The media is clearly benefiting, with many stories backed by a Donald Trump tweet. But if the tweets weren't free to begin with, they might not be as newsworthy.
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.
I think you (and many others) have this relationship by the wrong end. Things which are valuable are frequently rare/unique, whereas there are many unique/rare things with no value whatsoever. As others in this thread have implied, the lack of ability to monetize is strongly correlated with a lack of real value.
that is my concern as well, if it truly was so widespread and useful I doubt they could turn a profit, however its real market is apparently much smaller than people suspect.
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
> twitter simply cannot reach people who don't go looking for it
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?
It's unparalleled in that there is very little that's even similar out there.
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."
It's not really about whether or not the site works similarly to Twitter. It's about the neat stuff people can build with something like Twitter data. I don't think you could do something like http://blog.idl.ssrc.msstate.edu/?p=42 with Plurk data and get anywhere near the same kind of attention for it.
For that kind of thing, having lots of users is the key feature of interest.
Is attention the goal? I've been struck by the number of articles and research projects that are some version of "we got lots of tweets and graphed them" and have totally failed to go the "so what" step.
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.
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 larger population.
Most of the news reporting I've seen cast on individual Reddit communities. I don't think such a thing can be done as easily as twitter except through hashtags, thus the coverage on twitter being more twitter-wide hashtagging rather than sub-tweet communities.
What's interesting is that, even though they're not well-defined, there certainly are specific communities on Twitter. There's tech, and sports, and science, psychology, politics, music, etc, and each of those can be further divided. I'm sure that if Twitter put in the work, they could suss out all these communities based on who is following who and what they tweet about. (In fact, I'd be surprised if they aren't already doing that.) They could then make these communities accessible to the public.
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'd be pretty sure that "Who to Follow" is based on some sort of social graph though probably in a simplistic way, e.g. lots of people you follow follow this person and you don't.
Yeah, that's the only thing I've seen from them in this domain. It's just woefully lacking imo. I don't want to pick people to follow individually... I want to pick entire communities of people to follow.
Twitter is a cheap way to get response quotes for an article without asking anyone any questions. It's gotten so ridiculous that some news "content" is just a series of embedded Tweets. Serious news organizations should band together and restrain themselves from this silly practice. It violates one of the most important rules of interviewing, which is to know who the source is and what her biases might be so that the quote can be presented appropriately.
There's a lot of lazy journalism looking for a quote, any quote, because they're required to have one in a story they're writing.
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.
The BBC was one of the most egregious pioneers in soliciting meaningless viewer responses in the pre-social media era. They would go so far as to kill 30+ seconds of airtime to soliciting/demanding "participatory" viewer responses that were invariably inane. On the plus side, at least it led to some good satire [1].
yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the larger population.
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.
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.
I heard one of the "big data social scientists" to claim that they can now replace the population with the sample (as this is what the Twitter really is) because of, you know, big data.
Because you don't (and probably can't) know that this model is accurate? Also, there are a lot of populations which are not present on Twitter at all, and more which are not present in meaningful numbers.
Such models presumably can be tested in some sense. E.g. build some sort of predictive model of elections in each state using Twitter users as a surrogate, see how well you do.
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.
Depending on the kind of non-profit Twitter tries to become, they may need to somehow disentangle Twitter from all of the political favoritism and censorship controls currently built into the system.
Seems like a pretty huge change and it's definitely tough to envision!
Twitter has no open nature. Twitter exists to control information, that's why they don't care about making money. Twitter is very actively and heavily involved in censorship and manipulation.
A good recent example is the Democratic Primary-Twitter massively magnified Sanders' supporters, and a lot were genuinely surprised that Twitter does not in fact represent the will of the Democratic Primary.
That's not a great example; because Sanders had far greater non-Democratic Party support than the other primary candidate, Twitter was reflecting the opinions of a more general population than the primary would. To say it another way - Democratic primary voters reflect a narrower sector of society than Twitter does.
I'd challenge that interpretation. Lots of Hillary's disproportionate support came from people much less likely to use Twitter (e.g. older black voters), while Sanders' strength with younger voters would be much more likely to show up on Twitter.
I'd agree with both points, but only 32% of voters are registered Democrats. Sanders polled far better than Clinton within the other 68%, although amongst registered Democrats, Clinton stayed 15-25% ahead during the entire primary IIRC. On Twitter, in addition to Democrats, there were also Republicans, Independents, Argentinians, and others commenting on the primary. That's the definition of a wider sample.
>>and a lot were genuinely surprised that Twitter does not in fact represent the will of the Democratic Primary.
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.
The silicon valley bleeding hearts don't like to hear the truth when it doesn't fit their narrative or look good through their valley, rose colored, horn rimmed glasses. Even Mountain View coordinated with her campaign. As much as a self serving narcissist Trump is, I find it equally appalling that she gets so much support. The entire Wallstreet transcript scandal once again got buried by Trump-mania. This will be the most openly corrupt candidate we have ever seen in the history of this country. Presidents have resigned for far less in the past. Democracy is a farce in this country.
Its hard to tell if such sentiment comes from disappointed people on the far left, or pro Trump trolls concern trolling that Hitlery is the pro corporatist NEOLIB sell out.
I was adamantly for Sanders, and Democrats in general until I learned that they play even dirtier thank Republicans. They kneecapped one of the most honest person I have ever seen run for president before his campaign even had a chance to get started.
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.
Well, there's only been 44 presidents. So top ten is the top 23%. I'd wager she's barely even in the top 50%. There was a shocking amount of corruption during the gilded age.
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).
You just literally said "LUL but Andrew Jackson!" and it sums up basically every Hillary Supporter's defense. It's always "Yeah but _____" and that blank ranges from anything Bush, Colin Powell, Trump, and apparently Andrew Jackson related.
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.
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.
America's electoral college voting system is a joke though. Not to mention that voting isn't mandatory. Australia solved both of those problems with a preferential, mandatory voting system.
Why is it a joke? It's been around for a couple of hundred years so it can't be that terrible.
Also, it helps avoid the problem of settling close elections--we saw that in Florida in 2000. Without the electoral college the Florida mess would conceivably extend over all 50 states any time there is a close contest.
> It's been around for a couple of hundred years so it can't be that terrible.
Heh. If only everything that is old was good. The all-or-nothing electoral college system:
1. Removes power from all people, because they vote for electors not for the actual candidates.
2. Removes representation of people in both swing and predetermined states, because they don't get represented by their elector (all electors have to vote for the same party, not according to the fraction of their state that voted for party X). However, in a weird twist, not all states require that electors vote for the candidate the state told them to vote for -- meaning that they have insane amounts of power.
3. The way electors are assigned actually means that small states have more voting power than large states -- meaning that you can effectively become president if you can get the right 22% of the USA to vote for you.
Oh, and please note that the electoral college system came about because the founding fathers thought you (the commonman) was too dumb to understand how voting should work. So they gave the power of voting to electors.
> Not to mention that voting isn't mandatory. Australia solved both of those problems with a preferential, mandatory voting system
How will that stop corruption? Presumably, when someone is being dragged to vote, he'll vote for "the more familiar name", in other words, the name most repeated on TV, in other words, the one who raised the most funds.
If anything, voting should be hard (but fair) so that only people that actually know something about the candidates (and political system) should be able to decided which one is better.
> How will that stop corruption? Presumably, when someone is being dragged to vote, he'll vote for "the more familiar name", in other words, the name most repeated on TV, in other words, the one who raised the most funds. If anything, voting should be hard (but fair) so that only people that actually know something about the candidates (and political system) should be able to decided which one is better.
You could also (rather than viewing it as an education issue, that "dumb people shouldn't be allowed to vote" [not a quote]) see it as a representation issue. If only the "people who know something" can vote, now you've over-represented a sample of your population.
The only way to be sure that elections have the maximum benefit for everyone is to ensure everyone votes. Allowing people to not vote is not a benefit -- even if you argue that they're votes are not helpful.
And ultimately, in Australia you are allowed (through a legal loophole) to submit invalid votes -- a vote that doesn't count toward any party. The only thing that is mandatory is that you show up. Everyone knows about invalid (donkey) votes, so if someone really wanted to abstain they have an avenue for it.
> More importantly twitter profiles are public by default. That's not true for most social media.
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.
I've gone back months/years on some accounts, on some lazy days. Maybe it's a desktop/mobile client thing; I'm not a twitter user, so I don't use twitter on my phone.
Some would argue that twitters early open stance actually helped catapult popularity of the service, and allowed twitter to become a big deal in the first place. They're also definitely not that company anymore
I wish Twitter's walls were higher, so that they keep the shit they produce inside and it does not contaminate the worlds of journalism, politics and even real life.
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.
As a for-profit business? No, I do not think they should unban people who threaten to rape and kill people (for any reason). They have a duty to their investors to create a company that is profitable, and those actions rarely result in a profitable enterprise.
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.
I don't necessarily hold this view, but I can see the merit in it. I tend to lean toward purist as far as free speech goes. Slippery slope arguments and what not.
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.
Great freedoms come with great responsibilities. I tend to think that free speech works only when the consequences of using that free speech...y'know...exist. In a universe of pseudonymity and anonymity, those consequences don't exist. Even when you are literally committing the crime of assault (friendly reminder: assault is the threat of violence, battery is the violence) against somebody because they have the temerity to be a woman who makes video games or a black man who criticizes the police on the Internet.
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.
If by "assaulted" you mean assaulted by words alone, then I am not sure that the right to not be assaulted should trump free speech.
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.
Not true. I can mail anyone a letter, anonymously to their house. I can even drop it in a public mailbox w/ no return address and it will be delivered to you. Unless I mess this up some how there will be no jail time. This doesn't mean everyone wants the government to go through all of the letters and filter out the bad ones. Same goes on the internet.
Except Twitter is not mailing a letter - it's like renting up a billboard in front of Christie's house, that says that you're going to kill her and rape her.
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.
Raw community policing doesn't work either. That's what Reddit does and looking at /r/politics, that hasn't worked very well because it's being kept 99.99999% pro-Hillary and/or anti-Trump by whoever is willing to put in the time to keep it astro-turfed, most likely CTR.
What about completely anodyne conservatives like Robert Stacy McCain or Glenn Reynolds, or journalists like Chuck Johnson or Milo Yiannopoulos that at worst pick on celebrities National Enquirer-style?
I can't speak to McCain or Reynolds. But Johnson isn't a journalist; he is a bog-standard harasser in his own right. Yiannopoulos got a lot of cover for a long time because he is, under a technical and squinty definition, a journalist--and one who has a history of using their base of followers to threaten people. Where his eye settles, where he encourages actions, shitfloods of death and rape threats follows. I'm OK with both being shown the door.
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?
I asked seany if they should unban people who make death and rape threats. I didn't assert that Twitter bans only people who make death and rape threats. So, no, I'm not "going" anywhere.
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.
I'm impressed by your ability to ignore the banning of people like RSM for apparently no reason other than having wrote wrongthink in another forum. I suppose that was "harmful" too?
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 cannot find any information regarding McCain from any source that I find credible. The sites that are covering this are ones like Breitbart and Infowars, which are so incredible that, yes, I assume they're reporting from an alternate dimension until something is corroborated by somebody. And I certainly suspect that he probably did something nasty, because--and I know this will shock you deeply--that's what neo-Confederate white-supremacist gay-haters do. And since my experience with Twitter is that I have never seen somebody banned whose banning did not make the service a better place to be, and the names you drop that I do know are abject cancerous people who get off on harming other people, yeah, I will certainly give Twitter the benefit of the doubt.
If they overstep those lines, yes, I'll certainly reevaluate. And given actual proof, I'd be willing to revise my weakly-held stance even on a neo-Confederate, white-supremacist gay-hater like McCain. There's a reason that elsewhere in this thread I've made a point of saying that people who, say, threaten Donald Trump should be treated the exact same way because I don't believe that that kind of abuse is acceptable from any quarter.
But that proof will never, ever be forthcoming.
.
I'm getting kind of tired of this dance, though, so let's be really real here for a second. 'Cause I have this sneaking suspicion that this is about a very Southern flavor of "freedom", the freedom to do unto others. 'Cause I remember the hair-shirt conservative screams about BlockTogether when that rolled out, the idea that block lists were an attack on the right.
You won't go make Your Own Twitter not because you feel contrary, it's not because you're going to be a gadfly just because you Don't Respect The Left. It's because you will have nobody there who you can scream at. That's really the genesis of this complaint. It's the perceived right that other people have to listen to you.
And they don't. And that's why I'm done with you here. HAND.
It's a shame that we had to get this deep into the thread to get you to admit your preferred policy (and Twitter's, apparently) is that straightforward ideological purges by default make the platform better (unless you can prove a negative and establish that no one ever had a sad as a result of their writing).
Instead of leading with spurious claims of abuse, next time you should go with that on top.
While I agree that its not good to make these threats, does anyone take a bunch or gamers sitting in their mothers basements seriously when they make these threats?
A friend of mine had her address publicized and pictures taken in front of her home--no, not Google Street View shots, new pictures--by anonymous Twitter eggs who told her they would behead her and rape her. Should that not be taken seriously?
(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.)
Even if you don't take them seriously, they can still do a lot of damage. Even ignoring the psychological elements of being constantly denigrated, these groups can usually drive people off of Twitter by sheer mass of tweets.
"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.
For sure. This is also why "block lists" don't actually, y'know--work. Oh, distributed block lists! Which require somebody to be abused by the new randos before they work!
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.
Private decentralized ban lists would be a good solution to this. If you don't like people who say things that you believe are terrible, you can subscribe to a ban list.
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.
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?
If an account threatens to rape Donald Trump, I am 100% in favor of seeing that account shown the door (and, where possible, the person behind it be barred from the service and prosecuted if feasible). Why would I not be?
The same reason why they only barely combat the turds who threaten people I know personally: it doesn't scale. I would like them to invest much more in doing so.
Can you provide links to these threatening tweets? I will happily report them right now.
In no way do I think that. I don't think there is value in letting some assholes back in because you haven't shown every asshole the door. The correct answer is to continue showing assholes the door. You are bailing out the ocean--but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
Now, can you please provide those threatening tweets? I would like to report them.
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.
It would be better for everyone who uses Twitter, better for people who use it for social sciences, but probably not better for Twitter itself as a company.
Are you talking about https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ or a desktop or mobile app? I think tweetdeck.twitter.com is my preferred Twitter UI because it allows me to keep on top of keyword searches as well.
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
Wasn't there some "Twitter alternative" launched by someone who used HN? Its entire business model was to bill users. I can't remember the name of it, or the founder, but I think the service failed to gain traction.
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.
Most of the people I talk to on Twitter don't have money to spare. They're the kind of people who have to toss up a fundraiser to make rent because they had a surprise medical bill or car repair.
IMO the best way would be to do microtransactions and go whale hunting. For example, you could charge a quarter for every character past the current word limit and a dollar per character after 200 and kill two birds with one stone.
Instead of charging all users, they could offer premium accounts that allowed longer posts, did not display ads, have private circle-like channels that you could post to for closed conversations, etc. They haven't expanded the feature set to take advantage of these opportunities, though, so senior management seems to lack the imagination to drive it towards profits.
I don't know if Twitter has ever spoken about it but the lack of premium accounts has long puzzled me. Surely there are worthwhile features they could offer without degrading the free tier experience. My circles are perhaps atypical but for those of us who use it as a fairly important professional tool, a $50/year pro account would be a complete no-brainer. Maybe there aren't enough people like this to deal with the complications. It seems unlikely they haven't thought about it. But the lack is still surprising.
There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch. The open Facebook alternatives never took off though - very hard to get traction against deep pocketed and connected rivals.
Doesn't look as though anyone is going to buy Twitter which is embarrassing for them
> There's no reason a craigslist style nonprofit version of a service similar to Twitter couldn't launch.
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.
Does that follow? "Existing" doesn't strike me as a sufficient prerequisite. Building something that scales is easy. I do it all the time. It's all the non-technical stuff that matters, and open-source/decentralized services don't seem to really be good at that.
We already have the ostatus protocol / and GNUSocial as the open replacement to Twitter. The reason it doesn't win is because Twitter has all the users.
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.
Non-profit status has nothing to do with dividend payouts. While there are for-profit companies that do not pay dividends, Apple is not one of them: http://investor.apple.com/dividends.cfm.
As a non-profit, it would still need to breakeven. So far, it hasn't demonstrated this ability, so arguing that its problems stem from pressure by investors to make outsized returns seems weak. (And the article even admits that Twitter's problems aren't all about investor pressure.)
Which would require a very different cost structure from the Twitter of today. Not impossible perhaps but certainly a fundamental change. <$100m annual expenses for Wikimedia vs. $2b, so about 25x. Of course, some of those expenses are cost of sales and others could be cut in a more streamlined non-profit but it's a big difference today.
I like the idea of GNU Social, but the Twitter-like frontend, Qvitter, is slow and feels clunky. And last time I checked, it still hadn't solved its "spooling problem": offline nodes won't receive updates and won't catch up when they're back online. A post you delete from your timeline might end up still visible on a node if it was offline when you deleted it.
I'm sort of tempted to try writing a UUCP- or NNTP-based GNU Social clone now.
I understand that Twitter is an impressive piece of engineering given the scale and instantaneousness at which it operates. On the other hand, it does kind of boggle my mind that microblogging should be as difficult as it is.
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?
Keep in mind that the Old Net, particularly in its heyday (pre-1993) was small. A few thousand nodes. A few million users perhaps. Usenet at the time was ~50-500k users according to a guestimate from Gene Spafford. Microsoft conducted measurements in the early 2000s suggesting a few millions of users IIRC. Marc A. Smith and others:
Wow, cascade of downvotes. We're talking about whether or not Twitter constitutes enough of a public benefit to consider whether it should be a non-profit. I'm genuinely interested to hear why the idea that it should also be an open platform is also controversial!
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?
Sure they could still do it as long as the company itself remains non-partisan, but they just couldn't take money from politicians or political campaigns. They would have to find some other sort of donor capital to sustain their operations.
I would think that the donor capital would also be needed to purchase all outstanding shares. So I guess with something like the Knight Foundation or the Kroc Foundation or something with a similar sized endowment could conceivably accomplish this.
Twitter betrayed all developers that relied on their API, and also helped overthrow legitimate governments and put middle east and ukraine in chaos. Their failure is well deserved and should help other startups to not fuck with everybody while pretending to help (Google and Facebook, are you the next?)
Twitter had nothing to do with the wars in those countries. It was just a tool used by people to help them organize. By that logic Telephones and smoke signals should fail/be banned.
Exactly. Most people who work for non-profits do so out of passion for the company and mission because the salaries often are going to be about 80% of market rate. With no equity to compensate with either, you are left mostly with the believers (or the less optimal workers).
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.
This exacerbates the problem. A company that got a lot of folks to work there because "We're giving double the equity of the other company you're looking at" will struggle with "We're converting to a non-profit" - just different types of employees.
I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy.
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?
Yep. And, frankly, even within large or large-ish profitable companies, it's not uncommon to hear people making complaints along the lines of "What on earth do all the people in $XYZ_GROUP even do?" Now, I have no doubt that there are indeed inefficiencies within many companies and those inefficiencies tend to increase with scale. But there probably aren't 4x the number of people in finance, for example, that there need to be.
I have the same belief. The business could easily be run with a fraction of its current overhead -- IF it was willing to accept a "small is beautiful" existence.
The problem is, "small is beautiful" doesn't get you multibillion-dollar IPOs....
If a company morphs into a non-profit, I can't imagine that would be good for existing holders of options (pointedly including upper management who would make the decision in the first place).
We routinely run 5MM simultaneous TCP/IP connections on a single 12-core box (with Erlang!).
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.
If Twitter only needed to serve the states, sure. But they need to sync servers globally and provide decent bandwidth to every corner of the developed world. That's a big $ technical problem.
As a point of reference, even the Wikimedia Foundation had almost 300 staff and contractors as of 2015. This is admittedly a lot fewer than Twitter employs today. However, I suspect that even a minimalist Twitter without sales, etc. needs more employees and would have more of other types of costs than Wikimedia.
And frankly, much of the same criticism applies to them. A tiny tiny sliver of their constantly multiplying budget is spent on actually hosting the Wikipedia.
That's somewhat fair. It's certainly true that Wikimedia has a fair number of active projects that haven't had much of an impact. Apparently there have been at least some discussions of streamlining their work although organizations universally find it hard to avoid scope creep.
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.
> As a point of reference, even the Wikimedia Foundation had almost 300 staff and contractors as of 2015. This is admittedly a lot fewer than Twitter employs today.
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 don't know, but they do seem to need a lot of developers, and developers don't come cheap.
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 that by other metrics twitter is doing pretty well. There are very important people who will engage you in conversation (such as here) and ask you to DM them on twitter. That's insane.
huh? If cell phones didn't exist, you would make an arrangement to go meet someone at a certain time and place, and if you both didn't show up, OH WELL. "stood up".
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.
I don't really get this analogy. Cell phones are a qualitative improvement in that situation. How is sending a DM an improvement over sending an email?
Majority of those losses is because Twitter pays its employees large amounts of stock to retain them.
Check out this analysis on how exorbitant Twitter's stock based compensation is vs. Facebook: https://medium.com/@fwiwm2c/stock-based-compensation-faceboo...
If their employee compensation, which includes stock-based compensation, decreases then their expenses will go down and their losses will decrease. Of course, presumably their ability to attract and retain employees will also decrease.
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's probably the only good thing about Twitter then. The people making the site should be better rewarded than those at the top, that have less to do with it.
It seems weird to say that twitter discussion was so significant in furthering different causes. From the outside (I don't use it), I've still heard plenty about those events. From the inside, I'd bet it seems like they were the original source for the events, or at least the cause of it getting so big. On reddit/imgur/9gag/4chan/etc, there seems to be an idea that whichever one you are on is the source of whichever meme is getting popular. I think it's the same kind of thing. Maybe the discussion grows "organically" and that causes it to grow on each of these platforms, instead of the platform causing the growth.
Perhaps not Twitter's fault per se, but I don't mind seeing it die a lonely death for the only reason that it gave voice to the truly despicably racist, homophobic and planet hating assholes all around the world.
I have the exact opposite problem with Twitter. They need to get out of the business of trying to police speech. As you point out they completely failed to do it effectively but I think it is an impossible task for a global communications network in a still highly heterogeneous world.
"Nonprofits", especially when they have associated revenue streams beyond pure donations (eg government contracts), have really odd organizational incentives.
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.
I think a better question is could you make a nonprofit serve the purpose of twitter and GNU social has been successful in this regard. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social
I think we are seeing a (vastly accelerated) version of turn of the century industrial politics.
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
Oh yeah, we have had another. Fin-de-siecle 19/20th century.
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
What specific examples of nationally-controlled or regulated oil industries do you have in mind?
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.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadDoes 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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
This describes virtually every announcement I've heard from twitter.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQnd5ilKx2Y
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.
I say this as someone who really wants to like NPR and struggles to find any unbiased news source.
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?
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.
Seems like a pretty huge change and it's definitely tough to envision!
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.
Apart from RSS
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...
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.
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.
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.
Also, it helps avoid the problem of settling close elections--we saw that in Florida in 2000. Without the electoral college the Florida mess would conceivably extend over all 50 states any time there is a close contest.
Heh. If only everything that is old was good. The all-or-nothing electoral college system:
1. Removes power from all people, because they vote for electors not for the actual candidates.
2. Removes representation of people in both swing and predetermined states, because they don't get represented by their elector (all electors have to vote for the same party, not according to the fraction of their state that voted for party X). However, in a weird twist, not all states require that electors vote for the candidate the state told them to vote for -- meaning that they have insane amounts of power.
3. The way electors are assigned actually means that small states have more voting power than large states -- meaning that you can effectively become president if you can get the right 22% of the USA to vote for you.
Oh, and please note that the electoral college system came about because the founding fathers thought you (the commonman) was too dumb to understand how voting should work. So they gave the power of voting to electors.
Here's some videos on the topic:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90RajY2nrgk
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUS9mM8Xbbw
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wC42HgLA4k
How will that stop corruption? Presumably, when someone is being dragged to vote, he'll vote for "the more familiar name", in other words, the name most repeated on TV, in other words, the one who raised the most funds.
If anything, voting should be hard (but fair) so that only people that actually know something about the candidates (and political system) should be able to decided which one is better.
How to do that? No idea.
You could also (rather than viewing it as an education issue, that "dumb people shouldn't be allowed to vote" [not a quote]) see it as a representation issue. If only the "people who know something" can vote, now you've over-represented a sample of your population.
The only way to be sure that elections have the maximum benefit for everyone is to ensure everyone votes. Allowing people to not vote is not a benefit -- even if you argue that they're votes are not helpful.
And ultimately, in Australia you are allowed (through a legal loophole) to submit invalid votes -- a vote that doesn't count toward any party. The only thing that is mandatory is that you show up. Everyone knows about invalid (donkey) votes, so if someone really wanted to abstain they have an avenue for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they overstep those lines, yes, I'll certainly reevaluate. And given actual proof, I'd be willing to revise my weakly-held stance even on a neo-Confederate, white-supremacist gay-hater like McCain. There's a reason that elsewhere in this thread I've made a point of saying that people who, say, threaten Donald Trump should be treated the exact same way because I don't believe that that kind of abuse is acceptable from any quarter.
But that proof will never, ever be forthcoming.
.
I'm getting kind of tired of this dance, though, so let's be really real here for a second. 'Cause I have this sneaking suspicion that this is about a very Southern flavor of "freedom", the freedom to do unto others. 'Cause I remember the hair-shirt conservative screams about BlockTogether when that rolled out, the idea that block lists were an attack on the right.
You won't go make Your Own Twitter not because you feel contrary, it's not because you're going to be a gadfly just because you Don't Respect The Left. It's because you will have nobody there who you can scream at. That's really the genesis of this complaint. It's the perceived right that other people have to listen to you.
And they don't. And that's why I'm done with you here. HAND.
Instead of leading with spurious claims of abuse, next time you should go with that on top.
(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.)
"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.
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.
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.
Now, can you please provide those threatening tweets? I would like to report them.
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
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.
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.
It will be bought eventually. Everyone is just waiting for the price to come down, which is inevitable.
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.
[1] https://www.w3.org/Social/WG
"In the second quarter it lost more than $100 million — so perhaps it already is a nonprofit."
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...
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?
The only thing I blame them is the insane prices for gnip data, which alienates any normal developer outfit that isn't overly funded.
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".
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.
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?
[Yes / No]
Weren't we talking about Twitter?
The problem is, "small is beautiful" doesn't get you multibillion-dollar IPOs....
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Do you have backend data services and data analysis jobs behing those 12-core front-end servers?
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.
https://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/
Twitter lost $521MM in 2015, $578MM in 2014 and $645MM in 2013. Hundred million dollar losses would be a step forward at this point.
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.
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.
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.
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.