To quote Nilay Patel [1]: > I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Thin

To quote Nilay Patel [1]: > I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Things you mention like the backend data store truly do not matter. LIke at all. If Facebook can run billions of users on MySQL it just doesn't matter. You then get into product questions, which (IMHO) are more interesting. Twitter grew originally as mobile-only. As in, the 140 character limit came from the (then) SMS limit and you signed up with a phone number. That's interesting history but would you do it the same today? No. Smartphones are ubiquitous. It might be useful to reduce spam to tie an account to a phone number but that's a separate question. What people on HN tend to focus on however is: 1. The API; and 2. Whether it should be federated or not. For a truly open API, Twitter 2.0 just becomes plumbing, and not very interesting plumbing at that. Are you building a company or something like the Wikimedia Foundation? If it's a company, you lose the ability to easily advertise (ie monetize) your users with third-party clients so an open API is only ever going to exist until you get enough traction to throw all the third-parties off. We've seen this time and time again. It's Lucy and the football. It boggles my mind people keep falling for it. You could monetize with a subscription model but users don't want to pay for things. We've seen this time and time again too. As for federation, HNers seem to like this. They want Email 2.0. But email is terrible because of federation. Federation allows bad actors. more importantly, it doesn't solve any problem actual users care about. So it's going to be centralized. Which leaves us to the biggest problem of all: the network effect. How do you get users on a social platform when everyone is on the existing platform? The answer is you really don't unless you invent a new product (rather than copying an existing one). [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...