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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

#261

Post by forgetsusername »

blumkvist wrote: post #211
sinxoveretothex wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you care to expand on this one? It seems to me that stock price is correlated with more money: if I have X stock options worth Y dollars each, I effectively have X*Y dollars worth of stock. If stock price increase by 1 dollars, I have X dollars more than I did before. No?

Apple often beats expectations and trades lower after the earnings call.

No, Apple often outdoes its previous quarterly results, but fails to meet lofty analyst expectations, so its price falls after earnings.

Exceeding expectations with a price drop afterwards is inexplicable.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#262

Post by princetontiger »

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.

Several SF tech companies have been polluted by former investment bankers. I presume pushing paper and face time have become even more important.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#263

Post by jacques_chester »

tragic wrote: post #233
TheBlueDot wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's amusing yet disturbing the disconnect. Just three days before this leak everyone was told we're doing well, we're going to grow and hire more people and build these great new things. They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O

> They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we're firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don't leak anything we just told you. :-O I find this mindset frankly mind-boggling. I work for a significant corporation, and we recently changed CEOs. The trade press was reporting the change three months in advance; and anyone who cared to know ab…

> It seems to be almost an unconscious corporate reflex to treat the bulk of your staff like morons.

My understand is that there are laws about the disclosure of market-moving information make a lot of C-suites paranoid.

The thing is that refusing to answer, or being vague, is itself an answer. The incentives are to lie. If you equivocate, the effect is frequently more destructive because of the amount of rumour and innuendo that builds up.

This is why changes of policy in business and politics are often sudden and contrary to previous promises.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#264

Post by mahouse »

TheBlueDot wrote: post #254
mahouse wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think before you type a rude comment too, most Twitter people read HN and will see it. :-/ No criticism? Is it bad if I say that they have a very simple product that doesn't need so much people? Is it bad if I say every feature they add they ruin it more? Is it bad if I say I would rather go back to 2010 Twitter?

I'm talking about rude comments about the intelligent people that work there. Where do you work, lets compare products/people and the impact the product makes on the world shall we?

Engineering team is impressive. Such a website at such scale works very well, I must say I'm amazed (compared to around six years ago when the website was down daily).

Product team: not so much.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#265

Post by gaius »

beagle3 wrote: post #203
Tinyyy wrote: post #126

There's a popular meme "If you're not paying, then you're the product". I think an exception is " or they're just not making any money".

Note that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay or not. Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream. Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has…

You pay for your ticket, you pay for your popcorn, and yet the cinema still shows you ads before the main feature.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#267

Post by jacquesm »

rjberry wrote: post #249
vidarh wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

He's actually dead on. After that it's a 'mere matter of programming', so there's plenty of work to be done but that's the exact way how you tackle this particular problem.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#268

Post by rohit_goyal »

sdenton4 wrote: post #220
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.

Phone numbers as ID is actually a really important innovation. I worked in Kenya for quite a while, and found that many people had email accounts they had no idea how to actually access. Email-based authentication doesn't work for a considerable proportion of the world's population. But cell phones are pretty ubiquitous: This ease of authentication is a big part of why whatsapp is kicking ass in the developing world.

Interesting. If you think from the UX point of view the cell number is much more convenient than email as people generally have multiple email ids but 1/2 phone ids. Also obviously the fake account issue is much much lower in phone's case compared to email ids.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#269

Post by woah »

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.

What are reflectors?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#270

Post by jacques_chester »

beagle3 wrote: post #199
aetherson wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eas…

> you can fit 500 billion of them in memory

You will also need space for fulltext indexes, indexes per hashtag (a set which grows constantly and never shrinks, but has a power distribution, meaning that some hot tags will overwhelm any single machine and it constantly changes), the ability to call up any tweet from any point in history (growing by one beefy Dell server per day), the ability to fan out to 1 or 10 or 10 million followers and so on. The fanout problem turns sharding into a lumpy problem because again, there is a power law distribution that can overwhelm any single machine.

Then there's the fun part that Twitter is so reliable these days that when something else on the internet breaks, we check Twitter for updates. Robustness at that scale is more than buying a pair of SSDs and setting up RAID.

One thing I've learnt from being a consulting engineer is to stop assuming other engineers are morons. Sometimes we do things out of ignorance, or out of fear, or out of necessity. But often, when you inquire, there is a solid non-obvious reason for non-trivial diversions from the simplest thing that could possibly work.

I always find it useful to give the benefit of the doubt.

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