Keep in mind that operating Twitter, even if you eliminated all the stuff that's there to support advertisers, requires (bare minimum) roughly 2K servers just to handle the runtime request path. Monitoring those minimally requires another ~500 servers to ingest and aggregate all the log data and metrics. This wouldn't support any analytics platform, wouldn't allow for spam identification (because you wouldn't be able to build any spam models), so if you care about that stuff you need to add another 5K servers or so for the Hadoop ecosystem.
Essentially you can't run an advertising-less Twitter under roughly 10K servers (order of magnitude accurate -- people will want to quibble over these numbers but they won't be able to push it below 5K). I may well be forgetting something important that pushes it higher!
End result: there's no way to monetize Twitter at the scale it operates at without decentralizing it. Many of you will go "yeah, of course -- it shouldn't be a centrally controlled system in the first place." That's a fine sentiment, but many problems you can solve in a straightforward (not easy, but doable) way in a centralized system immediately become much, much harder, and now you are asking ISPs and individual users to operate these resources for free.
Take spam as one example. The main "solution" to spam we use these days is to all use a system that see enough email to power machine models that identify and filter spam out before we have to deal with it. IOW, we use centralized systems. This gets paid for with advertising!
You can fractally reinvent the system or you can just have Twitter.
Essentially you can't run an advertising-less Twitter under roughly 10K servers (order of magnitude accurate -- people will want to quibble over these numbers but they won't be able to push it below 5K). I may well be forgetting something important that pushes it higher!
End result: there's no way to monetize Twitter at the scale it operates at without decentralizing it. Many of you will go "yeah, of course -- it shouldn't be a centrally controlled system in the first place." That's a fine sentiment, but many problems you can solve in a straightforward (not easy, but doable) way in a centralized system immediately become much, much harder, and now you are asking ISPs and individual users to operate these resources for free.
Take spam as one example. The main "solution" to spam we use these days is to all use a system that see enough email to power machine models that identify and filter spam out before we have to deal with it. IOW, we use centralized systems. This gets paid for with advertising!
You can fractally reinvent the system or you can just have Twitter.