[roymurdock]

Weird thought:

I've seen some people on HN commenting on how the "responsibility" of funding R&D seems to be shifting (somewhat) from the public to the private sector. Surely this varies by industry (aerospace and defense is still hugely gov't funded) but it seems to be an increasing trend in the education, consumer goods, and healthcare sectors at least.

Twitter is not very profitable, but it is useful. Try to make it profitable w/ ads and dumb changes to a service that was fine without it, and you'll make it less useful. It's like taking a park and putting billboards on all the trees.

It would be interesting to see some sort of cost/benefit analysis from the gov perspective on whether or not to subsidize a public service like Twitter. We must do it for the large public energy companies we subsidize, why not for a network that (ostensibly) adds value to people's lives in a more abstract sort of way? If there was a compelling argument for putting our tax money towards Twitter rather than the DoD/NSA budget, I would at least be interested in hearing it.

Unless we start to think longer term about investing (50-100 years, not 5-10), we will be missing out on a ton of great products and services that investors shoot down with silly short-term monetization schemes.

[s_dev]

I'd prefer to see public money go to projects that are more "ethically pure" than twitter like Wikipedia or a open source projects like Linux or one of the BSDs. If twitter receives public support we're protecting inefficiency -- it is already a profitable private company with a strong product -- if they can't figure out how to make it more relevant to future proof their growth then it deserves to fail -- another will take its place.

[jerf]

"It would be interesting to see some sort of cost/benefit analysis from the gov perspective on whether or not to subsidize a public service like Twitter."

If you're going to think like a government (well... a good one anyhow), you shouldn't be thinking about Twitter. You should be thinking about the category of things it represents. Is that category in trouble? Goodness gracious no, it's all but in a Cambrian explosion.

There's no compelling reason to subsidize the category in general, and even less reason to subsidize Twitter specifically.

Arguably the correct move is to definitively kill Twitter and show that "get really big, have vague hopes to show ads someday" is not a viable business plan, instead of it being in an indeterminate limbo.

[DarkTree]

Subsidies are not just for services that benefit the public. They are used to both fund capital-intensive industries that our country relies on and to make our energy generation competitive globally. To compare the energy industry to a single company like Twitter, which provides a product that is not needed in any sense is pretty far-reaching. Energy utilities provide regulated returns that are very consistent. Who knows when Twitter won't be cool anymore.

[kuschku]

Well, in the case that the government starts funding private sector companies, it becomes an issue when they don’t get money back out either.

So you’d have to do it like Germany, and the government would just have to buy at least 20% shares of all the big companies.

Effectively leading to a higher tax rate without anyone losing anything.

[gaius]

At the point Twitter was taking investments, doing so would have been a reckless use of taxpayers money.