Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#211

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 11:12 PM UTC

squarecog wrote: post #122

Dylan16807 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In real time, yes. But the user database should already have backups, importing those backups into an analysis server should be easy, and running queries like that on an analysis server should be easy. Counting messages, or users with X messages, etc. is also largely a function of whether your backup/restore system works. But this time you do it in chunks.

I helped build Twitter's data platform, 2010-2016. There isn't an "analysis server" and analyzing user activity is not done on a "user database backup" at Twitter's scale, though indeed that's a common way that would be done for smaller businesses. By the way, if by user db you literally mean the db with user accounts, that's not the right data source -- you want the user _activity_ db to count active users, and for…

Thanks. Note that I wasn't trying to guess at what twitter does, just to provide a workflow that should be viable almost anywhere, in the absence of easier options. It's good to hear that the underlying idea of "calculating the metric isn't the hard part" is true.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#212

Post by ImSkeptical » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 11:18 PM UTC

craftyguy wrote: post #159

ImSkeptical wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threatening a country that is threatening us isn't exactly genocidal. Killing families of terrorists is deeply immoral and murderous - but it's also in keeping with current U.S. policy (see Anwar al-Awlaki - both Trump and Obama administrations have killed Awlaki's children). Terrorists aren't a race though, so wanting to kill them and their families isn't genocide.

Don't confuse yourself. It's not the millions of people El Cheeto would kill in a nuclear strike on DPRK that are threatening the US, it is effectively one trump-like individual in charge of DPRK that is threatening the US.

I'm not confused on this point. The people of North Korea have devastatingly unfortunate circumstances, and the thought that, in addition to living such grim lives, they may have to die to ensure our safety - it's unfair beyond the power of words to describe.

And yet, if I had to choose between a million North Koreans, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans, and tens of thousands of American soldiers, dying in a pre-emptive war - versus all that plus a few million more Americans and North Koreans dying in a nuclear exchange... Well, it's an obvious choice.

North Korea is approaching the point of being able to achieve mutually assured destruction. They could build a cobalt bomb, or spend a decade building ICBMS, but relatively soon the problem will be intractable and we will play nuclear chicken with an unstable murderous dictatorial regime.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#213

Post by jquery » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 11:45 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #200

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thus why he will never have violated the ToS. He could openly threaten to murder someone and Twitter would not suspend him. (Though in fairness they rarely suspend anyone else either.)

They mostly suspend minorities who are pissed enough to not politely say "no, thank you" to Trolls & Nazis sending them death threats. It'd be funny if it weren't so sad.

Examples of this happening?

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#214

Post by CM30 » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 11:49 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #76

samcheng wrote: post #5

It's not mentioned in the article, but I really think President Trump has been a savior for Twitter. Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.

And thus why he will never have violated the ToS. He could openly threaten to murder someone and Twitter would not suspend him. (Though in fairness they rarely suspend anyone else either.)

> Though in fairness they rarely suspend anyone else either.

Twitter suspends or shadowbans quite a few people, at least if what a fair few people online are saying is true. Not sure their logic behind who exactly they suspend though. Conservatives say they get accounts suspended more, liberals say it's them etc.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#215

Post by c3534l » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 1:18 AM UTC

travmatt wrote: post #210

c3534l wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone did a linguistic analysis and demonstrated that there are two writers of Trump's tweets. Trump's were all the crazy ones, his handler's were all of the moderate ones and the ones that walked back what was said previously.

Other people have done longitudinal analyses and have talked about how there was also a shift in ~2011 as he launched the birther movement.

Trump didn't "launch the birther movement" which started before Obama even got the Democratic nomination, let alone as late as 2011.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#216

Post by toomanybeersies » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 1:19 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #191

samcheng wrote: post #5

It's not mentioned in the article, but I really think President Trump has been a savior for Twitter. Without those controversial tweets, Twitter would rarely be in much of the public's mind, and the company would have continued its slow slide into irrelevance. As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news.

> As it is, barely a day goes by without "Twitter" being mentioned in national news. What are you talking about? Before Trump was a thing, Twitter was routinely mentioned in the news. It was the lazy source of react quotes: "Today, X tragedy happened in town Y. 'UnrelatedPerson' on twitter said 'what a tragedy'". The name is more prominent now, sure, but it already was routinely reported in the news.

These days though, Twitter is the news.

It's now "Today, Trump said X about Y on Twitter".

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#217

Post by bigphishy » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 2:01 AM UTC

willitpamp573 wrote: post #158

datavirtue wrote: post #131

Twitter, like FaceBook, should be an open, distributed platform. They are too valuable to remain under the control of a person or small group of people. They are communities and their value slides, and danger to society increases, when they are under centralized control.

Who is gonna pay to host the open distributed platform? Surely not the users

I don't have any figures, let's just 5 servers running containerized environments, with a couple of decent uplinks, it is feasible to handle bandwidth of a million users for a few thousand a month.

With a million users, it's feasible to support the site with donations... no funding or IPO's needed...

In addition, there are numberous open-source frameworks ( like gnu-social etc. ) that enable a single person to deploy the code onto the servers.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#218

Post by hiram112 » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 2:09 AM UTC

Regardless of my thoughts on Twitter as a product, I'm glad they're profitable and might be around for a while.

They've released a lot of good open source software - their Scala stuff is great, and it seems like the company allows and even encourages their engineers to not only open up their code, but also gives them the time to document and help the community.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#219

Post by iLemming » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 2:34 AM UTC

Maybe they finally fix their crappiest android app. Or open api for third-party developers, because obviously Twitter doesn't know shit about designing apps.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#220

Post by bm1362 » Fri, Oct 27, 2017, 2:56 AM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #115

ProAm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Im not wrong. Twitter was in dire straits a year ago. Saved by a reality show presidential candidate and might have their first profitable moment after 10 years of existence. Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and e…

"Let's force ourselves to be profitable right now, regardless of the fact that it will destroy our future profitability" Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will e…

I think SoundCloud's downfall would be it's huge investment into record label deals, it's paywalling to support said deals and then the lack of adoption for it's subscription service for access to those label's music.

Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.

Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.