Its a credible claim. Social media apps are a fairly basic kind of CRUD app, and if you forego the complex layers of privacy settings and permissions, monetization schemes, and scalability issues you end up with what amounts to a weekend project for an experienced developer.
Now, social media apps are worthless without the aforementioned features that would have to be omitted to get it done in a weekend, so obviously there's some hyperbole going on with statements like that. However, on a fundamental level its correct. The technical requirements of building a social media app are small/easy and within the scope of what a startup on a shoestring budget could manage if they felt like it was a good business opportunity.
The issues start to pile up only much later down the road. Maintaining scalability after you cross some critical threshold of traffic gets hard, but you don't have to think about that until you're at or near the threshold anyway. Not a lot of barrier in getting started.
I agree that if you strip out all the complexities behind what you see on the screen, then yes someone can definitely build a bootstrap-y clone in a weekend.
What do you mean? I fully believe that a competent developer could sit down and make something like Twitter in a weekend. Especially since the concept and what to do with it is already on display for them to copy.
Now, to create a Twitter clone in a weekend when there's no Twitter to go by? Nope.
If you boil down the entirety of Twitter into just a CRUD app that allows you to post 140 characters at a time, then yes, you can make that in a weekend.
Well, how about recommended posts / people to follow (ML)? Sponsored posts with a buy button (3rd part integration)? Growth and metrics (data analytics)? A software product is never just about pixels on the screen; and trivializing the engineering effort behind it is insulting to Twitter employees, some of whom are brilliant engineers I know.
You could create something that looks like Twitter, but you couldn't create Twitter. Ignoring the network effects and scale that Twitter has is ignoring its primary value.
It's hard for me to get that from what you wrote. It seemed that your point was more that the existence of Twitter means it's easy to reproduce it, but before Twitter, it was difficult to envision a site like Twitter.
My counterpoint is that it's not actually the idea that's interesting, it's the fact that they've convinced lots of people to use it, and have built a system powerful enough to support that scale.
The original comment expressly states a "non-scaling" version of twitter...what is so hard about that? this sub=thread then clearly illustrates what "non-scaling" means and doesn't mean. smh
The poster was stating that writing Twitter was easy, anyone can do it, the only thing Twitter really has going for it are the network effects of having a huge user base and lots of visibility.
I do think that Twitter's biggest asset are the network effects that it currently enjoys, but I don't think that it would be trivial to recreate what they've done in order to create a Twitter competitor. It's not insurmountable, but it's not trivial either.
The original comment was clearly meant to trivialize the engineering. "One guy can do it in a weekend" is hyperbole, it's something you say when you're trying to communicate that anyone can do something in a relatively short amount of time. If there are a bunch of downvotes I would assume they're more for the hyperbole than people actually disagreeing with whether or not one weekend is enough time to write "non-scaling Twitter", which isn't specific enough for anyone to argue about how long it would take to do.
Now, social media apps are worthless without the aforementioned features that would have to be omitted to get it done in a weekend, so obviously there's some hyperbole going on with statements like that. However, on a fundamental level its correct. The technical requirements of building a social media app are small/easy and within the scope of what a startup on a shoestring budget could manage if they felt like it was a good business opportunity.
The issues start to pile up only much later down the road. Maintaining scalability after you cross some critical threshold of traffic gets hard, but you don't have to think about that until you're at or near the threshold anyway. Not a lot of barrier in getting started.