QUESTION ASKED: Why Is Twitter a For-Profit Platform, Anyway?

The root of Twitter’s troubles — up to and including all the Social Justice Warring — stems from one fatal conceit. Microblogging is a low cost/low margin business, which Twitter’s management has spent the last several years trying to over-monetize and overstimulate into a multibillion-dollar Facebook competitor.

Last year I asked a sysop friend who runs data centers for a living what it would cost to run something like Twitter, but streamed down. His ballpark guess was that he could do it for two million dollars annually. That would be an easy sum to cover with banner ads, data mining etc, with enough left over for a modest profit — provided the investors didn’t expect that by some miracle the service could ever be anything more than that.

I suspect Twitter spends more than two million each year just on corporate extravagances.