Twitter Soars After Surprise Sales Gain, First Real Profit
bloomberg.com
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There is a whole bunch of innovation waiting to happen: for instance Twitter could build a community around creating and sharing 'lists' for just about any topic. I wanted to make a 'list' for every Canadian MP but man that's a lot of work and surely someone has done it already but I have no clue how to find that 'list'.
Publishing/maintaining lists is something a organisation could do - ie CNN might want to publish a list of all their political journalists.
The list thing is really just a example of a feature they could have experimented with and for whatever reason didn't.
Also, scouring peoples profiles for lists (they've made or belong to) seems to be a thing according to this: https://www.postplanner.com/how-to-find-twitter-lists-in-nic...
What I have now is a bunch of people in my own industry (music twitter, tech twitter), a bunch of people in industries I'm tangentially related to (Game dev twitter, vis-art twitter), a bunch of individual journalists, but by and large not the accounts of the publications they belong to, as well as the senators and congresspersons from my state.
By keeping a realtime stream of the people I follow in my periphery, I know when something is interesting when the list moves faster than normal, and if I feel like paying attention to it, the list moves quickly enough normally that there's a steady stream of real-time thoughts from people that I care about, and it doesn't move too quickly to read them.
The biggest thing I had to get over early on was wanting to read everything. Twitter's timeline isn't particularly legible if you want to go through and read everything your friends have written, but that's not how most people are really using it in my experience. People are checking in, seeing what's buzzing, and participating in the conversation if they have something to say.
That was the next big hurdle that I'm trying to get over now: Twitter is a participatory thing. You get more out of it if you start engaging with people. Twitter is so obtuse though, that it took my getting in to Mastodon to realize this.
You can talk to the void all you want, but if you want people to find /you/, you have to start talking to people.
One difference, however: I hardly ever use the Twitter Web interface anymore because of its algorithm that seems to emphasize yesterday's news and bury the stuff from people that I want to see. Tweetdeck's home feed is a godsend - just reverse-chron and no ads (yet).
Tangential rant: LinkedIn's feed has become a cesspool of clickbait and low-value "news" articles, as the algorithm prioritizes those posts which link to articles with photos. There are sometimes good text discussions sparked by people like Jason Fried, but 90%+ of the posts in my feed feature stock photography, company logos, and headshots of the titans of industry.
Also, LinkedIn is terrible, and has been for the entire duration of my experience with it. I recently discovered that someone had tried to contact me about something extremely important using the LinkedIn messaging service, so now I feel somewhat obligated to follow it, and trying to navigate it was physically painful for me. I'm deeply upset that it's been made a necessary part of my life.
Yes, I have been complaining about this sporadically for a while. I mean, I once tweeted that you have to do a headstand to read the tweets in chronological order [1], and even, the text will be upside down ... :) Some time later, I think they have made some changes to that, for certain cases at least, e.g. for a thread consisting of a tweet and replies to it. But in a sense that makes things even more confusing, because now you have to sometimes read things chronologically (a tweet and its replies), and sometimes in reverse (the rest)!
Jokes apart, there are multiple issues with the UI.
[1] Yes, I know there may be a technical reason for the problem, but has anyone at Twitter tried working on a solution?.
I'm sure someone has worked on it. Might be interesting if Twitter had a opt in way to try some of their UI experiments.
>Might be interesting if Twitter had a opt in way to try some of their UI experiments.
... and to give them feedback.
A lot of developers I want to follow are active on Twitter.
So it might be due to Trump, don't know, but I'm glad it's going well for them.
Pro tip: when a Trump article comes, select "I don't like this tweet" from the side menu, and after a few such actions applied here and there, your feed is going to feel clean.
It's sorta like a poor mans RSS.
Except for a programmer friend who died (I just can't bring myself to unfollow him) everyone is expendable.
I've never had a Twitter account because I'd much rather see ostatus and decentralized networks succeed, and Twitter has never offered anything meaningful in the past, but if this trend continues I'll be stuck signing up there just like I did with Tumblr not to use it as a social network but as a media consumption platform (as was mentioned in the article, video is also growing). Its also similar to how musicians were nigh forced to start using Youtube as their primary jumping off point over Bandcamp and Soundcloud because that was where the eyeballs were.
What kind of backwards world would it be if artists, musicians, animators, etc are all using Twitter as their primary distribution platform just because of the network effects. Same reason Tumblr took off in those circles. It doesn't matter if the UI is lacking even the barest support for effective navigation of media, its all about social bridging and getting into feeds. In my experience about 80% of artists and writers that use Tumblr have their creative works inaccessible because they are buried under a mountain of reblogs and non-content filler posts with limited to no means to filter or navigate them.
I'd hope this trend doesn't continue, but it almost certainly will. Those making a living for themselves through online media are doing so via network effects and memes. Get a breakout success, get into peoples "feeds", and spread through casual retweets and reblogs. Its never about discovery or wanting to find them, its them getting randomly referred to you through the hive mind, and that creates a handful of wildly successful winners and a sea of equally competent and capable creators that never gain any traction.
One might even say that the current state of affairs, or trend, is preferable because it's not some small group of people acting as gatekeepers, but instead it's "the hivemind" as you've put it.
It's not just twitter... the whole profit center around online communities is based on active communities. Most topics are cyclical - once the Superbowl is over, it's hard to keep a football community active. Only so many people are interested in the draft, in coaching changes, etc.
But throw in some controversy and all of a sudden everything lights up again.
The problem, or _a_ problem, is that people can only handle so much controversy. They have lives to lead. They _need_ to be happy. But as more and more profit centers are tied to active online communities, and as people who run those communities strive to keep people active, and since controversy is as easy a tool to use as there is in the toolbox... Well the end result is that online interaction shifts from being something that brings people together into something unhealthy.
Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a great tool for getting up to the moment information out there and for consuming it. I just wonder what there bottom line would look like if Trumps Tweets weren't making headlines 3 times a week.
The social health issue is one for all companies that compete in the social media space to figure out.
Hidden camera investigations[1] into Twitter employees suggest otherwise.
Like the clip about banning certain groups of people: the engineer says "it's going to ban a certain way of talking". You might take from this based on the video that he's talking about inadvertently banning right-leaning users. Well, what if he's talking about banning racism or messages that use ((subtle dog-whistles)) instead of overt racism?
Also, not many people like Trump, especially not in left-leaning areas (like where Twitter is based). Are employees not allowed to voice their dislike of a very dislikable man, while drinking at a social event?
> Journalist: "Would you say the algorithms block liberal or conservative users?"
> Engineer: "I would say the majority of it are for Republicans, because they are all from Russia and wanted Trump to win"
> Journalist: "So you would mostly just get rid of Conservatives?"
> Engineer: "Yes"
> Immediate cut.
Woah, what a compelling argument. The guy is saying they are using machine learning to block Russian bots masquerading as American conservatives that are influencing the narrative in favor of Trump (that totally don't exist btw because we love Russia now and they would never attempt to meddle in any other countries elections). The video attempts to twist that into him saying they block conservatives.
This study is an interesting read: http://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/polarization-partisansh...
And an associated news article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/018/feb/06/sharing-fa...
Conflict -> emotional human response on social media is good for business.
Twitter’s shareholders love the fact that Trump uses Twitter in the way that he does. Many users love reading and discussing Trump’s tweets, precisely because they despise him.
Great source.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a Brazilian and the latest years' politics headlines have been flooding Twitter around here too, but spurious political tweets tend to be much more boosted by people who don't agree with them -- they just feel that urge to answer it or create a hashtag against it -- than by people actually supporting said tweets.
In addition, just the huge media coverage of Twitter (in the slipstream of Trump) is like a massive free ad campaign.
Interesting. I've modded a fair amount of communities and the censorship argument to moderated discussion comes up frequently as new rules are implemented.
From an online discussion point of view I don't think it holds merit at all. If I run a football board and have a rule that says "no basketball talk" that's my prerogative.
As long as it's not government driven, censorship is perfectly fine (if you don't like the rules of my service, you are free to use someone else's). When it is government driven, censorship is murky territory at best, but not immediately bad and illegal/unconstitutional. The FCC in some form or another has rules against broadcasting certain types of content. You can't swear, you can't show nudity (or certain types of nudity anyways). That's government driven censorship, and its largely accepted.
Slashdot had a hands off approach for a long time. I couldn't go to their site without seeing a n-word reference in the comments because their approach was abused. If you go to reddit, facebook, twitter, snapchat, instagram, or any other major site you run into astroturfing campaigns. We've grown to accept that Microsoft is good at it and Sony is bad at it. But somehow when AT&T does it, it's evil.
I don't know what the solution looks like. I just know that we need to evolve. Filtering communication is part of it. A bigger part of it would be finding ways to drive healthier habits.
So, people don't depend on the Xbox network to regulate the social position of Microsoft. We have those discussions on other forums. But, if AT&T started censoring, what would stop them from working with other telecoms to standardise on a CoC where you couldn't criticise them? If you say, "because that would be wrong and people would stop them," then you're back to believing in limits on what it's right for a private corporation to censor.
So, the question is, where should we draw the line? Well, I'd propose that it should be deeply frowned upon to limit any discussions that server any social purpose; pressure release, activism, anything that connects society together and keeps it in sync. Unfortunately, those discussions sometimes use bad words.
By the way, there actually is an important (progressive even) social purpose served by individuals being crude. The bystanders watch, and depending on how the crowd responds to the bad behavior, they adjust their idea of how wrong it is to engage in the behavior. If you were to take bad words and hate entirely out of the information diet of everyone, we would all loose our socal resistance to seeing them. (Note: this is a great argument against filter bubbles as well.)
This is sort of begging the question though, since the question at hand in a way is precisely whether that is still a good manifestation of the free speech ideal. A good case could be made that scale critically matters; your tiny football forum of like a couple hundred people can make whatever rules it wants, and anyone who doesn't like it can easily just go somewhere else.
On the other hand, if Level 3, the internet backbone provider, hypothetically started censoring based on the content of what was going through their network, we'd have a free speech problem.
I don't think it's that shocking an idea that Facebook and Twitter are now large enough that they should be obligated to take a very light hand, basically the minimum the government permits, on the grounds that free speech is not something that should be killable by the simple expedient of making as much communication as possible flow through commercial entities, then freely applying arbitrary censorship to the communication because it's a private entity. It isn't even that far of a trip before the government "requires" things of the companies that produce this result with some clever plausibly-deniable requirements, and thus free speech is just mysteriously suppressed even though it's nobody's "fault". If free speech is that fragile, it's materially ceased to be free speech.
I'm pragmatic about free speech, not legally deterministic. I want the effect of free speech, not a legal form of free speech that yet somehow lacks the effects.
I think this is absolutely true. But things get murky when you're talking about sites like Facebook that are a primary means of communication for a significant part of the world's population. Because there's no "public space" online, large social networks become the de facto public space. But because they're not truly public they can do things like censor speech that would normally be allowed in the town square.
The social media issue is one for all netizens that develop code and systems to figure out
As a counter point, I think maximizing controversy is a short term optimization that reduces the number of users over time. Most people drop things at one point or another, and people are more reluctant to go back if their memories are stressful instead of fun.
Also, the more drama a site or service attracts, the more good members it'll inevitably lose. People with the kind of personality you want in a community aren't the kind to get into cat fights or attack people for months on end, and those you do attract with such 'content' tend to be the worst kinds of people.
So yeah, it's definitely a short term optimisation which can blow up in their face further down the line.
But it's a different beast from Twitter. I find it much more socially engaging and interactive. On Twitter, I mostly just followed people and consumed their posts the way I consume an RSS feed. I re-tweeted, but never really posted much on my own or engaged in any kind of dialogue with anyone else.
On Mastodon, I don't really follow anyone. I post a lot of random thoughts on my mind, watch the local timeline and jump into impromptu conversations with people about whatever is striking our fancy at the time. I use it more like an threaded IRC channel or a very ephemeral/rapid-fire bulletin board.
After a while it seems people have ditched local news save for weather.
Now it's mostly "Will tomorrow polar vortex freeze your testicles? Watch tonight at 10"
You're so spot on. You know how everyone says, "Seinfeld is a show about nothing!" It wasn't about nothing, but what did make it different is that the characters never changed. They didn't have these huge arcs and defining life moments. They just went about their lives and we watched.
People say "it was about nothing!" in shock, as if its incredulous that a show without drama in the characters lives could be so popular.
But that was why it was popular -- because most people's lives, most of the times, are not filled with drama. They just go about their day.
And most people like it that way.
A lot of the story arcs involved situations that people loved to gossip about. Like the woman who wouldn't wear a bra, or the whole "regifter" episode.
Sorry, this sounds backwards.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ResetButton
> This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The '60s through The '90s in part because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order, and in part because (prior to the advent of the internet) watching or catching up on a missed episode could be nearly impossible for viewers.
See anything from Gilligan always ruining the rescue attempt to JD always screwing things up with the current romantic interest on Scrubs. There's a long history of shows trying to make baby steps against this (resolving a 'will-they-won't-they' situation, for instance) and the show basically dying as a result. Exceptions like Babylon 5 where major things changed were rare.
Seinfeld was "about nothing" in that the things the reset button applied to were so minor that you basically didn't even notice the reset button most of the time - you wouldn't expect them to majorly change the characters. That, and that it wasn't super-location-centric in the way that Newsradio is "about a radio station" - I mean, it isn't, really, it's about the characters there too, but 99% of the action takes place in the radio station.
Ah but see, JD had different romanic interests throughout the show.
And Gilligan was trying to get off the island.
Look seasonal, and more importantly seasonally adjusted. What do you see there? Anything underlying?
[Not just seasonal events, like Easter, everything to adjust for, weather, etc...]
This is why I'm bullish on Twitter. It's a space for conversation, and people want to converse. (Also, it occupies a unique middle ground between message boards and real-time chat.) The other two spaces I can think of are Reddit and Facebook, and there's enough differentiation to allow all 3 platforms to peacefully co-exist.
IMHO we should regulate the hell out of them each time a significant harm on society can be proved, like we did for any other things that humans ever invented. But tech evangelists will say that time is different because 0 and 1 are being exchanged
Can you clarify what you mean?
Or at least it used to be until the politics of the employees shifted to be more mainstream.
The end-goal for a lot of us is a fully decentralized internet that is technologically impossible to regulate.
Linux: open, distributed development, massive success Bittorrent: p2p, massive success Bitcoin: fully distributed, massive success (pending)
There is nothing more centralized than the government. They have a monopoly on violence. I (and many others) want them as far away from our industry as possible. I'll take Google over government intervention any day.
Beyond that, you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized. The reality is, governments and markets are two sides of the same coin. They both strive centralize control.
Bitcoin is a great example of exactly how to do tech. I'm pretty sure we probably fundamentally disagree on most things :)
> you're under the mistaken impression that government=centralized, private=decentralized
None of the technologies I listed are private enterprises.
I disagree about that, but I don't really think we have that many fundamental disagreement. For instance, I get why many honest people like the decentralization and censorship-free ideas in Bitcoin. I share some of those values, too, but I put a different priority for them; for me, in case of Bitcoin, all those benefits are heavily outweighed by the energy footprint.
> None of the technologies I listed are private enterprises.
No, but that part was referring to the second part of your comment, about "taking Google over government intervention any day". Maybe I worded it too strongly, though.
When in human history have public spheres like Twitter existed? The public sphere up until about 50 years ago for most people was strictly local. You could not broadcast dumb narcissistic ignorance for free to millions of people. It wasn't possible.
Twitter is not good at what it does. It does not elevate public discourse. It's the equivalent of all the newsteams beating the hell out of each other at the end of Anchorman 2.
If you're bullish about Twitter, maybe we should be bearish about our chances as societies and as a species, because Twitter is full of examples of some or our worst behaviors. It's no surprise Trump loves it.
Just as an example, check out this tweet and its thread:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/96125316896862208...
It's 32,000 tweets of people shouting at each other.
This fact has nothing to do with Trump.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/96127083356920217...
I figured the tens of thousands of tweets of people saying hateful things to each other was evidence enough. That thread will do, too.
I was just pointing out Trump said nothing controversial in the aforementioned tweet.
It's possible the current state of "bad" affairs is a natural consequence of the democratizing power of the internet itself. Reduced friction means anyone can participate; more participants means lower quality of discussion.
Just a theory as I try to synthesize West's ideas.
Zakaria has some similar arguments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom
This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites.
We have a tendency to see size and democracy as obvious goods, but there are certainly some limits there. It's funny how around the time Digg got going, all the talk was about the "wisdom of the crowds". Not sure anyone wants to make that argument today after 15 years of social media.
Fittingly, I first learned of this concept on Twitter.
That tweet gave 32k people a chance to voice their opinion on the topic. You may not want to hear it but I bet they appreciated the platform that gave them a voice.
I'm really glad we live in a society that gives people more tools than a voting booth to express themselves.
Which is the real problem.
Usenet was better because it was before the Internet was interesting to the general population. Twitter sucks for the same reason YouTube comments and /r/all suck - regular people.
There clearly are some problems with the Internet, but nobody is forcing me to use Facebook or Twitter.
But there are some things I emphatically do not miss about the late '90s: Slow modems; even with ISDN, the Internet was painfully slow. Also, no flat rates - in Germany, the phone companies charged for dial-up connections by the minute. No mobile Internet. No Wikipedia. No YouTube. 10 MiB-sized mailboxes. TFT displays cost more than the entire PC I was using at the time (with a crappy CRT display). PCs with less RAM than todays HDDs have in cache. Windows 95 and 98. I could go on and on.
About the only thing I miss more and more often is that I was twenty years younger.
> This is why I'm bullish on Twitter.
Fuck Twitter. Its roles and permissions structure is a disaster to effective and FAIR communications and there is little reason by Twitter to disallow the more viral concepts circulating within its web. Time to deploy active measures to give humanity some means by which education on these concepts can occur.
A number of Twitter holdouts that I know finally created accounts this year. While they don't explicitly credit Trump for it, I think the constant barrage in the news made them feel like they were missing out.
Hacker News has become the only place I can have reasoned conversations about science, politics, etc without so much of an issue. The requirement of quality comments eliminates the karma farming from memes and nonsense and the inability to downvote until you are somewhat established prevents mass downvoting of opinions. It's a quality model IMHO.
>requirement of quality comments
Ha. You won't have shitposts or rehashed jokes, but you also won't always have quality. I'll refer to a past comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16154688
[0] - Usually niche interest or specific geographic
[1] - e.g. /r/askhistorians, /r/askscience, /r/neutralpolitics
Where this gets dicey is politics. If you are suddenly a black libretarian baptist who believes in evolution, but not gravity, there's probably a /r/blbwbiebng already waiting for you. And if any of those gravity believing scum show up, the mods will ban them.
My ex used to study these little fish from Alaska who evolved in basically tiny separated ponds as the water level dropped and they all got separated. This is what's happening with Reddit. Silos where evolution happens completely independently of anything in the outside world.
There are some good expert communities like /r/askhistorians, and their model certainly works for something like history, but I don't think the same format would really work for something like machine learning or mathematics.
Arstechnica is another tech oriented news aggregator/comment section and the ideological trolls on that board are a well oiled machine. They're on top of any relevant article before the bits are dry; pushing their agenda and gaming voting system until it finally falls off of the front page.
--
[0] - except maybe LessWrong of old, but I was (and still am) too dumb to be able to contribute anything of value on that site.
Isn't this the inherent nature of a fact-based platform? And most HN posters are probably quite rational and fact-based?
I wouldn't come to HN if it was a place where people could air stupid, non-fact based opinions and have them treated without criticism or derision. people can hang out in their Facebook group if they want to assert the world is flat.
Here's a thread where someone is getting downvoted for asking a question because people don't like the implication of that question, it doesn't fit the biases of the audience. That's not rational and fact based, its suppressing views we don't like.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16337180
There are many examples like that, and one of the dangers of "rational" communities is we assume we're rational and can't mess it up, when really we aren't any different.
Our traditional media organizations haven't figured this out in millennia. I'm not that hopeful. It's a fundamental conflict of interest between selling ads and creating informed citizens.
Some will tell you that's why they have the "church and state". I don't know. I'm not sure it's an effective policy and with native advertising the point is moot because they've given up on even the pretense.
How much twitter does trump own?
https://www.google.com/search?q=twitter+stock&oq=twitter+sto...
Certainly looks like this year has been an uptick for them...
Why: Subreddits for different tokens/currencies end up being echochambers (but still good resources as long you follow multiple subs). HN rarely shows blockchain stuff and the upvoted ones are often just anti crypto.
Following 30-50 crypto influencers on Twitter provides a good mix.
There was a lot more to it, but the conversation that led to the offer started when I replied to a tweet.
Some people use twitter like it's facebook, some people use it merely as a pointer to other content, some people use it to argue, some people use it to interact with major brands / corporations. I'm not sure if this is a strength or a weakness of the platform.
I guess the important thing is that it's getting used.
Yep, and I'm more than a little disappointed in myself about that. Something about the form factor of writing there and the perceived "well it doesn't have to be shippable, it's just twitter" quality bar lets me keep up a habit of writing there almost daily while I struggle "sitting down to write essays" even on a monthly basis.
I like your tweets too, btw.
In fact there probably is room in normal websites and blogs to allow you to write shorter "less quality" material along with the higher quality stuff.
I'm kind of convinced it's something like Medium + Twitter: A timeline of "tweets" on the home page where you can do everything you could on twitter but on the website (possibly syndicated) where you could also announce/promote articles written. One cool thing I realized is you can repromote old articles on your website when they become relevant again with a small blub just like most people end up doing all the time on Twitter.
But on your website, owned by you, etc. etc.
I have no idea whether I follow anybody. My only interaction with the site is to go to https://twitter.com/patio11 from time to time, scroll way down to the last thing I remember having read, then read up.
I can't understand why they don't have a simple way to sort things in the order they were written. But then it's possible that I'm the only person who reads it this way, so perhaps it's unreasonable to expect them to build a feature for me.
I try from time to time to read other people's twitters. Even tech people who are interesting here and on their blogs. It's unbearable.
The humans think this is “engagement” but the algorithm knows the truth.
Phillip Morris is also profitable...
One laaarge street corner.
No matter what industry you are interested in, there are leaders worth following on Twitter.
One example for finance, Cliff Asness. He's a billionaire quant hedge fund guy, but he tweets every day.
There's a ton of investors, businesspeople, reporters, programmers, researchers, etc. that are very active on Twitter, not to mention the plethora of comedy accounts that I find hilarious.
That is also the behaviour of crypto, but in this case the stocks aren't overvalued to start with, as decades of inflation have done to stocks.
Looking from another side, in crypto we haven't developed a sound investing framework yet, other than the usual github/reddit/social/TA checks, possibly because we are dealing with a protocol, not a product.
The interesting thing here, and maybe a somewhat contrarian position to take in the Twitter case, is that they're not a tech company, but a protocol company. And their value can't be measured with a number, they're essentially playing the same field as TCP or IRC, which value we haven't measured.
I would be buying $TWTR stock, if it weren't for cryptos like VEN, GVT or REQ which may be equivalent to investing in Twitter in the seed phase. Actually, this line of thought is really interesting, I may write something longer and more coherent about this stuff.
In the past year TWTR has been as low as $14.12, it has been anything but neutral.
I don't like that, but I get it. The money is in owning the user experience. And it's hard enough to continuously improve your user experience when all the people making that software work for one company. I think one of the reasons email and IRC are losing out to things like Facebook and Slack is that it's nearly impossible to make those things broadly better.
Promote Tweet -> Give card details -> Lets see what can do and cost $
Should be
Promote Tweet -> Lets see what can do and cost $ -> Give card details
I understand video advertising and if Twitter turns their attention to this area (after dipping their toes on Vine and Periscope) Youtube and Twitch may get a competitor. Now what does "data-licensing sales" means in this context? User data?
It's likely their firehose feeds and things like that https://developer.twitter.com/en/enterprise
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2018/a...
I wrote about that data licensing business here:
https://muckhacker.com/the-twitter-growth-conundrum-8339eda1...
Even though Twitter isn't growing DAUs quickly (and possibly will never do so), it is actually a pretty diversified business. It has a multi-hundred-million ARR SaaS business embedded inside a multi-hundred-million user consumer destination site, which primarily monetizes through a billion-dollar self-service advertising business.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/15/twitter-acquires-longtime-...
[2]: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2015/bloomberg-twi...
Of course twitter has just landed a dumptruck load of cryptocurrency ad revenue.
Now the question is will they ban it for the same reasons facebook did given how key it is to profitability?
I favor reading books and academic papers over random web browsing, but some time spent on Twitter, HN, and a few Reddit subs-Reddit’s keeps me up to date, tech-news wise.
https://www.recode.net/2018/2/8/16991140/twitter-profit-q4-2...
So far, the answer is usually yes. I follow a lot of good people and the fear of missing something is real. But it's not 100% yes and I don't think the trend line looks good for Twitter.
Twitter Could Easily Be Acquired In 2018
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4135256-twitter-easily-acqu...
This time is different, or is it. Just how much of their new revenue is due to fake users, ad fraud, and automation?
What changed is their expenses.
Negative $167m to positive $91m in net income, year over year for the quarter. That's nearly entirely from adjusting their expenses down. Dorsey is turning Twitter into the profit machine it should have always been by properly adjusting its expenses to the size of the business (rather than the size they hoped it would become years ago).
Then I realized that I am unable to read the next three pages of the analysis without creating an account on a website that I hear about for the very first time and that I am probably never going to open again.
Also, there are no links to terms of services and the privacy policy in the pop up (just two text boxes and a button), which on its own probably breaks some law.