela (1914), Mexico (1901), Iraq (1927), Saudi Arabia (1938), Brazil (1930), Kuwait (1938).

Unless you're talking about subsequent development of national oil companies, largely in the 1950s: Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, etc. See generally Yergin's The Prize.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#279

Post by davidpatrick »

misnamed wrote: post #276
AsyncAwait wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter is not like random comments section, because you can build your own network of interesting people by following only what genuinely interests you. There are a lot of great people on Twitter working on products you or I use every day that share good commentary or tease what's coming, curate links that I'll probably be interested in reading or share a "heads up" if there's something to be vary of, reporters foll…

> you can build your own network of interesting people by following only what genuinely interests you See that sounds great in theory but in practice I have never figured out how that actually works. Any tips?

As a frontend developer it has been quite easy since the industry leaders are all very active on Twitter. My rule of thumb is to unfollow people who tweet out of context to why I follow them.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#280

Post by notyourwork »

XorNot wrote: post #196
sdenton4 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is Netflix uses AWS for their infrastructure. Are they not on a similar scale as twitter with similar needs? Or is there a difference I am not seeing, perhaps a different use case. (This is a serious question, I am not doubting you.)
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