211–220 of 320 posts
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> move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability How exactly does that work?
Pretty sure they are already on AWS, also
Hard to imagine Twitter working as a non-profit when so much compensation is tied to equity.
It's worth mentioning that the more principled alternative is GNU Social: https://gnu.io/
I like the idea of GNU Social, but the Twitter-like frontend, Qvitter, is slow and feels clunky. And last time I checked, it still hadn't solved its "spooling problem": offline nodes won't receive updates and won't catch up when they're back online. A post you delete from your timeline might end up still visible on a node if it was offline when you deleted it. I'm sort of tempted to try writing a UUCP- or NNTP-based…
UUCP or NNTP are really interesting suggestions. They are protocols of the old net that seemed to scale very well and long ago solved many of the kinds of issues I'd expect to see with something like a federated Twitter clone. Maybe I'm overestimating the scale of newsgroups during their heyday?
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Yeah, that was my one gripe with the comment. If you've already invested in creating your own infrastructure like Twitter has, moving to a public cloud is throwing money down the drain.
I'm intrigued that you're unfamiliar with the idea of a sunk cost.
Twitter's best bet is cut costs by bring employee count down to 100, 50 sales related, 50 engineering and move their infrastructure to AWS/Google Cloud which take the company to profitability. I think once they become profitable, it opens a lot more opportunities to explore new markets. Right now they are in a scramble to get users. Being profitable and focusing on one thing at a time will do them wonders. Should sta…
50 people to maintain a site the size of Twitter?
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the problem is that by other metrics twitter is doing pretty well. There are very important people who will engage you in conversation (such as here) and ask you to DM them on twitter. That's insane.
Ask you to what? Deathmatch?
I've never been able to understand Twitter's popularity. To me, it's like a website's comment section without the attached content. And most of the stuff I've seen on Twitter is only slightly better than YouTube comments, and often worse. I know there are lots of Twitter users here -- seriously, I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, I just don't get the appeal. What am I missing?
According to Paul Graham (April 2009): >[Twitter] is a new messaging protocol, where you don't specify the recipients. New protocols are rare. Or more precisely, new protocols that take off are. There are only a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP (the Internet), SMTP (email), HTTP (the web), and so on. So any new protocol is a big deal. But Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. That's even rarer.
I think Twitter could have become ubiquitous, like Facebook or email, had it not gone the platform route and started to shut down third party apps. But then, how do you make money as a protocol?
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Generally, at any scale over ~500 computers that run continuously, investing in private infrastructure is going to be 1/2 to 1/5 the cost of public cloud, including people costs. The real levers for improving engineering spend are around complexity of your actual serving software, which doesn't depend on / isn't really influenced by who you buy your computers from.
I don't buy that claim at all. No way you're building private infrastructure for 1/5 the cost of Azure or AWS. Or even 1/2. If you're comparing some servers in a 4th tier colo with a poor SLA to AWS and pretending that devops time is free, then sure. But if you're actually building something with comparable reliability and availability, then no way. You're going to spend a lot more than you'd expect on extra capacity…
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Raw community policing doesn't work either. That's what Reddit does and looking at /r/politics, that hasn't worked very well because it's being kept 99.99999% pro-Hillary and/or anti-Trump by whoever is willing to put in the time to keep it astro-turfed, most likely CTR.
I would think this just suggests the community is made up of more people who lean toward those politics.
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50 people to maintain a site the size of Twitter?
Whatsapp only had 50 engineers even when they reached 900M users. Now, granted, Twitter may be a more complex system, but assuming they would just be maintaining it, they could be enough.
However, there's a Presidential Debate tonight so you know Twitter's traffic is going to be off the charts.