"While Twitter had earlier told TechCrunch that it would be “winding down” Smyte’s business with existing clients, what that apparently meant was that it was going to announce the acquisition, then effectively shut off the lights over at Smyte and leave everyone in the lurch."
Just to reiterate because it's not obvious from the excerpt, Smyte is some kind of anti-harrassment API that a lot of large platforms (like npm and zendesk) were using. Twitter acquired it as a solution to their own harrassment problem and immediately shut everyone's access off, even though many companies had multi-year contracts with them! 😂
Not only does Twitter have harrassment issues on its own platform, now they're exporting these issues to other platforms too!
How did nobody on their board see this PR disaster coming. The incompetence keeps surprising me.
@Gargron it's worse than incompetence, it's that by allowing harassment people write more, which creates more data, which is the core of their business.
@nobru @Gargron I found this nice article (from 2013):
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-24397472
It explains how twitter makes some profit from ads, which are embedded in an non-annoying way, so that users keep using twitter.
Also other companies can use the public data to see f.ex. how good a product sells.
A coworker of mine also explained how f.ex. facebook, and other social media, are all the time running experiments, to find out how people react to specific designs.
I hope this answers your questions :)
@Agra @Gargron I'm sorry to go out on a tangent, but does twitter actually have any business plan? Do they run ads (e.g. google/facebook)? Do they sell data (e.g. google/facebook)? Where does the money come from?