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I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have no

by modsec 8y ago

I see comments like this coming up on Hacker News almost every month and I tend to think that people who make these comments are either too young and/or have not worked for a mid-sized to a large company. If you have worked in any company that deals with internet-facing traffic serving the size of audience that Twitter does, it should be obvious that 1k employees is nothing if you want to have all the necessary teams you need to keep the business running, for example, software engineering, software support, hardware engineering, hardware support, network engineering, software engineering, HR, finance, legal, PR, management, IT department, etc. A company of this scale is not just code and raw technical skills. There are many nuances that you need to appreciate before you understand why it involves 1k-5k employees.

paulgb 8y ago
I've worked for a number of internet companies (including half of FANG), and to be honest, if they wanted to clean up a lot of this stuff by having one or two data scientists tackling low-hanging fruit it would go a long way. Typically it doesn't happen because it's more profitable to use data scientists to sell more ads.
jnbiche 8y ago
Before being acquired by Facebook, WhatsApp was supporting 900 million users with only 50 employees. So it can be done if you know what you're doing, run a robust tech stack, and don't worry about customer service (and to be clear, Twitter doesn't do customer service, either).
- foo101 8y ago
  So why do you think they had to grow from 50 employees to beyond 1k employees?
  - Rjevski 8y ago
    Because Facebook? Because they switched from providing a great service to try and milk out as much money as possible from their users by the way of ads and privacy violations?
FRex 8y ago
Just last month Krebs got told by Facebook report system carding is welcome content on Facebook: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/is-facebooks-anti-abuse-system-broken/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/is-facebooks-anti-abuse-... I've reported someone leaking Polish court documents of an ongoing case on Facebook - nothing happened. I've reported a YouTube video praising Anders Breivik as an European hero defending whites from Marxists, Leftists and Muslims - it's still up. I've created a Twitter account and it got instantly locked for being 'suspicious' or 'automated' (but of course giving them my phone number would fix it instantly) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511 What are the nuances that I'm missing?

by modsec 8y ago

paulgb 8y ago

I've worked for a number of internet companies (including half of FANG), and to be honest, if they wanted to clean up a lot of this stuff by having one or two data scientists tackling low-hanging fruit it would go a long way. Typically it doesn't happen because it's more profitable to use data scientists to sell more ads.

jnbiche 8y ago

Before being acquired by Facebook, WhatsApp was supporting 900 million users with only 50 employees. So it can be done if you know what you're doing, run a robust tech stack, and don't worry about customer service (and to be clear, Twitter doesn't do customer service, either).

foo101 8y ago
So why do you think they had to grow from 50 employees to beyond 1k employees?
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Because Facebook? Because they switched from providing a great service to try and milk out as much money as possible from their users by the way of ads and privacy violations?

FRex 8y ago

Just last month Krebs got told by Facebook report system carding is welcome content on Facebook: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/is-facebooks-anti-abuse-system-broken/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/is-facebooks-anti-abuse-... I've reported someone leaking Polish court documents of an ongoing case on Facebook - nothing happened. I've reported a YouTube video praising Anders Breivik as an European hero defending whites from Marxists, Leftists and Muslims - it's still up. I've created a Twitter account and it got instantly locked for being 'suspicious' or 'automated' (but of course giving them my phone number would fix it instantly) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014511 What are the nuances that I'm missing?