I mean, the punch line of this post is that the "firehose" of even a successful social network is trivial to handle. Even Twitter at its pinnacle of popularity

I mean, the punch line of this post is that the "firehose" of even a successful social network is trivial to handle. Even Twitter at its pinnacle of popularity barely breached ~10000 posts/second intraday peaks. If you only want to observe and transiently store such traffic you barely even need a computer.