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Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

nytimes.com

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Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#241

Post by [deleted] »

x1024 wrote: post #232
petercooper wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned? That technology with limits... scales? If you want to "do social", do it for small groups. Nobody really has 40 000 friends, so why bother with the use-case that is literally only used by advertising companies?

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#242

Post by batrat »

amix wrote: post #216
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new video and calling system, innovation? Skype, Hangouts and Viber have had those features for years... I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.

I am an active user of WhatsApp and their service is much more reliable than Skype or Hangouts. There's a reason why 800 million people are using it and it's not only because of network effects, it's because the base product and service is rock solid. Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.

"Reliable" is a relative term for WA. Everybody I know has a random delay in messages, the browser "thing" is mostly not usable, no desktop app, etc. You can not use WA for productivity.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#243

Post by xanderjanz »

petercooper wrote: post #225
amix wrote: post #206

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

In a certain sense, twitter's one-to-many messaging is simpler, because it is a smaller volume of messages that have to be served.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#244

Post by zer0defex »

tajano wrote: post #234

I predicted Twitter would be the next unicorn to cut staff and offices ten days ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10300002 ). To be honest, I didn't think it would happen quite this fast. But 4K employees, 2K engineers to support Twitter? If they were still in a rapid growth/innovation phase, perhaps they could get away with this. But rapid growth is over.

"I predicted..." really? with a link to your comment even? hahahahaha, you're so proud of yourself for repeating what's said here every hour of every day, it's amazing. do you act this way in RL?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#245

Post by oinksoft »

nemothekid wrote: post #176
xienze wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

WhatsApp can't tell me how many users were talking about Peanut Butter Sandwiches 30 seconds ago. WhatsApp can't alert me when people suddenly start talking about earthquakes, super bowls, or Elon Musk. WhatsApp doesn't need to fanout a message to millions of consumers, millions of times a day (and with multi-second latency to boot!). WhatsApp also doesn't provide a CDN, mobile analytics/monetization/debugging platfo…

You're underestimating the difficulty of scaling Mnesia the way WhatsApp did (one source says "In-memory Mnesia database using about 2TB of RAM sharded across 16 partitions to store about 18 billion records." [1]). The prevailing wisdom in the Erlang community was that Mnesia could not be made to do such things. The only well-known user of Mnesia at anywhere near this scale prior to WhatsApp was Klarna. To achieve this, Klarna employed at least one of the original Mnesia developers who wrote proprietary patches for their system [2]. So while you accuse parent of being reductionist, your views of WhatsApp's engineering challenges also seem reductionist. Erlang/OTP software doesn't write and scale itself ... large-scale distributed systems are decidedly non-trivial no matter what tools you've chosen.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

[2] https://www.erlang-factory.com/upload/presentations/601/EUC2...

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#246

Post by LoSboccacc »

batrat wrote: post #242
amix wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an active user of WhatsApp and their service is much more reliable than Skype or Hangouts. There's a reason why 800 million people are using it and it's not only because of network effects, it's because the base product and service is rock solid. Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.

"Reliable" is a relative term for WA. Everybody I know has a random delay in messages, the browser "thing" is mostly not usable, no desktop app, etc. You can not use WA for productivity.

but productivity never was it's intended target - skype was killed on mobile because of shitty notification requiring the app to be on for the longest time, call dropping, software block to 3g calls.

basically they shot themselves in the foot on the mobile market with an half assed implementation, and even today the notification system on skype mobile apps is dumb, especially how they handles balloons (the only app that could do worse on notification balloons is facebook)

whatsapp may not be a cornerstone of reliability, but it has an incredibly frictionless mobile user experience.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#247

Post by vidarh »

petercooper wrote: post #225
amix wrote: post #206

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

There are many well understood approaches to scaling this. There are operational challenges to it, but it's not that hard. E.g. decompose large follower lists by using reflectors, and cap the size in the messaging system to a suitably low number. Now you've reduced the issue to one of sharding it over enough machines.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#248

Post by anjc »

amix wrote: post #206

I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well. I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.

I'm sure you can take a guess as to what Twitter employees do, what with the ad platform, firehouse access, APIs, infrastructure, frontends, celebrity management, support, and then the fact that it's a giant company, so HR, marketing, sales, finance...

I mean, it's obvious. And WA isn't necessarily a replicable model for all companies.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#249

Post by rjberry »

vidarh wrote: post #247
petercooper wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, but the scale of what Twitter is doing technically is very different. Network size is not as important as how messages are distributed within it. Whereas most WhatsApp messages are one to one, on Twitter they're almost always one-to-very-many. If 10000 Twitter users with 1000 followers each send a tweet, that's 10000000 messages hitting queues. 10000 WhatsApp users sending a single message each are li…

There are many well understood approaches to scaling this. There are operational challenges to it, but it's not that hard. E.g. decompose large follower lists by using reflectors, and cap the size in the messaging system to a suitably low number. Now you've reduced the issue to one of sharding it over enough machines.

Hubris, much?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#250

Post by anjc »

I wonder if this will have an effect on private equity for startups immediately, and have an effect on what some see as a VC bubble. Twitter was often hailed as an example of a company that didn't need - not just profit - even a monetisation strategy, because growth! Ads! User data! You're the product! It's becoming more obvious that this may be a hollow way to speculate about returns.
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