Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by JumpCrisscross on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:24PM (#12672529)

> when I see things like $100m in losses

Twitter lost $521MM in 2015, $578MM in 2014 and $645MM in 2013. Hundred million dollar losses would be a step forward at this point.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by product50 on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:50PM (#12672709)

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...

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by pfarnsworth on Sunday October 09, 2016 @07:21PM (#12674106)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by sukilot on Sunday October 09, 2016 @03:36PM (#12672964)

So if the stock price collapses, losses will decrease?

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by ghaff on Sunday October 09, 2016 @04:15PM (#12673195)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by logicallee on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:45PM (#12672675)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by komali2 on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:52PM (#12672722)

What do you think would happen if Twitter didn't exist? You'd probably just email them or something.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by logicallee on Sunday October 09, 2016 @05:30PM (#12673590)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by sanderjd on Monday October 10, 2016 @01:20AM (#12675207)

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?

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by logicallee on Monday October 10, 2016 @03:39AM (#12675654)

I guarantee you that every single person sending and receiving DM's has an email address, so you'll have to ask them.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by wott on Sunday October 09, 2016 @05:05PM (#12673462)

Ask you to what? Deathmatch?

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by gspetr on Sunday October 09, 2016 @06:00PM (#12673757)

Pretty sure "DM" here stands for "Direct Message", i.e. private message.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by logicallee on Sunday October 09, 2016 @05:30PM (#12673594)

regardless, it is a preferred method of communication (to the exclusion of other types) of many people, and is absolutely huge.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by bunderbunder on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:14PM (#12672465)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by blackkettle on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:36PM (#12672614)

FogCreek uses their own in-house programming language? Is there more of a story there?

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by bunderbunder on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:38PM (#12672629)

https://blog.fogcreek.com/the-origin-of-wasabi/

https://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by riprowan on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:09PM (#12672441)

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....

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by ethbro on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:52PM (#12672723)

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).

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by onewaystreet on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:05PM (#12672409)

They have 3,860 employees.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by rublev on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:08PM (#12672432)

Doing what? Holy shit.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by _nedR on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:29PM (#12672559)

Fwiw, this article was posted was just the other day on hn : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by ghaff on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:46PM (#12672685)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by ng12 on Sunday October 09, 2016 @11:31PM (#12674857)

Their Boston office is almost entirely Fabric/Crashlytics. Almost nothing to do with Twitter proper.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by bluedino on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:24PM (#12672528)

Sales, user engagement, quality control...

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by wott on Sunday October 09, 2016 @05:07PM (#12673470)

> quality control

Weren't we talking about Twitter?

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by riprowan on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:10PM (#12672443)

Did you like this?

[Yes / No]

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by chatterbeak on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:10PM (#12672444)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by mattmanser on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:44PM (#12672665)

Twitter's needs are several orders of magnitude greater than that, and those kind of problems have a habit of being exponential.

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by ghaff on Sunday October 09, 2016 @03:17PM (#12672860)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by morgante on Sunday October 09, 2016 @04:16PM (#12673205)

> 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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by revelation on Sunday October 09, 2016 @03:36PM (#12672962)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by ghaff on Sunday October 09, 2016 @03:46PM (#12673026)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by sukilot on Sunday October 09, 2016 @03:41PM (#12672991)

Do your 5MM connections do anything that garners the attention of CNN and Google realtime search indexing?

Do you have backend data services and data analysis jobs behing those 12-core front-end servers?

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by pessimizer on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:30PM (#12672569)

Whatsapp?

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...

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by komali2 on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:53PM (#12672728)

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.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by sosborn on Sunday October 09, 2016 @02:32PM (#12672579)

How big would your salesforce (and supporting components) be?

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