Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 414 posts

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#111

Post by lucianmarin »

yid wrote: post #24
xienze wrote: post #9

4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.

> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there. Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple…

This is just rubbish from developers that don't know what they are doing. I run Sublevel on a $5 VPS from DigitalOcean. Guess what, I optimized it to run smoothly in any situation.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#112

Post by joshkpeterson »

rdtsc wrote: post #94
calcsam wrote: post #8

This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading. Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adj…

> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction? But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising). Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, c…

I don't know, I'd be willing to bet twitter usage is up compared to 4 years ago. Also, stock price != coolness, and further coolness != making more money. Isn't that what this story is about?

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#113

Post by kzhahou »

scurvy wrote: post #102
kzhahou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Instagram had ~13 employees when they were acquired by FB, and they were obviously already huge. WhatsApp had ~30 when they were acquired, and were also huge. ("Huuuuuge!", says The Trump) Those teams are gods of scalability. Twitter is.... kinda the opposite.

Did WhatsApp have much in the way of storage needs? I don't think that they did. This is where the cost goes, durability. They were basically just a giant switchboard with some buddy lists (aka glorified MSN Messenger with SMS gateways). It's no wonder they were able to keep costs down and grow. They didn't have a lot of storage and persistence needs, just passing datagrams around the Internet between phones. Edit: M…

We are discussing the need for 4100 engineers, not storage costs.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#114

Post by kzhahou »

smacktoward wrote: post #96
yid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there. Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple…

But would that be Web scale?

Without node.js? No.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#115

Post by scurvy »

kzhahou wrote: post #113
scurvy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did WhatsApp have much in the way of storage needs? I don't think that they did. This is where the cost goes, durability. They were basically just a giant switchboard with some buddy lists (aka glorified MSN Messenger with SMS gateways). It's no wonder they were able to keep costs down and grow. They didn't have a lot of storage and persistence needs, just passing datagrams around the Internet between phones. Edit: M…

We are discussing the need for 4100 engineers, not storage costs.

It takes engineers to run and utilize all that stuff. You don't need a back-end scaling team you're only throwing around XMPP in Erlang.

Edit: I know b/c I've done that before in $previousjob. Storage is hard. Storage is where the money goes. Durability is expensive. Storing ephemeral stuff in a non-durable KV store is easy, cheap, and trivial to scale. This is why WhatsApp didn't have so many people, not because they were geniuses.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#116

Post by aetherson »

Scoundreller wrote: post #79
philipjoubert wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp is an outlier in many ways and comparing them with any company will make that company seem bloated. As for the comparison, Whatsapp has no monetization model, no marketing and a simpler product.

WhatsApp charges a subscription fee after the first year of $1/year. When you have several hundred million users, that adds up. An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.

But it actually doesn't charge that subscription fee. At least not to the overwhelming majority of its users.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#117

Post by jacobwcarlson »

rdtsc wrote: post #94
calcsam wrote: post #8

This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading. Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adj…

> What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction? But is it? Maybe the public is realizing that tweets were just a cool fad for a while. For twitter to be profitable, I am guessing, there has to be people that want to use it, and (very important) people believing that people want to use it (so they'd pay Twitter for advertising). Compare with Google. Google provides something momre back (gmail, search, c…

> 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 anarchists all interact. Its a place of record quoted in headline news briefs and long-form journalism. It is used to organize rebellion and restricting access to it is viewed by many as a human rights violation.

Twitter as a business has problems, but being a fad isn't one of them.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#119

Post by addicted »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #45
addicted wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has 3 properties which have more users than Twitter (Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram). Facebook itself has more active users than Google and has another property, Whatapp which is also close to or just over that billion user mark. And they are already reporting profits. I doubt they will go the way of Twitter.

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.

The easiest solution would be to expand Whatsapp to support mobile payments. A lot of commerce in countries in Africa and Asia is already conducted over the phone using SMS and other similar technologies, and FB could fairly easily have Whatsapp play that role and earn a decent chunk of money.

Re: Twitter Expected to Begin Layoffs and Stop Headquarters Expansion

#120

Post by jethro_tell »

lucianmarin wrote: post #111
yid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there. Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple…

This is just rubbish from developers that don't know what they are doing. I run Sublevel on a $5 VPS from DigitalOcean. Guess what, I optimized it to run smoothly in any situation.

I can't tell if you're webscale or trololololing, but I like it either way.
Post reply on HN