5 ms·

WhatsApp, 50 engineers, > 1 billion users daily, sold to Facebook for $19 billions.

threeseed 4y ago
WhatsApp didn't have advertising, recommendations, bots or had to provide tooling for governments, regulators, content moderators etc. It is so incomparable in scope I don't know why people bring it up.
- Amezarak 4y ago
  > WhatsApp didn't have advertising, Is there a reason to integrating ads into WhatsApp would require more than another 50 people? Twitter ads are certainly do not appear very complicated. The most complicated thing about Twitter is scale, which is why the comparison is made with WhatsApp. > recommendations, Does Twitter have recommendations? From what I understand, the front page was actively curated - that is, a human chose stories to put there. I guess you could count the god-awful default feed ordering as "recommendations", but there is nothing advanced about it. > bots If WhatsApp doesn't have bots, it's the only social media/chat app I've ever heard of that doesn't. What is needed for this other an an API? > had to provide tooling for governments, regulators, content moderators etc. I'm sure at least some of this exists for WhatsApp. Nevertheless, how many additional employees does this have take? I am not sure why there is so pushback against the idea most companies are overstaffed. For the most part, yes, everyone has "work" to do. But most of the work is fundamentally unproductive. It's this way throughout the economy, but a few tech companies probably do represent extreme cases. I think the best argument for their case is that most of them are very profitable anyway (not Twitter, somehow), and they might as well throw money at thousands of people to do stuff in case one of them accidentally does something that ends up being wildly profitable. I am fairly neutral on the whole thing; I strongly dislike Elon, but I also think Twitter was horrifically mismanaged. While I doubt Twitter will come out better than it is, the idea that firing most of such a large organization would necessarily result in the immediate collapse of a mature product does not say much about the people that were fired. I'm more sympathetic to the idea that it would get even worse over time, but I don't think there's anything necessary about this. You could focus on resolving longstanding issues while pausing most new work and probably come out perfectly fine.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    > Twitter ads are certainly do not appear very complicated. You see a couple of ads mixed in your feed; behind that there's a big machine selling that space to advertisers and mixing it into the timeline of every user based on whatever profile Twitter has created for you. Then the advertisers want to know how their ads are doing, or they'll stop buying them…and you'll probably need to have salespeople to get them to put money into your ad system in the first place. > I guess you could count the god-awful default feed ordering as "recommendations", but there is nothing advanced about it. Just because you don't like the ordering doesn't mean it's not advanced. > I am not sure why there is so pushback against the idea most companies are overstaffed. Twitter could be overstaffed. In fact it probably was overstaffed. But it's not overstaffed in the tune of of "it should be 10 people working out of a garage".
    - Amezarak 4y ago
      > You see a couple of ads mixed in your feed; behind that there's a big machine selling that space to advertisers and mixing it into the timeline of every user based on whatever profile Twitter has created for you. Then the advertisers want to know how their ads are doing, or they'll stop buying them…and you'll probably need to have salespeople to get them to put money into your ad system in the first place. This is not crazily complex, bleeding-edge tech. This is something fairly well-understood and at any rate done by a lot of teams in a lot of places. (Twitter's ad profiling also seems awful. Maybe I am hard to pin down.) Probably the most complicated part is coming up with data to make advertisers think their campaign is working. (I am extremely skeptical most ad spend is actually worthwhile.) > Twitter could be overstaffed. In fact it probably was overstaffed. But it's not overstaffed in the tune of of "it should be 10 people working out of a garage". I agree 10 is too low for anything but bare-bones keep-the-lights-on-this-month maintenance, but it seems likely you could have a great and functional Twitter run by ~200 employees. I've seen more done with less.
      - govg 4y ago
        Just as one data point that might tell you why you are misinformed - Twitter's AI team frequently publishes at the biggest venues in AI research and do a wealth of machine learning research on the data and processes they have. Some of that is used in advertising, among other things (recommendations, anti-spam, detecting abuse). There are very few teams doing advertising at the scale of Twitter, saying "done by a lot of teams in a lot of places" is accurate just like "programming is done at a lot of places so why is programming hard".
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Instagram had 13 at acquisition, presumably content moderation was outsourced but they definitely had to deal with it and bots by that point. >provide tooling for governments What tooling do they provide for governments?
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Someone needs to interface with governments and law enforcements when they request data in criminal investigations. Someone needs to interface with lawmakers when new legislation is passed. Someone needs to handle data privacy requests from Europe. There's a lot of people working on this, or were at least.
    - markdog12 4y ago
      Don't forget conspiring with the government to censor what can be seen/thought: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
      - enaaem 4y ago
        And not just one government. Every country you want to operate in.
  - jsjohnst 4y ago
    Instagram had around 10M users at acquisition too when it was acquired a decade ago. IG has way way more staff now that they have scale. Must we continue to compare Apples and Oranges?
    - JimDabell 4y ago
      > Instagram had around 10M users at acquisition No, they had 30M: https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acquisition-anniversary https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acq...
  - 4y ago
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > WhatsApp didn't have advertising, recommendations, bots so you mean that 50 people could run Twitter, if only they removed the bloat and focused on their core business? > or had to provide tooling for governments, regulators, nobody did back in 2014. Since then WhatsApp has grown a lot, doubling its size to around a hundred employees.
  - donkeyd 4y ago
    > focused on their core business? What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments? Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment? Because the first is very easy with 50 people. Elon can keep sinking money into it and never earn a dime (see Truth Social, they seem to be doing well!). The last is a lot more complicated and requires an ad platform, ad sales, content moderation, documentation writers, support agents, management, scrum masters, SREs, purchasing, et cetera. IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack. Like tech is the only thing needed to run a profitable business. (It is... But not to run a 40B valued profitable business... And Twitter wasn't even profitable at all.)
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments? they've been running the same exact business for years now, if what you say it's true, maybe the answer is yes? I never heard of Twitter making profit, so maybe their core business was "Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments" There was abundance of both, AFAIK, long before Musk Remember when Dorsey tweeted nazi propaganda and then said his account was compromised? (which if true it means at Twitter they don't know what they are doing, if false, well...) Remember when journalists wrote articles titled "Twitter is a Nazi haven for the same reason its CEO claims no bias" because Dorsey never actually distanced himself from the worst of the worst the platform hosted? Fearing he would be labeled as "too liberal"? Remember when he started spamming crypto-bro propaganda? Remember when a spy from Suadi crown worked at Twitter helping to uncover activists using the so called "free" platform and after he was discovered and reported to authorities, Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal bought 4.61% of Twitter shares? Did the situation got better with more and more employees or it just revolved around banning prominent accounts? (not that I necessarily disagree with the reasons behind it, but if that is the best solution they've found, after years of fine tuning, they could have done it before with much less people involved) > Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment? it's easily provable that the 7,500 employees did not improve things on that front. > IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack that's a really odd proposition. Looks to me that Twitter was in bad shape already, despite thousands of non tech employees, Facebook it's in no good shape either, despite tens of thousands of them, basically the only thing still working as intended in those companies is the tech stack. I guess the real question you're asking is "why non IT people are so bad at doing their job"? Not my opinion though, I never said IT over other departments, I simply said nobody is able to explain what makes WhatsApp so special that a hundred people can run it while Twitter requires 75 times that and still doesn't work as well.
philjohn 4y ago
Chats have a finite upper limit of participants, some accounts on Twitter have 100m+ followers. Storage is limited to buffer of not yet delivered messages, and avatars/stories. They are entirely different technological challenges.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > some accounts on Twitter have 100m+ followers ok, so this must be the hardest problem in the World, given that - WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time of acquisition - Twitter had 7,500 full-time employees at the end of October
  - philjohn 4y ago
    Ads teams, sales teams, partnership teams - how many engineers did they have is the more salient question. But still, you can't compare apples to oranges.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > But still, you can't compare apples to oranges right, because WhatsApp is a small company that makes very little money and has virtually no users and it mostly does not work nor scale... We could all write that in a single weekend, if only we had no family to spend time with. It's interesting how the prospective shifts when people are told "yeah, that's impressive per se, not very impressive compared to what the others are doing" It's like discounting Sputnik 1 because the Russians did not employ an army of people selling ads, but just the people necessary to launch a satellite in orbit, which is actually the real achievement. Anyway, from the news: Nearly 1200 software engineers left Twitter last week Suddenly the Twitter engineering team sounds not so capable, which clearly is not the truth, the truth is that if you have hundreds of managers, you'll end up with hundreds of small teams competing to boost the ego of the manager, usually wasting thousands of man hours on miniscule returns (if not losses) while those power point slides will help someone else to get promoted for the new project that nobody uses. Been there, done that, I don't know why a demographic so well versed in the dichotomies of the tech industry such us the users of HN is so baffled by the claim that 2,000 engineers for a single company that does what Twitter does is a complete waste of human potential. Elon Musk is a person I would never work for and I think he's not even a good entrepreneur, but one thing he does right: he calls the shots and then executes them. He said he would fire people and he did, many helped him by leaving on their own, which left Musk with the responsibility of proving he was right. If Twitter will still be up and running in a year time, we can be sure that there were 1,200 engineer too many working there. because, honestly, who really believes that the "influencers" will actually leave for the fediverse, where they'll have to work hard and compete with mere mortals, while they could keep cashing from advertisers to promote shit to their already established audience? nobody believes that. Also because the fact that Twitter will sell less ads in the next future doesn't mean that advertisers won't spend that money on Twitter, they will simply not pay Twitter, but the Twitter users. For them it's exactly the same thing, for Twitter celebrities it's a giant opportunity.
mrguyorama 4y ago
1 message broadcasting to 10 silo'd people is a completely different system than ensuring a celebrity tweet gets to 100 million people within a couple minutes, which is what twitter considered their task.

WhatsApp didn't have advertising, recommendations, bots or had to provide tooling for governments, regulators, content moderators etc. It is so incomparable in scope I don't know why people bring it up.

Amezarak 4y ago
> WhatsApp didn't have advertising, Is there a reason to integrating ads into WhatsApp would require more than another 50 people? Twitter ads are certainly do not appear very complicated. The most complicated thing about Twitter is scale, which is why the comparison is made with WhatsApp. > recommendations, Does Twitter have recommendations? From what I understand, the front page was actively curated - that is, a human chose stories to put there. I guess you could count the god-awful default feed ordering as "recommendations", but there is nothing advanced about it. > bots If WhatsApp doesn't have bots, it's the only social media/chat app I've ever heard of that doesn't. What is needed for this other an an API? > had to provide tooling for governments, regulators, content moderators etc. I'm sure at least some of this exists for WhatsApp. Nevertheless, how many additional employees does this have take? I am not sure why there is so pushback against the idea most companies are overstaffed. For the most part, yes, everyone has "work" to do. But most of the work is fundamentally unproductive. It's this way throughout the economy, but a few tech companies probably do represent extreme cases. I think the best argument for their case is that most of them are very profitable anyway (not Twitter, somehow), and they might as well throw money at thousands of people to do stuff in case one of them accidentally does something that ends up being wildly profitable. I am fairly neutral on the whole thing; I strongly dislike Elon, but I also think Twitter was horrifically mismanaged. While I doubt Twitter will come out better than it is, the idea that firing most of such a large organization would necessarily result in the immediate collapse of a mature product does not say much about the people that were fired. I'm more sympathetic to the idea that it would get even worse over time, but I don't think there's anything necessary about this. You could focus on resolving longstanding issues while pausing most new work and probably come out perfectly fine.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  > Twitter ads are certainly do not appear very complicated. You see a couple of ads mixed in your feed; behind that there's a big machine selling that space to advertisers and mixing it into the timeline of every user based on whatever profile Twitter has created for you. Then the advertisers want to know how their ads are doing, or they'll stop buying them…and you'll probably need to have salespeople to get them to put money into your ad system in the first place. > I guess you could count the god-awful default feed ordering as "recommendations", but there is nothing advanced about it. Just because you don't like the ordering doesn't mean it's not advanced. > I am not sure why there is so pushback against the idea most companies are overstaffed. Twitter could be overstaffed. In fact it probably was overstaffed. But it's not overstaffed in the tune of of "it should be 10 people working out of a garage".
  - Amezarak 4y ago
    > You see a couple of ads mixed in your feed; behind that there's a big machine selling that space to advertisers and mixing it into the timeline of every user based on whatever profile Twitter has created for you. Then the advertisers want to know how their ads are doing, or they'll stop buying them…and you'll probably need to have salespeople to get them to put money into your ad system in the first place. This is not crazily complex, bleeding-edge tech. This is something fairly well-understood and at any rate done by a lot of teams in a lot of places. (Twitter's ad profiling also seems awful. Maybe I am hard to pin down.) Probably the most complicated part is coming up with data to make advertisers think their campaign is working. (I am extremely skeptical most ad spend is actually worthwhile.) > Twitter could be overstaffed. In fact it probably was overstaffed. But it's not overstaffed in the tune of of "it should be 10 people working out of a garage". I agree 10 is too low for anything but bare-bones keep-the-lights-on-this-month maintenance, but it seems likely you could have a great and functional Twitter run by ~200 employees. I've seen more done with less.
    - govg 4y ago
      Just as one data point that might tell you why you are misinformed - Twitter's AI team frequently publishes at the biggest venues in AI research and do a wealth of machine learning research on the data and processes they have. Some of that is used in advertising, among other things (recommendations, anti-spam, detecting abuse). There are very few teams doing advertising at the scale of Twitter, saying "done by a lot of teams in a lot of places" is accurate just like "programming is done at a lot of places so why is programming hard".
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Instagram had 13 at acquisition, presumably content moderation was outsourced but they definitely had to deal with it and bots by that point. >provide tooling for governments What tooling do they provide for governments?
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Someone needs to interface with governments and law enforcements when they request data in criminal investigations. Someone needs to interface with lawmakers when new legislation is passed. Someone needs to handle data privacy requests from Europe. There's a lot of people working on this, or were at least.
  - markdog12 4y ago
    Don't forget conspiring with the government to censor what can be seen/thought: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/ https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformat...
    - enaaem 4y ago
      And not just one government. Every country you want to operate in.
- jsjohnst 4y ago
  Instagram had around 10M users at acquisition too when it was acquired a decade ago. IG has way way more staff now that they have scale. Must we continue to compare Apples and Oranges?
  - JimDabell 4y ago
    > Instagram had around 10M users at acquisition No, they had 30M: https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acquisition-anniversary https://www.vox.com/2017/4/9/15235940/facebook-instagram-acq...
- 4y ago
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> WhatsApp didn't have advertising, recommendations, bots so you mean that 50 people could run Twitter, if only they removed the bloat and focused on their core business? > or had to provide tooling for governments, regulators, nobody did back in 2014. Since then WhatsApp has grown a lot, doubling its size to around a hundred employees.
- donkeyd 4y ago
  > focused on their core business? What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments? Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment? Because the first is very easy with 50 people. Elon can keep sinking money into it and never earn a dime (see Truth Social, they seem to be doing well!). The last is a lot more complicated and requires an ad platform, ad sales, content moderation, documentation writers, support agents, management, scrum masters, SREs, purchasing, et cetera. IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack. Like tech is the only thing needed to run a profitable business. (It is... But not to run a 40B valued profitable business... And Twitter wasn't even profitable at all.)
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > What's their core business? Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments? they've been running the same exact business for years now, if what you say it's true, maybe the answer is yes? I never heard of Twitter making profit, so maybe their core business was "Losing money on a platform where people can post racist comments" There was abundance of both, AFAIK, long before Musk Remember when Dorsey tweeted nazi propaganda and then said his account was compromised? (which if true it means at Twitter they don't know what they are doing, if false, well...) Remember when journalists wrote articles titled "Twitter is a Nazi haven for the same reason its CEO claims no bias" because Dorsey never actually distanced himself from the worst of the worst the platform hosted? Fearing he would be labeled as "too liberal"? Remember when he started spamming crypto-bro propaganda? Remember when a spy from Suadi crown worked at Twitter helping to uncover activists using the so called "free" platform and after he was discovered and reported to authorities, Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal bought 4.61% of Twitter shares? Did the situation got better with more and more employees or it just revolved around banning prominent accounts? (not that I necessarily disagree with the reasons behind it, but if that is the best solution they've found, after years of fine tuning, they could have done it before with much less people involved) > Or do they have to earn money without getting sued for being used to spread CSAM and being a platform for harassment? it's easily provable that the 7,500 employees did not improve things on that front. > IT people are really good at ignoring everything but the tech stack that's a really odd proposition. Looks to me that Twitter was in bad shape already, despite thousands of non tech employees, Facebook it's in no good shape either, despite tens of thousands of them, basically the only thing still working as intended in those companies is the tech stack. I guess the real question you're asking is "why non IT people are so bad at doing their job"? Not my opinion though, I never said IT over other departments, I simply said nobody is able to explain what makes WhatsApp so special that a hundred people can run it while Twitter requires 75 times that and still doesn't work as well.

philjohn 4y ago

Chats have a finite upper limit of participants, some accounts on Twitter have 100m+ followers. Storage is limited to buffer of not yet delivered messages, and avatars/stories. They are entirely different technological challenges.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
> some accounts on Twitter have 100m+ followers ok, so this must be the hardest problem in the World, given that - WhatsApp had 55 employees at the time of acquisition - Twitter had 7,500 full-time employees at the end of October
- philjohn 4y ago
  Ads teams, sales teams, partnership teams - how many engineers did they have is the more salient question. But still, you can't compare apples to oranges.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > But still, you can't compare apples to oranges right, because WhatsApp is a small company that makes very little money and has virtually no users and it mostly does not work nor scale... We could all write that in a single weekend, if only we had no family to spend time with. It's interesting how the prospective shifts when people are told "yeah, that's impressive per se, not very impressive compared to what the others are doing" It's like discounting Sputnik 1 because the Russians did not employ an army of people selling ads, but just the people necessary to launch a satellite in orbit, which is actually the real achievement. Anyway, from the news: Nearly 1200 software engineers left Twitter last week Suddenly the Twitter engineering team sounds not so capable, which clearly is not the truth, the truth is that if you have hundreds of managers, you'll end up with hundreds of small teams competing to boost the ego of the manager, usually wasting thousands of man hours on miniscule returns (if not losses) while those power point slides will help someone else to get promoted for the new project that nobody uses. Been there, done that, I don't know why a demographic so well versed in the dichotomies of the tech industry such us the users of HN is so baffled by the claim that 2,000 engineers for a single company that does what Twitter does is a complete waste of human potential. Elon Musk is a person I would never work for and I think he's not even a good entrepreneur, but one thing he does right: he calls the shots and then executes them. He said he would fire people and he did, many helped him by leaving on their own, which left Musk with the responsibility of proving he was right. If Twitter will still be up and running in a year time, we can be sure that there were 1,200 engineer too many working there. because, honestly, who really believes that the "influencers" will actually leave for the fediverse, where they'll have to work hard and compete with mere mortals, while they could keep cashing from advertisers to promote shit to their already established audience? nobody believes that. Also because the fact that Twitter will sell less ads in the next future doesn't mean that advertisers won't spend that money on Twitter, they will simply not pay Twitter, but the Twitter users. For them it's exactly the same thing, for Twitter celebrities it's a giant opportunity.

mrguyorama 4y ago

1 message broadcasting to 10 silo'd people is a completely different system than ensuring a celebrity tweet gets to 100 million people within a couple minutes, which is what twitter considered their task.