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Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

reuters.com

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Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#121

Post by wolco »

vonnik wrote: post #104
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.

Yeah, all Twitter needed was a pack of neo-Nazis, some Russian bots, and a genocidal conman in the White House. Not worth it. The health of Twitter's balance sheet is a counterindication of the health of the world. When their stock goes up, the market should dive.

That is what passes for entertainment these days. Who do you thinking is following the feeds? Who is watching the cnn warrooms? The general public is rooting for or against whatever they believe.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#122

Post by squarecog »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #85
lotso wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculating these metrics at scale is not trivial.

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 high-scale applications, those are different things. Presumably user activity updates are orders of magnitude more frequent than user object updates. You don't want to thrash your user db by constantly updating some "last seen at" field. Put that stuff somewhere else.

That said, it's true that counting is simple, it's just a Hadoop / Spark / distributed computing platform of choice job. Filter, distinct, count. It's not even hard in real-time if you have enough ram or are ok with approximate counts with bounded error, thanks to Storm, Heron, Flink, etc.

Defining what exactly constitutes an active user and catching edge cases such as this Digits thing is where things get tricky; the number of weird scenarios that cause under/overcount for what seem like reasonable and straightforward definitions would surprise you.

@baddox nailed it.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#123

Post by FilterSweep »

jjeaff wrote: post #86
a13n wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.

Although few have any experience operating at that scale, one can make comparisons. I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook. And they had 55 employees. So obviously you don't need 4,000 employees for the technology at this scale. I'm not sure what in the world the other 3,945 employees are doing though.

> I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook

I recommend you search around HN before you make sweeping generalizations, there are numerous threads that explain how or why WhatsApp were capable of doing what they were. From a technical perspective, as a "core product", Twitter's business has more abstractions

To get you started[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225096

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#124

Post by Danihan »

vonnik wrote: post #104
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.

Yeah, all Twitter needed was a pack of neo-Nazis, some Russian bots, and a genocidal conman in the White House. Not worth it. The health of Twitter's balance sheet is a counterindication of the health of the world. When their stock goes up, the market should dive.

What an ignorant comment. Who has Trump committed genocide on? Who is a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house?

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#125

Post by wolco »

WalterSear wrote: post #108
aaron-lebo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: why should Dorsey not be seen as an exaggerated media story (by the media and himself) and what has he done which justifies the stock jumping that high? He's run both companies for awhile now, Twitter has basically been stagnant. Doesn't he supposedly work like 80 hours a week anyway? It's already a full time job. Examples from 2011 and 2016: http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/13/technology/dorsey_techonom…

"So if he's actually working 80 hours a week, where are the results?" And here I am, trying to find just one job in tech that's only 40 hours a week.

Plenty of 80 hour a week jobs that pay 35.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#126

Post by travmatt »

Danihan wrote: post #124
vonnik wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, all Twitter needed was a pack of neo-Nazis, some Russian bots, and a genocidal conman in the White House. Not worth it. The health of Twitter's balance sheet is a counterindication of the health of the world. When their stock goes up, the market should dive.

What an ignorant comment. Who has Trump committed genocide on? Who is a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house?

>Who is a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house?

Seb Gorka

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#127

Post by Danihan »

travmatt wrote: post #126
Danihan wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an ignorant comment. Who has Trump committed genocide on? Who is a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house?

>Who is a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in the white house? Seb Gorka

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/19/donald-trump-aide...

>Mr Gorka denied any anti-Semitism in his family.

>He said his father had protected Jewish boys wearing yellow stars on the way to school as a child. When Communists took power, he supplied information to MI6 before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned (possibly betrayed by Kim Philby). He arrived in the UK after escaping during the 1956 uprising.

How exactly is that "self-proclaimed" when he is denying it.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#128

Post by hk__2 »

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

They probably suspend a lot of people every single day, but we don’t notice it.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#129

Post by jsonne »

Top19 wrote: post #17
ceejayoz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd fully expect many of those 4,000 to be sales staff, each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed.

Sales Departments have way too many people. I like that they employ people, but that’s a separate conversation. On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even. The other 6, usually because of poor sales territory luck, sell maybe half their salary worth of services, but since growth is everything, an employee who makes 100k but only sells 50k is considered valuable.

>On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even.

Likely this is true for engineering as well. 25% of the team pulling the weight of the department.

Re: Twitter says it could turn first-ever profit

#130

Post by wolco »

gigatexal wrote: post #102

I know it's the huge growth story that wallstreet seeks but it's an invaluable resource, Twitter is. It should be bought by one of the big 5 tech firms if just to keep it alive in the public interest.

It should be part of the big 5 or that was the thinking 5 years ago.
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