More than a decade ago, some HN commenters claimed "StackOverflow could be thrown together in a weekend", which is very similar to the sentiment expressed here.

More than a decade ago, some HN commenters claimed "StackOverflow could be thrown together in a weekend", which is very similar to the sentiment expressed here. StackOverflow employees reply here: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ and here: https://www.bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ https://www.bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-n... Their main argument is that some developers take an incredibly myopic view of what it takes to run a software business, and I think the same applies here, if not more so, considering Twitter's business model of selling advertising. From the linked posts: > If you then tell a developer to replicate StackOverflow, what goes into his head are the above two SQL tables and enough HTML to display them without formatting, and that really is completely doable in a weekend. The smarter ones will realize that they need to implement login and logout, and comments, and that the votes need to be tied to a user, but that's still totally doable in a weekend; it's just a couple more tables in a SQL back-end, and the HTML to show their contents. Use a framework like Django, and you even get basic users and comments for free. > But that's not what StackOverflow is about. Regardless of what your feelings may be on StackOverflow in general, most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish. They feel that they're interacting with a polished product. Even if I didn't know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success has to do with the database schema--and having had a chance to read through StackOverflow's source code, I know how little really does. There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation.