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I think one of the under-estimated interesting points of twitter as a business is that this is the core. Yes, Twitter is 140 characters, it's got "300m users" w

I think one of the under-estimated interesting points of twitter as a business is that this is the core. Yes, Twitter is 140 characters, it's got "300m users" which is probably 5m real heavy users. So yes, you could do a lot of "140 characters, a few tweets per person, few million users" on very little hardware. But that's why Twitters a shit business! How much RAM did your advertising network need? Becuase that is what makes twitter a business! How are you building your advertiser profiles? Where are you accounting for fast roll out of a Snapchat/Instagram/BeReal/Tiktok equivalent? Oh look, your 140 characters just turned into a few hundreds megs of video that you're going to transcode 16 different ways for Qos. Ruh Roh! How are your 1,000 engineers going to push their code to production on one machine? Almost always the answer to "do more work" or "buy more machines" is "buy more machines". All I'm saying is I'd change it to "Toy twitter on one machine" not Production.

reacharavindh 4y ago
The author claimed early on, and very clearly that this was a fun exercise of thought and engineering rather than saying “Look this is how Twitter should be run”. After all this is Hacker News. Such exercises, and engaging other hackers to pick something out of there is how we progress(and get our tickles). So, may be instead think about how one could tackle the advertising/indexing needs in a similar fashion(could it be done in just another server? 5 more servers?)..
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Yeah I completely get that, but I think a lot of hacker news tends to think of companies as the sum of their engineering resources, rather than what they really are. Which is weird, because it's hosted by YC which is meant to be the polar opposite of that. The point of my comment was that the decision making that lead to Twitter's design actually make sense when you understand the business model behind them. It's not good enough to just run a webpage.
Nextgrid 4y ago
If it actually takes you a single machine to run this, you don't really need an advertising network to fund it. Out of 5M users (let alone the theoretical 300M) there will be enough people who'd be happy to pay for verification or an exclusive badge on their profile. > How are your 1,000 engineers going to push their code to production on one machine? That might actually be the reason why Twitter barely keeps afloat. 1k engineers for a product that's already built and hasn't fundamentally changed nor evolved in years makes me wonder what business value those engineers actually provide.

reacharavindh 4y ago

The author claimed early on, and very clearly that this was a fun exercise of thought and engineering rather than saying “Look this is how Twitter should be run”. After all this is Hacker News. Such exercises, and engaging other hackers to pick something out of there is how we progress(and get our tickles). So, may be instead think about how one could tackle the advertising/indexing needs in a similar fashion(could it be done in just another server? 5 more servers?)..

SilverBirch 4y ago
Yeah I completely get that, but I think a lot of hacker news tends to think of companies as the sum of their engineering resources, rather than what they really are. Which is weird, because it's hosted by YC which is meant to be the polar opposite of that. The point of my comment was that the decision making that lead to Twitter's design actually make sense when you understand the business model behind them. It's not good enough to just run a webpage.

Nextgrid 4y ago

If it actually takes you a single machine to run this, you don't really need an advertising network to fund it. Out of 5M users (let alone the theoretical 300M) there will be enough people who'd be happy to pay for verification or an exclusive badge on their profile. > How are your 1,000 engineers going to push their code to production on one machine? That might actually be the reason why Twitter barely keeps afloat. 1k engineers for a product that's already built and hasn't fundamentally changed nor evolved in years makes me wonder what business value those engineers actually provide.