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> 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

> 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".
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      > There are very few teams doing advertising at the scale of Twitter looks like actual numbers don't agree with you (hint: for TikTok it's Douyin + TikTok) https://imgur.com/a/HvyynTI https://imgur.com/a/HvyynTI https://imgur.com/a/xLgSTzW https://imgur.com/a/xLgSTzW
      - 4y ago

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".
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > There are very few teams doing advertising at the scale of Twitter looks like actual numbers don't agree with you (hint: for TikTok it's Douyin + TikTok) https://imgur.com/a/HvyynTI https://imgur.com/a/HvyynTI https://imgur.com/a/xLgSTzW https://imgur.com/a/xLgSTzW
    - 4y ago