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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?

#311

Post by toddchambery »

paavokoya wrote: post #271
nostromo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sympathetic to claims of NPR bias (still a big fan), but rather than seeking an "unbiased" source, I want a thoughtful, reasonable, open-minded and well-mannered conservative news source. It does not exist.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#312

Post by beemanners »

dpark wrote: post #259
beemanners wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Unfortunately two things in the way of that are will and the cost of building a long tail of product features. First, that I'm not interested in running a standalone business, and second - my research here (it's been a lot) depends on being able to spend 20% effort on an 80% solution. I don't build a dynamo or a SNS and don't need a sales and marketing budget when I'm embedded in a large company building something purpose-built. The overhead of normalizing for industry wide generic use cases kills the 500% dream.

There's obviously room here though because AWS definitely takes a margin and that means opportunity!

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#313

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

toddchambery wrote: post #311
paavokoya wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sympathetic to claims of NPR bias (still a big fan), but rather than seeking an "unbiased" source, I want a thoughtful, reasonable, open-minded and well-mannered conservative news source. It does not exist.

You might look into the magazine The American Conservative. It's far from perfect (Pat Buchanan uses it as his soapbox from time to time, for starters), but on the whole it's pretty readable.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#314

Post by GFischer »

sambobeckingham wrote: post #165
slackoverflower wrote: post #157

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…

50 people to maintain a site the size of Twitter?

As many mentioned, Whatsapp runs on 1/20th the number of Twitter employees.

It does have less features, but many of Twitter's are of dubious value.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#315

Post by GFischer »

dagamer34 wrote: post #220
icebraining wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp only had 50 engineers even when they reached 900M users. Now, granted, Twitter may be a more complex system, but assuming they would just be maintaining it, they could be enough.

WhatsApp isn't real-time, and there's no reason for traffic 2 weeks ago to be any bigger than tomorrow. However, there's a Presidential Debate tonight so you know Twitter's traffic is going to be off the charts.

I don't know where you live, but people use Whatsapp groups a lot during and after an event.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#316

Post by JayNeely »

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?

I was writing about this for some friends recently. A lot of people don't "get" twitter because it's a very multi-purpose tool; it's not built around a central use case.

I find there are 5 useful ways to think about twitter:

1. It’s a way to follow people you’re most interested in. (Friends, authors, celebrities, professional mentors, restaurants you like.)

2. It’s a way to follow publishers of content you like. (Comedians, news, industry pubs, local events aggregators, food bloggers, magazines.)

3. It’s a tool for actively finding content you like or things you want. (Discussion about a show you like, jobs, deals, feedback.)

4. It’s a platform to get people interested in what you have to say, and be followed by those that already are.

5. It’s a quick, accessible opportunity to communicate with a peer, influencer, business, or supporters.

If you're interested in the rest of what I shared with friends (more actionable stuff on how to find what you want, how to handle noise, skimming other basics), you can find that here - https://medium.com/@jayneely/how-you-can-use-twitter-a-guide... - but the above is probably what's most interesting to the HN crowd.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#317

Post by azinman2 »

pessimizer wrote: post #73
meira wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly to who? To me and all developers that I know, this isn't the most important. A good and reliable API is.

More important to everyone but developers?

Or even developers if you like data.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#318

Post by meerita »

dfeart3453465uf wrote: post #3

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.

Twitter closed it's garden. If you want to make a client for Twitter you're very limited.

Re: Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

#320

Post by seany »

eropple wrote: post #16
seany wrote: post #5

It would only be better if they unbanned everyone and stopped trying to bend the messages sent over the platform. At the moment it seems like it might be better for it to just burn down, so something more open can replace it.

Do you think they should unban people who threaten to rape and kill people because they disagree about video games? If so, why?

Yes. There is already a legal mechanism for dealing with this. Ignore them on your list, or report them to the authorities. Booting them off the platform doesn't make sense to me.
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