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Twitter's biggest mistake was hiring thousands of people when they only needed 30. It doesn't need thousands of people. It doesn't even need 100. Twitter is no

by tomkin 9y ago

Twitter's biggest mistake was hiring thousands of people when they only needed 30. It doesn't need thousands of people. It doesn't even need 100. Twitter is not a technological marvel. It's something Oprah promoted, and Donald Trump bitches on. And now, it's an API with a (social) class-based access, and without irony, also promotes itself as a leader in conversation and exchange.

agentdrtran 9y ago
How dumb do you have to be to think twitter could be run by 30 people? They probably have more than 30 account managers alone.
- itronitron 9y ago
  and they only need account managers because they are selling advertising. They could have chosen to monetize their platform another way but lacked the creativity to do so.
  - mojowo11 9y ago
    We'll never know whether your unstated genius creative idea for how to monetize Twitter would have worked. Tis a shame.
    - itronitron 9y ago
      Yeah, I'm certainly not going to post it here.
- Antrikshy 9y ago
  That comment reminds me of Quora questions like this one: https://www.quora.com/I-am-confident-that-I-am-going-to-build-a-search-engine-that-will-compete-with-Google-at-least-in-the-smallest-scale-possible-first-but-for-now-I-dont-know-any-programming-What-should-I-do?srid=CbR https://www.quora.com/I-am-confident-that-I-am-going-to-buil...
- tomkin 9y ago
  I guess I would just point to GitHub, Shopify, Pandora, Spotify, Snapchat, LinkedIn, MailChimp, WordPress.Com, (insert everyone else basically here).
  - detaro 9y ago
    Of these, only GitHub, Mailchimp and Auttomatic have less than 1000 employees. All have more than 500. (That doesn't mean that Twitter isn't too big or grew too early, but it does mean that none of those nowadays qualify as "see how you can run a big product with 30 people")
    - tomkin 9y ago
      You're making a stretch, here. The difference between 100 to 500 or 1000 is exponentially different than the difference of 100 to 3,700. They don't need this many people. Period. This is a "who's dick is bigger" contest over a thinly veiled (and absurd) justification of infrastructure. No one outside of this bubble buys this shit. There are global supply-chain networks that move millions of products, and they don't employ as much as a micro-blogging platform. Come on, now.
stuntkite 9y ago
At one point like 10 years ago, I left ebay because it felt like more than 60% of everything was fraud. I think they've curtailed that a bit, but that is what Twitter feels like to me now. Like 80% of the traffic has to be fraud because they killed all the real users. They have to make money off the fraud and be sort of complicit just like Paypal and eBay used to be (to a larger degree than they are now). No one ever held Paypal and eBay responsible for what they did because it was so esoteric. It seems that there is a government investigation that is going to lead to a nice graph of botnets used for social manipulation which is cool, but I doubt we'll ever get a proper accounting of the really inventive fraud that dominates what twitter is.
Jagat 9y ago
I often see these kind of comments and find them extremely myopic. Sure you can create a twitter clone all by yourself, but good luck scaling it to ~150k tweets per second writes[1]. All the while ensuring they're fanned out to all the respective followers some of whose tweets may need to be fanned out to tens of millions of users in a matter of seconds. You'll need 30 engineers just to build and maintain the datastores, caching mechanisms, and service deployment infrastructure. You then have the actual services, real time streaming platforms, streaming applications, batch infra (hadoop), analytics pipelines, notifications, security, anti-spam, recommendation/machine learning pipelines, ads infrastructure etc to name a few. Can't find it now, but there should be a circa 2011 architecture of twitter in one of the blogs somewhere. I recommend you have a look at it. If you're comparing it with WhatsApp, note that WhatsApp messages are mostly 1->1 and it's easier to shard the servers by recipient. Also, not having to bother persisting all the messages forever simplifies the system by a lot. [1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2013/new-tweets...
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  >>If you're comparing it with WhatsApp Worth noting WhatsApp was written in Erlang. Relevant article: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... So it seems choosing the right technology can have a massive impact on a company's trajectory and chance of success.
  - williamscales 9y ago
    They definitely attribute a lot of their early success to this choice. It seems reasonable to me that choosing a tool developed to create modern real time communications software is a pretty good idea ;)
- rtpg 9y ago
  100% agreed that running a network on the scale of Twitter, with all the strong interconnections, is extremely hard. Probably the hardest, moreso than even things like Facebook. I do wonder what the thousands of engineers are doing. I imagine there's a lot of fire-fighting, but is it only that? It could be the case that twitter is constantly falling over, still.

by tomkin 9y ago

agentdrtran 9y ago

How dumb do you have to be to think twitter could be run by 30 people? They probably have more than 30 account managers alone.

itronitron 9y ago
and they only need account managers because they are selling advertising. They could have chosen to monetize their platform another way but lacked the creativity to do so.
- mojowo11 9y ago
  We'll never know whether your unstated genius creative idea for how to monetize Twitter would have worked. Tis a shame.
  - itronitron 9y ago
    Yeah, I'm certainly not going to post it here.
Antrikshy 9y ago
That comment reminds me of Quora questions like this one: https://www.quora.com/I-am-confident-that-I-am-going-to-build-a-search-engine-that-will-compete-with-Google-at-least-in-the-smallest-scale-possible-first-but-for-now-I-dont-know-any-programming-What-should-I-do?srid=CbR https://www.quora.com/I-am-confident-that-I-am-going-to-buil...
tomkin 9y ago
I guess I would just point to GitHub, Shopify, Pandora, Spotify, Snapchat, LinkedIn, MailChimp, WordPress.Com, (insert everyone else basically here).
- detaro 9y ago
  Of these, only GitHub, Mailchimp and Auttomatic have less than 1000 employees. All have more than 500. (That doesn't mean that Twitter isn't too big or grew too early, but it does mean that none of those nowadays qualify as "see how you can run a big product with 30 people")
  - tomkin 9y ago
    You're making a stretch, here. The difference between 100 to 500 or 1000 is exponentially different than the difference of 100 to 3,700. They don't need this many people. Period. This is a "who's dick is bigger" contest over a thinly veiled (and absurd) justification of infrastructure. No one outside of this bubble buys this shit. There are global supply-chain networks that move millions of products, and they don't employ as much as a micro-blogging platform. Come on, now.

stuntkite 9y ago

At one point like 10 years ago, I left ebay because it felt like more than 60% of everything was fraud. I think they've curtailed that a bit, but that is what Twitter feels like to me now. Like 80% of the traffic has to be fraud because they killed all the real users. They have to make money off the fraud and be sort of complicit just like Paypal and eBay used to be (to a larger degree than they are now). No one ever held Paypal and eBay responsible for what they did because it was so esoteric. It seems that there is a government investigation that is going to lead to a nice graph of botnets used for social manipulation which is cool, but I doubt we'll ever get a proper accounting of the really inventive fraud that dominates what twitter is.

Jagat 9y ago

I often see these kind of comments and find them extremely myopic. Sure you can create a twitter clone all by yourself, but good luck scaling it to ~150k tweets per second writes[1]. All the while ensuring they're fanned out to all the respective followers some of whose tweets may need to be fanned out to tens of millions of users in a matter of seconds. You'll need 30 engineers just to build and maintain the datastores, caching mechanisms, and service deployment infrastructure. You then have the actual services, real time streaming platforms, streaming applications, batch infra (hadoop), analytics pipelines, notifications, security, anti-spam, recommendation/machine learning pipelines, ads infrastructure etc to name a few. Can't find it now, but there should be a circa 2011 architecture of twitter in one of the blogs somewhere. I recommend you have a look at it. If you're comparing it with WhatsApp, note that WhatsApp messages are mostly 1->1 and it's easier to shard the servers by recipient. Also, not having to bother persisting all the messages forever simplifies the system by a lot. [1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2013/new-tweets...

enraged_camel 9y ago
>>If you're comparing it with WhatsApp Worth noting WhatsApp was written in Erlang. Relevant article: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us... So it seems choosing the right technology can have a massive impact on a company's trajectory and chance of success.
- williamscales 9y ago
  They definitely attribute a lot of their early success to this choice. It seems reasonable to me that choosing a tool developed to create modern real time communications software is a pretty good idea ;)
rtpg 9y ago
100% agreed that running a network on the scale of Twitter, with all the strong interconnections, is extremely hard. Probably the hardest, moreso than even things like Facebook. I do wonder what the thousands of engineers are doing. I imagine there's a lot of fire-fighting, but is it only that? It could be the case that twitter is constantly falling over, still.