Has someone told their recruiting team? My twitter feed today was about 30% "join the flock" tweets.
Guess they didn't get the tweet about cover sheets on the TPS report.
Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
191–200 of 414 posts
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#192rise of cockroaches was the techcrunch headline, arguably this is a bit of a nod to that.
Would you care to explain the cockroaches metaphor? I'm confused.
Cockroaches can survive extremely hostile environments that more "advanced" creatures cannot. They might not be pretty like unicorns, but they are extremely well adapted to resource-poor environments.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
They turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.
>What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems…
While not stated eloquently, I do think there's some truth in that.
1. Open API's, good documentation and community engagement goes a long way in establishing developer trust. I don't believe developer trust is correlated significantly with revenue (directly), but it's absolutely correlated with acquisition. I'd argue that Angular or React were partially successful because of the stickiness of their communities, and that's a powerful self-perpetuating force.
2. Monetization is in the queries. Facebook and Google know this. Throwing aside all of their auxiliary services, emerging markets, hardware, et al... between 70-90% of their respective revenue is from direct advertising. If there's a way to scale or "ramp" their revenue model, this would be the portion to focus on.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Twitter provides 140 status messages. There is nothing wrong it, that is very cool. But I think there is a realization that it just isn't as cool as it was in 4 years ago. And it just became 3% less cool. I can't tell if you're being ironic or facile, but Twitter has become quite a bit more than "140 status messages"(sic). It's a medium where politicians, dissidents, celebrities, the hoi palloi, brands, and anarchi…
They no longer allow sign ups via Tor, so I don't think it's as dissident friendly as it used to be.
That's more due to stupid retards abusing tor for spamming... with tor you have to draw the line somewhere.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet. It's not going anywhere in the next year or two. But in five years? Ten years? Twitter's main problem is that it has one product, and it's possible to get bored with that product. It's not really possible to get bored of googling things or buying things off amazon, but it's entirely possible…
That analogy doesn't hold up as well to tools. I mean we're still using E-mail right? Twitter is basically a format in its own right at this point
No it's not, and unlike email, it's a proprietary system under the control of a single company.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing lasts forever in tech. How will they monetize Instagram and WhatsApp? Don't show me users. Show me profits from those users if you want to count them.
Inserting ad images into Instagram would be fairly trivial. Given the large number of celebs on Instagram, shared revenue on product placement is another option. Promotion of high profile Instagram accounts (say, a new movie) etc
Instagram already does this since a couple of weeks ago.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#1974100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
Please don't post dismissive comments to Hacker News.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
They turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.
>What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together So, I'm genuienly curious. How do they make money by "ramping that shit up"? I've seen a lot of companies that have 'get users' as their M.O., but I have no insight into the "profit!!!" phase. Opening their user base seems…
I think it's supposed to work like this: assuming more users == more revenue, then opening up and promoting the use of APIs creates alternative channels to acquire new users (partner apps have their own incentive to attract users etc). Where it can hurt is when the integrating apps either don't substantially move the needle on new user acquisition, or worse they cannibalize your user base by creating reasons for your users to NOT visit your site.
IMO though the API "shutdown" was shortsighted by Twitter. If people are using a competing interface instead of your own, then maybe you should fix your own rather than just shutting down the API. Of course that's easy to say as an outsider. I'm sure the truth is much more nuanced.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't doubt it's challenging to keep the thing up, but 4100 employees? And meanwhile WhatsApp has 50 or so employees in total.
Twitter is doing something vastly more technically challenging that WhatsApp. WhatsApp just delivers messages. It doesn't store them, and it certainly doesn't, say, try to make them available in a searchable away to everyone in the world. This isn't a knock on WhatsApp -- I use WhatsApp and don't use Twitter -- but Twitter's scale challenges are vastly more complex than WhatsApp's, which doesn't have many features th…
> It doesn't store them, and it certainly doesn't, say, try to make them available in a searchable away to everyone in the world.
Back of the envelope calculation: If your messages are 256 char messages, on a 128GB ram server you can fit 500 billion of them in memory; incidentally, that's one day's worth of tweets these days. I recently got a quote for a beefy 256GB ram server from Dell for $6,000. To make things easier, let's assume $10,000 with redundant 1TB SSD and everything else you might need. The data is extremely easy to shard.
With proper caching, you can probably keep 99.9999% of all tweets shown in just one such servers, and serve them within a few ms. I don't have recent experience with web frontends, but a properly configured nginx could probably server on meager hardware can do a few tens-of-thousands requests per second. a Seastar server on beefy hardware can probably handle a significant percentage of Twitter's load.
Search is a little harder, but not by much.
Is this engineering trivial? Far from it. But I've worked with stunt programmers who can build this in a few months with a 3 person team. At least one of them commands a salary of about $500K last I heard.
Is that all Twitter is doing? No, I'm sure they have 10 backend "things" for every user visible "thing". They needed something like Bootstrap for internal use, after all. I don't really believe you can run Twitter with just $1M/year in capex, just $1M/year in opex and just $1M/year in engineering salary - you need a whole lot more than that; In fact, to pull in revenue of $2B/year (which Twitter seems to be on track for), you probably need 50 people just in accounting.
What I am saying, though, is that the technical challenges faced by Twitter (at least those that are visible to users) are highly overrated. If you know what you are doing, Twitter can be run on $50,000 worth of hardware; This has been true since 2007 - Computers were weaker and had less memory then, but Twitter had much less traffic too. I've looked at the numbers every single year since 2007, and at any point in time, the "bare bones essential hardware for interactive response" was in the $50,000 range. Which probably means if they spent more than $1M/year on hardware (or depreciation-equivalent-hosting) at any point in time, they should have hired better engineers.
Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that's just people having their delusions of rampant future growth and expansion of twitter being crushed in the gears of mundane reality. These moves are perfectly fine for a normal company that intends to continue operating at about the same level as it is currently indefinitely. But people view every tech company through the lens of apple, google, amazon, etc. They expect growth, they expect new stuff, a…
They turned off their APIs to application developers. What they should have done is ramp that shit up and figure out how to monetize the query traffic or figure out a way to decentralize their infrastructure to allow everyone to run Twitter together.
I thought they did exactly as you said: the APIs are available as long as you pay Twitter for them...