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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
I've never been able to understand Twitter's popularity. To me, it's like a website's comment section without the attached content. And most of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is only slightly better than YouTube comments, and often worse. I know there are lots of Twitter users here -- seriously, I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, I just don't get the appeal. What am I missing?
Twitter is not like random comments section, because you can build your own network of interesting people by following only what genuinely interests you. There are a lot of great people on Twitter working on products you or I use every day that share good commentary or tease what's coming, curate links that I'll probably be interested in reading or share a "heads up" if there's something to be vary of, reporters following a story, bands for upcoming plans etc. etc.
It's also interesting to follow some people you strongly disagree with just to see their day to day thinking, what they're reading and how they may've come to their conclusions.
You can also share a request/call into action/product you just launched etc. with your network and they'll spread it for you if you provide them with an interesting feed and generally quality stuff - must be a quality list of people you follow/they follow etc.
It's like your own personal humint if you know how to take advantage of it.
If you just engage with a bunch of random people, it's not that useful indeed.
As a frontend developer it has been quite easy since the industry leaders are all very active on Twitter. My rule of thumb is to unfollow people who tweet out of context to why I follow them.
Yep. Twitter should have incorporated the concept of user switching to their UI by now. Trying to avoid (US/gender) politics by unfollowing technical leader people has left me with a, let's say, very manageable set of people to follow.
This would be largely avoidable if there was easy way to switch to a secondary/tertiary user to vent off thoughts that aren't the beef.
Twitter gives you the ability to curate yourself a feed from comments of people you deem interesting enough to follow and keep up-to-date with, as far as I know. I mostly use it for my literary pursuits, and being able to follow editors, agents, and authors at the same time with minimal hassle has made twitter very useful to the fiction scene.
Alternatively, in the tech world, it gives you live updates on various developers that people look up to. technologies you want to keep up with, and updates on exciting open source software.
A word of warning. You think you're curating it yourself, but the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased towards finding you an opinion you already agree with.
This is why a) social media is often characterised as a narcissistic echo chamber, and b) why it becomes so rapidly toxic when two naturally opposed communities coincide on a topic.
A wonderful petri dish for anthropologists, but not a medium we'll be proud of fifty years from now.
> ...the discovery mechanisms are algorithmically biased...
That depends entirely on how you use Twitter.
Find people you know or have heard of other places and think are smart/interesting/important/etc. Follow people they retweet. Repeat. Meet Kevin Bacon.
Fighting human psycology, sociology, and site design through individual conscious will scales poorly.
Your friends and FOAFs are not likely to exercise the same level of control as you're expressing. I've consistently observed this even among a carefully curated set of sources on several SocMed sites.
The problem with Twitter, IMO, is that it's a fire hose. Let's say that I decide to follow John Carmack. I'm interested in his thoughts on technical topics and especially articles or posts that he may have written. Instead, I get all of that plus* the inspirational quotes he posts every morning, his political opinions, his thoughts on current events, etc. None of which I care about, and none of which (AFAIK) Twitter gives me the ability to filter.
*I don't know if John Carmack actually posts anything of the sort, just a hypothetical.
Is there a comparable service that has a public/private feed? I guess Facebook wall posts would be the closest, but you can't publicly follow people there.
>[Twitter] is a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
It's a shame that, instead of seeing themselves as a protocol, twitter decided they were another "P" word: platform.
I think Twitter could have become ubiquitous, like Facebook or email, had it not gone the platform route and started to shut down third party apps. But then, how do you make money as a protocol?
IMO it's the appeal of having an audience. Get followers, get recognition for your thoughts - get recognition for yourself.
I really think the reason Facebook first exploded in popularity (I was just entering college when it rolled out so have some first-hand experience) was because a whole lot of college age people love to show off pictures of themselves doing cool things, they want the audience. I won't comment on how Facebook has changed, but the original appeal was close to why Instagram is so popular today.
It feels good to have an audience, whether it's for your thoughts or pictures of your life. Not here to judge that as good or bad.
I don't know if it's just me, but these days instead of seeing inane photos of my friends, all I see are photo's my friends liked (especially if they have 1.5k other likes).
I don't "like" anything on fb so it's not just fb deciding for me what I want to see. I think that it's moving closer and closer to curated TV than a true social network
Interesting that nobody has mentioned (yet) the social aspect of Twitter, for which it was originally developed - like SMS but on the web.
I use it to stay in touch with people I've worked with, other people in my sector who I've met at events, and with friends and acquaintances who live in other places. There's also people I've met on Twitter who have gone on to become friends 'irl'.
I was writing about this for some friends recently. A lot of people don't "get" twitter because it's a very multi-purpose tool; it's not built around a central use case.
I find there are 5 useful ways to think about twitter:
1. It’s a way to follow people you’re most interested in. (Friends, authors, celebrities, professional mentors, restaurants you like.)
2. It’s a way to follow publishers of content you like. (Comedians, news, industry pubs, local events aggregators, food bloggers, magazines.)
3. It’s a tool for actively finding content you like or things you want. (Discussion about a show you like, jobs, deals, feedback.)
4. It’s a platform to get people interested in what you have to say, and be followed by those that already are.
5. It’s a quick, accessible opportunity to communicate with a peer, influencer, business, or supporters.
If you're interested in the rest of what I shared with friends (more actionable stuff on how to find what you want, how to handle noise, skimming other basics), you can find that here - https://medium.com/@jayneely/how-you-can-use-twitter-a-guide... - but the above is probably what's most interesting to the HN crowd.
It's a great place for me to talk to other furries. Not sure how that translates to an eleven-figure business.
I suppose I can try to make a more general case for it. Twitter is the global community of people who have some specific thing in their brain that is also in your brain. It's not the place to share life updates with your college buddies and cousins. It's a place to find people who have a specific niche interest you share, and to share in the thoughts that you all don't necessarily want to express to the people you interact with day-to-day. Unlike Facebook, you can actually meet people there. And it doesn't require the sustained attention (I won't dare call it obsession) of places like forums and LiveJournal so a wider crowd is willing to use it. I still don't know if it's an eleven-figure business, but I'm glad it exists. It makes me feel more connected to the world.
You're missing friends on Twitter. I use it a lot because a lot of my friends are there; it's sort of like an asynchronous semi-public IRC channel where I decide who's in it. They, and whatever random thoughts they happen to feel like broadcasting on Twitter, are the "content".
It's a social network. If you're not being social it's pretty goddamn boring.
It's not without its flaws - nuanced, lengthy discourse is pretty much impossible thanks to that 140-character limit - but it's been a great way to keep up with my friends on an informal basis.
You could say the same thing about random conversation. Which is what twitter is, it's conversation. But you get to choose who you follow on twitter, it's not like you just sign up and get a firehose stream of random tweets. It's a great way to keep up on your friends and interesting people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Twitter's best bet is cut costs by bring employee count down to 100, 50 sales related, 50 engineering and move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability. I think once they become profitable, it opens a lot more opportunities to explore new markets. Right now they are in a scramble to get users. Being profitable and focusing on one thing at a time will do them wonders. Should start by shutting down Periscope and have a new tab in the app for Live.
Yeah, that was my one gripe with the comment. If you've already invested in creating your own infrastructure like Twitter has, moving to a public cloud is throwing money down the drain.
OTOH, continuing to develop that infrastructure may be continuing to place money on a losing bet... If they're actually running their own infra cheaper than cloud would allow, they should absolutely keep going with their own. But it's foolish to keep doing something simply because it's what you're already doing.
AWS/GCE are not cheap. They're cost-effective for certain classes of use-case, but beyond a given scale, or with certain base-level requirements, you're way better off colocating a bunch of a machines.
My understanding is Netflix uses AWS for their infrastructure. Are they not on a similar scale as twitter with similar needs? Or is there a difference I am not seeing, perhaps a different use case. (This is a serious question, I am not doubting you.)
I believe that Netflix mainly uses AWS because their needs tend to surge dramatically at certain times, so that if they built their own worldwide server network, it would have to be vastly over-provisioned for when people get home at 7 PM and start streaming.
Plus they were a pretty early-adopter of AWS, and they have a ton of infrastructure running on it already.
You misunderstand my comment. Understandably so, I can see I wasn't as clear as I should have been. Let me clarify: Twitter has already spent a lot of money developing their own infrastructure. They now get to enjoy significantly cheaper ongoing infrastructure costs versus the cloud, as per the sibling comment. Moving to the cloud would be "throwing money down the drain" because they would have to invest significant resources into the migration and only have an increased monthly server bill as a result.
Generally, at any scale over ~500 computers that run continuously, investing in private infrastructure is going to be 1/2 to 1/5 the cost of public cloud, including people costs. The real levers for improving engineering spend are around complexity of your actual serving software, which doesn't depend on / isn't really influenced by who you buy your computers from.
I don't buy that claim at all. No way you're building private infrastructure for 1/5 the cost of Azure or AWS. Or even 1/2.
If you're comparing some servers in a 4th tier colo with a poor SLA to AWS and pretending that devops time is free, then sure. But if you're actually building something with comparable reliability and availability, then no way. You're going to spend a lot more than you'd expect on extra capacity, a team of service engineers, load balancers, multiple locations, etc.
What availability does Twitter actually deliver? I might be getting mixed up with reports about other sites or biased toward older events that happened when Twitter's architecture was less mature, but it seems like it's at least a semi-regular victim of "break the Internet" phenomena.
Twitter hasn't gone down in ages. (At least 2-3 full years.) It's reliable enough that hundreds of sites use Twitter as their "if our site is down, check for updates here" alternative.
> It's reliable enough that hundreds of sites use Twitter as their "if our site is down, check for updates here" alternative.
This has nothing to do with twitter's reliability. It just means companies have said twitter is more reliable than they are so look for our update on twitter opposed to some company specific system status page.
You're severely discounting the very large margin those companies take. It is not hard to build a medium sized infrastructure, with quality, cheaply - if you have access to expertise. This usually means hiring a few infrastructure jockeys from the larger companies.
Your SLA will likely be better than with public cloud.
You should absolutely build a public cloud competitor if you believe your numbers. By your numbers you'd make a minimum 100% margin and as much as 400%.
Unfortunately two things in the way of that are will and the cost of building a long tail of product features. First, that I'm not interested in running a standalone business, and second - my research here (it's been a lot) depends on being able to spend 20% effort on an 80% solution. I don't build a dynamo or a SNS and don't need a sales and marketing budget when I'm embedded in a large company building something purpose-built. The overhead of normalizing for industry wide generic use cases kills the 500% dream.
There's obviously room here though because AWS definitely takes a margin and that means opportunity!
Serious question (because I've never worked on a site that large) does the size of the site mean anything as to how many engineers are needed to maintain it? I would think it would be more a function of complexity?
Security, abuse / harassment, fraud, community interaction, developer relations, 24/7 maintenance & ops, APIs, marketing & PR, legal, advertising, physical security / cleaning etc (whether outsourced or not it's a cost), secretarial, accounting, human resources & recruiting, sales, engineering, various management and so on.
The notion that you could run a $2.5 to $3 billion sales business with 100 people is a very bad joke. To deliver on that kind of sales level, you need more than a hundred people working in your sales organization alone. There are only a few types of businesses that can operate that thin at that size of sales, most of which are in the financial world.
Twitter doesn't need to cut down to 100 people to become nicely profitable, they need to cut down to 1,000 - 1,500 (while reducing infrastructure costs). Facebook delivers $1.5 million in sales per employee. Twitter's overall business is less complex and easier to operate than Facebook, they could deliver a higher ratio.
I don't have any experience with large-scale sites either, but here's my view:
It is a function of complexity, but complexity is often necessitated by scale. More users means more problems with scale, which leads to increased complexity to address the problems, which leads to a larger team needed to maintain the software.
That being said, 50 engineers seems enough to me for maintenance.
Whether or not it's 50 people to field legal requests, it's certainly more than zero. And I'm sure that you don't need to look hard to find complaints that, even given current staffing levels, it's hard to reach a human who can deal with a hijacked account/harassment/etc. Scaling up from narrowly scoped technical support takes a lot more people.
Whatsapp only had 50 engineers even when they reached 900M users. Now, granted, Twitter may be a more complex system, but assuming they would just be maintaining it, they could be enough.
Legal would be outsourced, marketing same, spam control - yup, the same. That leaves developers and critical function staff. Twitter could easily work with 200 staff from 2 locations.
Working for. I was working for an outsourcing company that catered for companies like that. My hourly rate were ridiculously high, but still companies would be better off hiring us, than employing.
I agree that they should cut costs, but I don't agree with your thoughts of how they do so.
One of the notable things about Twitter is that they're a huge marketing machine. They have hundreds of employees that handle sales, marketing, advertising. Hell, they've acquired startups that handle advertising analytics, and have brought them in-house to build their own platform. They now directly sell contracts to TV channels and businesses that allow them to view how their brands interact on Twitter.
I'd argue that this has helped to create bloat. Anyone that has had to use Twitter's API over the years can see that they've gone from being an incredibly open company to building up a walled garden to protect their brand, in a similar way to how Facebook scaled back their efforts to be an application/gaming platform.
If I were Twitter, I'd give teams the opportunity to split from the company, but to continue to use their platform. If they believe in the product they've built within Twitter, they can be happy to compete against the open market. It allows them to drastically cut their workforce in key areas, while re-opening their product to the world. They can continue to be a sales company, but can fully allow others to continue to build great things on their platform, or to help shape how it works in the next decade.
But the question is how do you reduce? How do you decide who to keep, when whittling down to ~100 from 4000 (or whatever the current number is)?
From my experience, this type of re-org leaves the resultant company unsustainably top-heavy. I recently left a company who downsized but refused to hire anyone "junior level" because their pivot "requires all stars". And we all know, when everyone is a senior, no one is...
The article sites Mozilla as a "precedent in tech for a nonprofit spin out," but that's really not relevant at all. The Mozilla Foundation took over the Navigator codebase that Netscape open-sourced, the Mozilla Foundation having been created for that sole purpose. What happens with Twitter's software is moot because Twitter's value comes from its community.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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 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
No. Twitter would be better off using machine learning to segment their users (the way Hello is trying to do manually). For example they should know I love Nike trainers, Arsenal football club, I'm a developer, I'm thinking about buying a house etc. and surface this information when I'm writing a tweet such that it knows if I'm talking about Arsenal or my trip around Japan and gives a richer UI based on this. Making my stream more interesting i.e. when a game is on and I'm writing about it there should be way to message only Arsenal people...
All of this should be automatically added/tagged up and while you can remove the metadata it'll be right most of the time. The advertising potential is incredible.
Maybe some things don't need to have advertising crammed into every possible corner. Maybe some things don't need to be monetized to the maximum extent possible.
See the #1 HN article today about returning the web (or the internet) to its decentralized origins.
The existence of Twitter and many other technolpolies that dominate with what could basically be a shared protocol is what's holding back decentralization.
Actually I think all of the giants will eventually fall hard because of (re)-decentralization. That includes Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the United States, etc.
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.
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.
No, because you would not build it that way. You could say the same about Facebook. Diaspora already exists, as well as some other distributed social networks. If any of these alternatives prospers it may be because the idea of Twitter should be implemented as something other than an investor-owned venture.
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.
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.
At the very least twitter should have never gone public. The stresses of a public company don't jive with the needs of a platform like Twitter.
Thousands of employees looking to monetize our tweets aren't what Twitter needs, in any case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
