Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?
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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 empirical reason why that should be the case that's more compelling than, "We we have to pretend it is in order to get published."
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 larger population.
This isn't new. When I was an analyst, some reporters would call me for a quote about something. There were times when I didn't have anything to say because I didn't know anything about said thing. But some would pester me for a quote anyway so they didn't have to give someone else a call.
Twitter does seem to have become a particular crutch though.
You should stop by /r/austin sometime, and just lurk. The amount of local reporters looking for some kind of pulse to put their finger on and even those nu-'journalist' sites (Vice,Vox,insert here) obviously mining for quotebait is absurd, and the community has been calling it out.
Of course, /r/austin isn't a remarkably interesting place to be anyway for a lot of reasons...it's just interesting to watch the "Austin" phenomenon manifested there. Different story though.
quality news sources, like NPR
I say this as someone who really wants to like NPR and struggles to find any unbiased news source.
Twitter currently has lists, but the problem is that these lists aren't crowdsourced (to my knowledge). They're maintained by individuals, which is unsustainable, because one person can only do so much work keeping a list accurate and up-to-date.
I'm not claiming that such a model is guaranteed to be perfect or even as good as a pollster, but it sounds in principle like a reasonable thing to do, if you take appropriate precautions to reduce bias.
Now given the Twitters nature then is there such a model that is even approximately accurate?
Or in other words, what relevant data Twitters collects and how accurate it is?
For that kind of thing, having lots of users is the key feature of interest.
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.
Does that actually mean it's valuable? Just because something's one of a kind doesn't mean it's worth that much.
GP is basically saying twitter has accumulated a vast wealth of social data that is immensely valuable to the research community.
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.
In the short term, anyway. The substitution of Twitter-trawling for actual journalism and research is doing immense damage in the long run.
twitter simply cannot reach people who don't go looking for it, it would need to basically just randomly show up on your instant messenger unbidden, it has no universal connector like radio and tv which are everywhere.
then the last issue is there are too many voices on twitter so only those connected get out and assume importance. importance to only users of the medium
I'm not so sure. Hashtags are everwhere both physical and digital, companies want to to start tweeting about their event/product/etc. As for a direct connection, how often have you see a tweet embedded in a news article, or displayed on live TV?
Seems like a pretty huge change and it's definitely tough to envision!
It's also interesting to follow some people you strongly disagree with just to see their day to day thinking, what they're reading and how they may've come to their conclusions.
You can also share a request/call into action/product you just launched etc. with your network and they'll spread it for you if you provide them with an interesting feed and generally quality stuff - must be a quality list of people you follow/they follow etc.
It's like your own personal humint if you know how to take advantage of it.
If you just engage with a bunch of random people, it's not that useful indeed.
See that sounds great in theory but in practice I have never figured out how that actually works. Any tips?
This would be largely avoidable if there was easy way to switch to a secondary/tertiary user to vent off thoughts that aren't the beef.
Alternatively, in the tech world, it gives you live updates on various developers that people look up to. technologies you want to keep up with, and updates on exciting open source software.
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 proud of fifty years from now.
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.
Your friends and FOAFs are not likely to exercise the same level of control as you're expressing. I've consistently observed this even among a carefully curated set of sources on several SocMed sites.
*I don't know if John Carmack actually posts anything of the sort, just a hypothetical.
>[Twitter] is a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
I think Twitter could have become ubiquitous, like Facebook or email, had it not gone the platform route and started to shut down third party apps. But then, how do you make money as a protocol?
I really think the reason Facebook first exploded in popularity (I was just entering college when it rolled out so have some first-hand experience) was because a whole lot of college age people love to show off pictures of themselves doing cool things, they want the audience. I won't comment on how Facebook has changed, but the original appeal was close to why Instagram is so popular today.
It feels good to have an audience, whether it's for your thoughts or pictures of your life. Not here to judge that as good or bad.
I don't "like" anything on fb so it's not just fb deciding for me what I want to see. I think that it's moving closer and closer to curated TV than a true social network
I use it to stay in touch with people I've worked with, other people in my sector who I've met at events, and with friends and acquaintances who live in other places. There's also people I've met on Twitter who have gone on to become friends 'irl'.
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.
I suppose I can try to make a more general case for it. Twitter is the global community of people who have some specific thing in their brain that is also in your brain. It's not the place to share life updates with your college buddies and cousins. It's a place to find people who have a specific niche interest you share, and to share in the thoughts that you all don't necessarily want to express to the people you interact with day-to-day. Unlike Facebook, you can actually meet people there. And it doesn't require the sustained attention (I won't dare call it obsession) of places like forums and LiveJournal so a wider crowd is willing to use it. I still don't know if it's an eleven-figure business, but I'm glad it exists. It makes me feel more connected to the world.
Everyone can chirp it up, tweet like crazy, or just go nuts.
It's a social network. If you're not being social it's pretty goddamn boring.
It's not without its flaws - nuanced, lengthy discourse is pretty much impossible thanks to that 140-character limit - but it's been a great way to keep up with my friends on an informal basis.
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.
I would contest this. Twitter represents a very narrow sector of society.
Yep, we found out that a small group of DNC insiders do, by controlling the media narrative and conspiring with party insiders to sabotage the campaign of the non-favored candidate.
I mean, let's get real: there is a reason the DNC chairwoman Debbie Schultz resigned.
re: downvotes... everything I've said is factually accurate: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/debbie-wasserm...
Andrew Jackson literally handed out political appointments to his supporters and relatives.
Hilary Clinton isn't even close to being the most corrupt. She probably wouldn't even be in the top ten.
Technically you are right, but this sounds pretty depressing.
At least she didn't make it to the top 10!
Also, she's really not that corrupt. So she takes campaign contributions from wall street financiers. So does every other political candidate. She's released all of her tax returns, so we knew what all her financial connections were, even before the emails were leaked.
Don't get me wrong. I don't like her, I don't like her Wall Street connections, and I don't like most of her politics. But I'm still going to vote for her. I at least recognize that she can be a competent president, which is more than I can say about any of the other candidates (and yes, that includes Gary Johnson and Jill Stein).
If you could step back and re-read that comment from an objective stance, you can see just how ridiculous it is. How Andrew Jackson has anything to do with anything a modern president would have to face is beyond me. The president today has many more obligations, decisions, power at the push of a button, etc.
Also the irony of your comment as you try to use a president from centuries ago as a reason why Clinton "ain't so bad" -- she too has literally sold a position of power with security clerance to her foundation donor, a man that had absolutely zero business having that sort of security clearance.
I hate to break it to ya my friend, not only is she in the top 10, she's the training model of how to do it. She makes Watergate not look so bad, afterall.
Honestly, the threads underneath my original post give me more insight into how people can stomach voting for her, so it's eye opening at the very least.
"Aw comon! She's not that bad!" basically echos the sentiment my family has, as well, and it's why the status quo will never change.
Next time you convince yourself that Hillary is a great candidate, just know two things: 1. The only reason she even looks appealing as a candidate is because she is literally running against a walking dumpster fire. She is the second most disliked candidate in modern history, next to guess who? Donald Trump. Congrats.
2. Despite all of Trumps scandelous comments and bigotry, she still might actually lose. The polls don't mean anything this election, and 538 has even come out and said that, and even so, he's only down a couple points.
Truly remarkable candidate ya got there, DNC. It took underminding democracy, and the literal biggest turd nugget to run against her for to even have a shot.
Where did this claim come from? None of the (many) scandals in the election so far have involved fraudulent voting. Democracy in America is very far from a farce. Instead it's more that you don't like the choices the voters have made.
As does most written text.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/9/3135406/twitter-api-open-cl...
Maybe, but now logged-out users (or users without an account) cannot see more than the last few tweets on an account.
Twitter is a lot less open than it was two or three years ago, and while it's more public-by-default than Facebook, it's less public-by-default than Blogger was.
Apart from RSS
How exactly does that work?
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.
Plus they were a pretty early-adopter of AWS, and they have a ton of infrastructure running on it already.
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, a team of service engineers, load balancers, multiple locations, etc.
Your SLA will likely be better than with public cloud.
Security, abuse / harassment, fraud, community interaction, developer relations, 24/7 maintenance & ops, APIs, marketing & PR, legal, advertising, physical security / cleaning etc (whether outsourced or not it's a cost), secretarial, accounting, human resources & recruiting, sales, engineering, various management and so on.
The notion that you could run a $2.5 to $3 billion sales business with 100 people is a very bad joke. To deliver on that kind of sales level, you need more than a hundred people working in your sales organization alone. There are only a few types of businesses that can operate that thin at that size of sales, most of which are in the financial world.
Twitter doesn't need to cut down to 100 people to become nicely profitable, they need to cut down to 1,000 - 1,500 (while reducing infrastructure costs). Facebook delivers $1.5 million in sales per employee. Twitter's overall business is less complex and easier to operate than Facebook, they could deliver a higher ratio.
It is a function of complexity, but complexity is often necessitated by scale. More users means more problems with scale, which leads to increased complexity to address the problems, which leads to a larger team needed to maintain the software.
That being said, 50 engineers seems enough to me for maintenance.
However, there's a Presidential Debate tonight so you know Twitter's traffic is going to be off the charts.
It does have less features, but many of Twitter's are of dubious value.
I don't think it's comparable.
One of the notable things about Twitter is that they're a huge marketing machine. They have hundreds of employees that handle sales, marketing, advertising. Hell, they've acquired startups that handle advertising analytics, and have brought them in-house to build their own platform. They now directly sell contracts to TV channels and businesses that allow them to view how their brands interact on Twitter.
I'd argue that this has helped to create bloat. Anyone that has had to use Twitter's API over the years can see that they've gone from being an incredibly open company to building up a walled garden to protect their brand, in a similar way to how Facebook scaled back their efforts to be an application/gaming platform.
If I were Twitter, I'd give teams the opportunity to split from the company, but to continue to use their platform. If they believe in the product they've built within Twitter, they can be happy to compete against the open market. It allows them to drastically cut their workforce in key areas, while re-opening their product to the world. They can continue to be a sales company, but can fully allow others to continue to build great things on their platform, or to help shape how it works in the next decade.
From my experience, this type of re-org leaves the resultant company unsustainably top-heavy. I recently left a company who downsized but refused to hire anyone "junior level" because their pivot "requires all stars". And we all know, when everyone is a senior, no one is...
"In the second quarter it lost more than $100 million — so perhaps it already is a nonprofit."
But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel there is a real opportunity for Twitter to streamline its engineering and operational costs?
Is there a breakdown available of where/how they spend their money?
Twitter lost $521MM in 2015, $578MM in 2014 and $645MM in 2013. Hundred million dollar losses would be a step forward at this point.
A lower stock price could translate into lower stock-based compensation costs but you'd have to dive into the details of what they issue and how they issue it.
That doesn't diminish from the value and buy-in of cell phones and is a bizarre argument to make regarding the value, if any, of twitter.
Summingbird and Heron come to mind as quite-probably-very-expensive projects that seem to solve some very Twitter-specific problems. My completely uninformed, biased, pulled-out-of-thin-air suspicion is that said problems are largely self inflicted. It reminds me of Fog Creek's longtime insistence on using their own in house programming language.
The problem is, "small is beautiful" doesn't get you multibillion-dollar IPOs....
Weren't we talking about Twitter?
[Yes / No]
There's no reason for Twitter to need all those employees and all that hardware. If someone can get it at a fire sale price, and reduce it to 100 employees, they can have a nice business.
It's not even the same kind of problem, they've got to tailor their response to every user.
Finally, their investors simply cannot accept 'a nice little business'. They need Twitter to deliver serious ROI.
Exactly, that's actually a pretty good argument for why Twitter should downsize substantially.
In no way does Twitter need more than 1,000 employees.
I'd point out though that, according to Wikipedia :-), the Internet Archive has a staff of about 200 so a few hundred employees/contractors doesn't seem out out of line as the baseline for a non-profit information infrastructure project.
Do you have backend data services and data analysis jobs behing those 12-core front-end servers?
edit: which had a ratio of 1 engineer to 16 million active users when acquired http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...
They have taken a great tool and striped it so that it fits their blurry vision of what the service should look like.
Staying on top of current conversations and trends in a niche area of web design is a big chunk of Twitter's value to me and it's very time consuming to do that in their mobile app or regular Twitter.com
http://justinvincent.com/page/1972/its-time-for-an-open-twit...
I'm not sure I see Twitter's mission being strong enough to attract the developers it needs if it were to become a non-profit. Further, while there are large media grants out there, I don't really see a huge pool of capital willing to cover Twitter's operational costs with donations.
I was going to ask What is it's Mission but then the more important question is Why Is it used?
A straw into someone's brain not knowing if they drew acid, water, colored water or truth serum first into the straw before discharging and reading.
In the context of something like Twitter where selective censorship / megaphone promotion is becoming a core part of their operations, it looks like reorganizing as a nonprofit is just a tax-advantaged way for the board to act how they want without being even theoretically obliged to operate for the benefit of the people that supplied them with the capital to build up their service.
They've been extremely aggressive in purging high-value users on extremely flimsy pretences in what cannot possibly be a revenue-optimal way (unless somehow you think celebrities fighting amongst themselves is bad for user engagement), but if they have a purported goal of something vague like "improving communication" that becomes a non-issue.
All of this should be automatically added/tagged up and while you can remove the metadata it'll be right most of the time. The advertising potential is incredible.
Maybe some things don't need to have advertising crammed into every possible corner. Maybe some things don't need to be monetized to the maximum extent possible.
The existence of Twitter and many other technolpolies that dominate with what could basically be a shared protocol is what's holding back decentralization.
Actually I think all of the giants will eventually fall hard because of (re)-decentralization. That includes Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the United States, etc.
The ultimate (good) destiny if Google, Facebook and Twitter is as public utilities. This valuable data open to all and their connective abilities as useful and common to all as the road network.
Should it be a non-profit. No it should be a utility
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
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.
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 campaigns, would this even be a viable option for them?
Doesn't look as though anyone is going to buy Twitter which is embarrassing for them
Launch, sure. Scale? That's a much harder problem in terms of user acquisition (and if you can do that, you can deal with the technical side of things even as a nonprofit, maybe). I think there's only room for one Twitter. If you don't have 99% of the people interested in that sort of service, you might as well have nobody.
And I don't think the arguments towards federation and distribution help--you can have a thousand federated hosts, and if you have no users, you will get no users. It's a really hard problem.
If Twitter became an OStatus node and was interoperable with the GNUSocial network it would basically be a second smtp in terms of universality of information conveyance.
It will be bought eventually. Everyone is just waiting for the price to come down, which is inevitable.
What, do you think twitter should start censoring everything that governments disagree with?
An open, non-profit twitter would probably allow people to do even MORE things like "overthrowing governments".
The only thing I blame them is the insane prices for gnip data, which alienates any normal developer outfit that isn't overly funded.
If you want a non-profit twitter, make a non-profit alternative and hope for Twitter to die.
As a nonprofit organization? Yes, absolutely they should. They should allow users to form groups and better curate their own feed, assisted by algorithms, and essentially let the people who want to say terrible things say terrible things and let the people who don't want to read it block them.
This is essentially the same fight about what "The Internet" should be that has been going on since the Usenet heyday. We do have to realize now, though, that there are no benevolent corporations who want what is best for the Internet. We have to advocate for that ourselves.
If you don't care about people saying offensive things, you just don't subscribe to any ban lists. Or maybe only subscribe to spam ban lists.
Personally, I like the concept of outsourcing the policing/moderation of a community to the community itself. I think what online forums do by promoting moderators from the long time, trusted user base is a step in the right direction. The upvote/downvote system on HN, where the downvoted stuff gets increasingly more difficult read, is even better.
To that end, showing people the door seems eminently reasonable. You aren't going to actually be able to visit upon them the prosecution (again, for literal and extant crimes) that they have earned for themselves, but you can, and IMO should, cut them out of the social universe that you undertake to create and protect.
I believe dealing with newly generated accounts can be dealt with as a separate problem, distinct from the community at large. Reputation and filtering messages/content, and or restrictions based on account age are some examples.
If you don't think there can be any consequences for free speech on the internet, then I don't see how you can give any credibility to threats of violence, which you can simply block out yourself instead of having to have big brother do it for you.
That way you don't have to interact with people you don't want to.
Doing that will absolutely land you in a criminal court. 'She doesn't have to look at it' won't be a great defense, either.
Words have consequences, and centuries of precedent and legislature have established them.
You can write a sellable poem that people like about wine, all its good and (mostly) bad. But good luck selling a poem about sucralose or aspartame.
Because they are arbitrarily applied based on ideological lines and what your caste is in progressive caste system. I see tons of accounts asking for Donald Trump to be anally raped but none of them are suspended.
Why do you support this gross and repulsive censorship?
What are your thoughts on why Twitter choose not to do that?
Can you provide links to these threatening tweets? I will happily report them right now.
"Just block them", it's easy when there's one or two accounts being dicks. It's much more difficult when 4chan's recruited 50,000 accounts to be dicks.
At some point, and I'd personally argue that that point was a few years ago now, you take the gloves off and start eighty-sixing the bad actors.
(She, of course, did take it seriously; she crashed on friends' couches for a few weeks while she found a new place to live. And she is not the only one by a long shot; this is totally a just and equitable punishment for being a woman on the Internet, though, I guess.)
EDIT: OK, I've done some quick reading, and "anodyne"? Are you serious? I have no opinion on whether McCain should be shown the door from Twitter, but dude, if you think a neo-Confederate and active white supremacist is "anodyne", either I am vastly underestimating the rot in the right wing of American politics or you do not live in anything within fridge-tossing distance of the real world. (But, then again, Trump.)
"Twitter mostly only bans people throwing around death threats"
to,
"well this one guy once wrote some bad stuff under a pseudonym in another forum, and this other guy has rude followers"
Do you see why people might not exactly trust Twitter's commitment to being a content-neutral platform, or why they might be reluctant to give them huge amounts of free content and network effects that can be taken out at a whim?
Now, as to your eliding of actual malicious intent: pointing the Eye of Sauron at people, when you know-and-can't-not-know that your followers will deluge whoever you point at with death and rape threats, is not, in my book, merely "having rude followers". It is intentionally trying to harm somebody. And this is what Milo did, regularly, on Twitter--while he finally picked on a celebrity who had the social standing to hit back, he would regularly retweet some nobody who never said anything to him to his followers and let the head-hunting commence. You should be judged for that, and you shouldn't be allowed to continue harming people. So yeah, I'm OK with him being kicked to the curb.
But I'm gonna be honest: given the way you're writing about all of this, you should be reluctant to use Twitter. You should leave Twitter. I think that's a great idea. I entreat you to definitely, without a question, leave and start your own thing. And maybe you'll prove me wrong, that this land of ponies is so much better for everyone, instead of just the swarms of abusers--but I doubt it. So go get started! I look forward to seeing it.
Given the left's continuing efforts to restrict freedom of association, I don't find myself under any obligation to respect their desire to exclude people of my ideological persuasion from any given platform.
Ironically Twitter's censorship efforts are just barely effective enough to drive respectable, real-name conservatives off of their platform, but laughably underpowered against dedicated trolls. If anything it's giving them a nice lesson in disposable identities and minor opsec.
I'm sort of tempted to try writing a UUCP- or NNTP-based GNU Social clone now.
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 like a federated Twitter clone. Maybe I'm overestimating the scale of newsgroups during their heyday?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/picturi...
These websites are more like gardens than amusement parks. A collective shared space, which is hard to monetize.
Don't mention this to Karl Auerbach....
edit: The service was/is App.net, and it was founded by Dalton Caldwell. It used to make the rounds on HN all the time.
Or they could offer little widgets you can buy and post on your profile page, like LiveJournal does (assuming it still does; it's been ages.)
Or a combination of the two, like DeviantArt.
There's plenty of options. Hell, sell Twitter plushies. That failwhale image was pretty cute.