Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#221

Post by kenhwang » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:11 AM UTC

hipadev23 wrote: post #207

kenhwang wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Majority of TikTok's user base watches what TikTok decides to show them, which TikTok can optimize to lower their content creator payouts (and further optimized by only showing content that have been properly primed in the CDN). TikTok's monetization is also pretty nebulous and also terrible; Youtube's "bad" monetization rate is like $4 CPM, TikTok's is allegedly $0.001. People choose what they want to watch on Twitc…

I feel like you’ve never actually used twitch. What you’re describing in terms of how it works and “subscription costs” is very incorrect.

No, I've just worked with Twitch and had friends in executive positions at Twitch. Many of their top streamers that pay the bills for Twitch are recruited and have employment/partnership contracts. They're very much paying for content during the time I had connections with them (pre-Amazon and a while after).

The nobodies that no one watches doesn't cost or earn Twitch very much.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#222

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:11 AM UTC

kevinventullo wrote: post #203

everforward wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really follow the space, so if I use the wrong amounts or titles, someone please correct me. For streamers with even a moderate following, they'll be in some status with Twitch to earn money off Twitch's ads. Don't recall if it's Affiliate or Partner or what, but the follower counts were surprisingly small to qualify for ad revenue. Twitch pays out $3.50 per 1k ad views to those creators, so Twitch is paying…

$3.50 per ad view is a very different number than $.20-$.40 per video view. I wasn’t aware of the “one-time” aspect of TikTok creator monetization, but I just find it hard to believe anyone is going to make good content without being paid for it.

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Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#223

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:12 AM UTC

matrix_overload wrote: post #73

madcadmium wrote: post #3

The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%

People fundamentally misunderstand how this works. For a large enough product company there's always a years-long queue of feature requests, fixes, optimizations, and other things to do. All of it will never get done! The doable amount of highest-priority items will get picked through a combination of pressures from different people and departments, and will get more or less implemented. If you cut the workforce by 5…

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Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#224

Post by hot_gril » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:13 AM UTC

timr wrote: post #163

hot_gril wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I figured you can place it on a CDN carefully, but it's not nearly as easy as with non-live video which I'd describe more as "throwing" it on there. And even with the complex infra already built, it must be still more expensive to operate. Everything you cache is only good for 10-15s.

It's more similar than you might think. The big problem is dealing with the bursty nature of live video -- lots of people will start watching a live event at the same time, which can easily trip you over into expensive bandwidth tier for the peak streams. You need to be able to react in real time and reallocate connections to cheaper providers, shape traffic, use peering arrangements, etc. Static video providers have…

Hmm yeah, now that I think about it more, a 1hr stream with 10K viewers is no more bandwidth in theory than a 1hr static video viewed 10K times. But there's what you said about burstiness challenges, which is interesting to read about.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#225

Post by whatyesaid » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

madcadmium wrote: post #3

The remaining employee's workloads are about to increase 50%

You're overestimating things like Twitter and Twitch. The reason these layoffs can occur is that these products are solidified, you can't really improve them much, there's not much real work there.

And Twitter apparently had 20 million lines of microservices so it's not like their engineers were doing a good job, despite it being a legacy codebase, all they shipped for 10 years was 1 major redesign and Spaces + NFTs before Dorsey was fully out.

That said if they fired the report moderation team then yes it scales linearly.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#226

Post by tempestn » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:15 AM UTC

scarface_74 wrote: post #214

tempestn wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't mind being advised by someone who created a business and sold it to Amazon for a billion dollars, lack of profitability notwithstanding.

So they found the “greater fool”? Mark Cuban also sold broadcast .com to Yahoo for 5.7 billion

I guess one could also argue in these cases that the founder started a very promising company, and the buyer failed to realize its potential.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#227

Post by bananapub » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:15 AM UTC

matchbok wrote: post #68

bananapub wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ask sam altman what he did - I still can't figure out how he went from "startup that went nowhere" to "hand out other people's money at YC until paulg fires him" to "CEO of openai".

Something called hard work?

and they say HN has no sense of humour, bravo

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#228

Post by dathinab » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:17 AM UTC

eklitzke wrote: post #192

lchengify wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am supremely curious about this myself. My guess would be their ad spend is bad in comparison to the other networks (Google, Facebook, TikTok). Could be because their audience isn't worth as much, could be because the ad formats are bad, could be because they can't get advertisers. But unless they are serving ads from Google's network, my guess is they are 4th place at best. As noted on other threads, their streami…

I'm not an expert in this, but I don't think you'd be using similar hardware for video encoding and AI. Encoding uses a lot of compute, but it doesn't use much memory, whereas deep learning models (especially LLMs) use gobs of memory for both training and inference. If I had to guess, I'd speculate they're doing encoding on their Graviton ARM CPUs: https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/infrastructu...

yes encoders are special purpose hardware mostly unrelated to AI

for consumers they tend to overlap because they way to get a good encode is to buy a good graphics card which might be more expensive due to AI and before that crypto

through on server center there are special purpose encode PCIe cards I think, through the ARM CPUs might also be an option

as a side note because people mix it up all the time Twitch is owned by Amazone but a distinct legal entity which has to pay Amazone for any AWS/Server stuff they use in the same way as other customer

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#229

Post by runevault » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:19 AM UTC

bitmasher9 wrote: post #46

raz32dust wrote: post #19

I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry ins…

1. I think the infrastructure costs is probably more than you think. It’s probably the single biggest line item. They have to encode every video stream to multiple formats, and then deliver it globally. 2. The core product is pretty mature. 3. Elon raised the bar for how large of a staff cut you can make. 4. Most of their revenue is split with content creators. 5. They lost their CEO about a year ago. New guy has to…

One note on line item 1: Only Partners and sometimes affiliates get transcoding. Everyone else is just whatever they stream at.

Re: Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff

#230

Post by raz32dust » Wed, Jan 10, 2024, 1:19 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #78

asdfasdflkj211 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You answered your own question. Twitch is solid and well-built. It doesn't need an army of well-paid engineers to maintain it and isn't seeing a great ROI on new features. Some companies repurpose all, many or some engineers when the spreadsheet says to, others fire them wholesale.

Not many people realise this. Engineers build stuff. When your product is feature complete, you can get rid of most of them. Big tech companies keeping tens of thousands of engineers on staff despite their core product not seeing substantial changes for years are just wasting money.

No software product that has actual paying users can afford to stop development like that. It needs to constantly keep evolving with the environment, or someone else will fill their niche quickly or it will just atrophy. That may require fewer engineers though, so I agree with you partially.

With software, once you find PMF, it's not the building that's hard, but keeping the users paying and using your product. The entry barrier to building a copycat is very low. So you have to pile on resources to keep your software be the best available.