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I couldn’t give you details, but I do know Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought them. Is Twitter really two-orders of magnitude more difficult to run

I couldn’t give you details, but I do know Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought them. Is Twitter really two-orders of magnitude more difficult to run?

jsjohnst 4y ago
Well, let’s see. IG was acquired by FB in April 2012 and had somewhere above 10M users at the time. Around the same time, Twitter had around 140M accounts in US alone, nearly 500M worldwide. Do we want to continue the apples vs oranges comparison further. Happy to keep citing scale differences. :) Source: Wikipedia pages for both
- mdorazio 4y ago
  Do you also have a source showing that the number of engineers required scales linearly with number of users?
  - lightbendover 4y ago
    It in fact scales exponentially. Internal sources only, but topics like regionalization, localization, bespoke caching implementations, hardware-level optimizations, content moderation, policy adherence (e.g. GDPR, CCPA), long-term monetization (especially if supporting advertisers as a direct customer), 3P support, public APIs, documentation, SRE (a fledgling product doesn't need 5 9s), analytics (internal and for advertisers and 3P partners) and for the most part, security, are non-exhaustive examples of things you can mostly ignore when your product supports 10M users that are unavoidable when your product supports half of the US, a good chunk of the rest of the world, and other large businesses that consume you at large business scale.
    - naasking 4y ago
      You listed a bunch of requirements without an argument that fulfilling those requirements actually entails an exponential growth in employees.
- criddell 4y ago
  That's true, but also hardware and software hasn't stood still in the past decade. I'd definitely like to hear more about the scale differences. So far at best, you've accounted for one order of magnitude. How do you explain the second?
- naasking 4y ago
  > Well, let’s see. IG was acquired by FB in April 2012 and had somewhere above 10M users at the time. Around the same time, Twitter had around 140M accounts in US alone, nearly 500M worldwide. So increasing your user base by one order of magnitude requires increasing the number of employees by more than two orders of magnitude? Rate of employee acquisition should probably never outpace rate of user acquisition, so I think that's a pretty clear sign that something was off.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Was instagram selling advertising to giant brands yet when they were bought? Sales staff balloon because they are really good at selling themselves to hiring staff and also because any brand that pulls in more than $10M in revenue expects to be treated like the only king of the world in pretty much every interaction and literally requires handlers, and the number of handlers required scales with the size of the brand.
    - naasking 4y ago
      You can potentially solve the handlers issue by being ruthlessly cutthroat. If they want hand-holding, they can hire a third party to manage advertising on Twitter. They probably already do in fact, so if you are a third-party, do your job and know your tools. As for sales staff being good at selling themselves, agreed, so maybe Musk's ruthless firing spree will end up as a good thing. Maybe.
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        >You can potentially solve the handlers issue by being ruthlessly cutthroat No, that just results in those businesses and brands leaving you, unless you can provide them a LARGE revenue stream that is impossible to get anywhere. A large brand will absolutely give up a little money just to spite you and your company for not treating them like god.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
macNchz 4y ago
In my mind the issue is less “is it conceivable that a small team can run a bare bones version of the Twitter app with hundreds of millions of users” and more “can a small team manage a big distributed system that was designed to be managed by many different teams, with no handoff period”.
Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
> I do know Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought them. It was also pathetically unprofitable, and had serious problems with inappropiate child photos, gore etc. Some of those problems require man power, there is no 10 man team who are very good at devops who can solve that.
- criddell 4y ago
  The person I responded to was specifically talking about the tech stack. I wholeheartedly agree that the difficult part of running a service like Twitter lies in the soft problems.
  - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
    But the profitability requieres a big tech team regarding ads and recomendation algos etc. And moderation requieres humans but also a big tech team regarding bots, known offenders, etc. it's not exclusively a tech problem but in a tech company tons of those responsabilities will be handled, addressed and solved by product and tech teams. And on 10 people, no matter how smart, they got no chance
- thordenmark 4y ago
  Child safety advocates have praised Elon for his quick action in removing inappropiate child photos from Twitter, as well as dealing with the hashtags traffickers use. Something people have been asking for years for and little was being done.
  - MockObject 4y ago
    Nobody knows what the secret hashtags are. The claim is unverified and unverifiable, and probably signal-boosted from a single wild tweet.
    - philippejara 4y ago
      Unless you wish to ask for people to openly post child porn guidance you're gonna have to rely on the people actually following the issue for years. For what it's worth business insider claims they checked said hashtags and the content was gone[0]. Said user is allegedly going to release today an article in a corporate outlet that did fact check it[1] so we'll see. I have no reason to distrust her and can't see any reason for her to lie about it. 0: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-child-sexual-exploitation-content-is-top-priority-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-child-sexual-... 1: https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1595109108608544768 https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1595109108608544768

I couldn’t give you details, but I do know Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought them. Is Twitter really two-orders of magnitude more difficult to run?

jsjohnst 4y ago

Well, let’s see. IG was acquired by FB in April 2012 and had somewhere above 10M users at the time. Around the same time, Twitter had around 140M accounts in US alone, nearly 500M worldwide. Do we want to continue the apples vs oranges comparison further. Happy to keep citing scale differences. :) Source: Wikipedia pages for both

mdorazio 4y ago
Do you also have a source showing that the number of engineers required scales linearly with number of users?
- lightbendover 4y ago
  It in fact scales exponentially. Internal sources only, but topics like regionalization, localization, bespoke caching implementations, hardware-level optimizations, content moderation, policy adherence (e.g. GDPR, CCPA), long-term monetization (especially if supporting advertisers as a direct customer), 3P support, public APIs, documentation, SRE (a fledgling product doesn't need 5 9s), analytics (internal and for advertisers and 3P partners) and for the most part, security, are non-exhaustive examples of things you can mostly ignore when your product supports 10M users that are unavoidable when your product supports half of the US, a good chunk of the rest of the world, and other large businesses that consume you at large business scale.
  - naasking 4y ago
    You listed a bunch of requirements without an argument that fulfilling those requirements actually entails an exponential growth in employees.
criddell 4y ago
That's true, but also hardware and software hasn't stood still in the past decade. I'd definitely like to hear more about the scale differences. So far at best, you've accounted for one order of magnitude. How do you explain the second?
naasking 4y ago
> Well, let’s see. IG was acquired by FB in April 2012 and had somewhere above 10M users at the time. Around the same time, Twitter had around 140M accounts in US alone, nearly 500M worldwide. So increasing your user base by one order of magnitude requires increasing the number of employees by more than two orders of magnitude? Rate of employee acquisition should probably never outpace rate of user acquisition, so I think that's a pretty clear sign that something was off.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Was instagram selling advertising to giant brands yet when they were bought? Sales staff balloon because they are really good at selling themselves to hiring staff and also because any brand that pulls in more than $10M in revenue expects to be treated like the only king of the world in pretty much every interaction and literally requires handlers, and the number of handlers required scales with the size of the brand.
  - naasking 4y ago
    You can potentially solve the handlers issue by being ruthlessly cutthroat. If they want hand-holding, they can hire a third party to manage advertising on Twitter. They probably already do in fact, so if you are a third-party, do your job and know your tools. As for sales staff being good at selling themselves, agreed, so maybe Musk's ruthless firing spree will end up as a good thing. Maybe.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      >You can potentially solve the handlers issue by being ruthlessly cutthroat No, that just results in those businesses and brands leaving you, unless you can provide them a LARGE revenue stream that is impossible to get anywhere. A large brand will absolutely give up a little money just to spite you and your company for not treating them like god.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

macNchz 4y ago

In my mind the issue is less “is it conceivable that a small team can run a bare bones version of the Twitter app with hundreds of millions of users” and more “can a small team manage a big distributed system that was designed to be managed by many different teams, with no handoff period”.

Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago

> I do know Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought them. It was also pathetically unprofitable, and had serious problems with inappropiate child photos, gore etc. Some of those problems require man power, there is no 10 man team who are very good at devops who can solve that.

criddell 4y ago
The person I responded to was specifically talking about the tech stack. I wholeheartedly agree that the difficult part of running a service like Twitter lies in the soft problems.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  But the profitability requieres a big tech team regarding ads and recomendation algos etc. And moderation requieres humans but also a big tech team regarding bots, known offenders, etc. it's not exclusively a tech problem but in a tech company tons of those responsabilities will be handled, addressed and solved by product and tech teams. And on 10 people, no matter how smart, they got no chance
thordenmark 4y ago
Child safety advocates have praised Elon for his quick action in removing inappropiate child photos from Twitter, as well as dealing with the hashtags traffickers use. Something people have been asking for years for and little was being done.
- MockObject 4y ago
  Nobody knows what the secret hashtags are. The claim is unverified and unverifiable, and probably signal-boosted from a single wild tweet.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    Unless you wish to ask for people to openly post child porn guidance you're gonna have to rely on the people actually following the issue for years. For what it's worth business insider claims they checked said hashtags and the content was gone[0]. Said user is allegedly going to release today an article in a corporate outlet that did fact check it[1] so we'll see. I have no reason to distrust her and can't see any reason for her to lie about it. 0: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-child-sexual-exploitation-content-is-top-priority-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-child-sexual-... 1: https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1595109108608544768 https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1595109108608544768