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It still boggles the mind Twitter has 7000 employees when Whatsapp had fewer than 50. There must be a huge amount of deadweight.
by xqcgrek2 4y ago
It still boggles the mind Twitter has 7000 employees when Whatsapp had fewer than 50. There must be a huge amount of deadweight.
- jacooper 4y agoWhatsapp literally has nothing to moderate or do. The infrastructure is basically just a mail man to deliver messages, and that's it. Almost everything is encrypted, there is nothing to moderate really.
- version_five 4y agoIs moderation a material part of Twitter's headcount? Like is that what 1000 people are doing?
- jacooper 4y agoThere is also development on social features like topics, the algorithm, spam filters, Ad management and much more. So its not really a fair comparison.
- type0 4y agoI could be wrong but I somehow imagined most of this people doing nothing other than banning regular users for twits taken out of context or some other bs activism on Twitter to create "engagement"
- res0nat0r 4y agoYes, or hundreds at least. Every platform has to deal with this problem, if they want to keep users and advertisers. https://sports.yahoo.com/twitter-locks-hundreds-content-moderation-195004648.html https://sports.yahoo.com/twitter-locks-hundreds-content-mode...
- mikkergp 4y agoI also have to imagine the graph and recommendation engine exponentially increases the infrastructure requirements and code complexity.
- Matthias247 4y agojust running infrastructure at a certain scale is a really hard problem. You will deal with hosts going bad for arbitrary reasons (some hardware, some software), weird infrastructure problems (networking broken, spurious connectivity in routers, etc), deployments not being rolled out to all hosts in the same version, etc. You can work around a few of those by having really good tooling, and by trying to offload to cloud providers which do a bunch of the work for you, but it still won't be easy. At the scale at which whatsapp and Twitter operate 50 engineers is nothing - in many products this will be less than the size of teams who just do some basic server rollout and operations.
- whateveracct 4y agocompletely different cardinality on the face of it
- kumarvvr 4y agoYou are comparing a large scale information distribution system to essentially as post office.
- kleinsch 4y agoApples and oranges. WhatsApp has tons more than 50 today and operates off Meta’s business. Twitter was 350 a year before the IPO.
- tech-historian 4y agoDoes WhatsApp have a global ad sales team? Sales is generally a large portion of the workforce in a large-ish media company.
- shaburn 4y agoDebilitatingly so. How many processes were not automated to justify keeping friends by the thousands.
- greatpatton 4y agoWhatsapp doesn't provide any paid product... Nobody to take care of the problem of your customers and no sale organization, no moderation, etc. etc.