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by biggest_lou 3899 days ago
Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads? Spoiler art: it's much, much, much more than that. Massive analytics stack, tons of distributed computing needs, lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin). I could name about 20 other things. The headcount may be a bit excessive but this is a caricature.
5 comments
beagle3 3899 days ago
Those 4,100 people are not just facebooking all day. The question isn't whether they produced anything - it's whether it is actually needed to run twitter. And personally, I believe the answer is "not really".

As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.

If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".

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BinaryIdiot 3899 days ago
> Do you really think it's all just tweets and ads

No but that's the majority; I simplified on purpose but obviously they have far, far more people there than necessary.

> lots of well-maintained OSS projects (Mesos, Aurora, Finagle, Pants, Bootstrap, Zipkin)

As much as I love OSS it does not pay the bills.

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27182818284 3899 days ago
I have to jump in and side with the grandparent. Despite everything you just mentioned, if it isn't about "tweets and ads" I would contest that it is exactly about them. Do whatever you want back-end, but that doesn't matter if my front-end experience is not so great. For example, they are terrible with spam bots. I mean when super-model-quality photos suddenly follow me, and the bot is posting shortened URLs, it makes me feel like they aren't on the ball at all.
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tomjen3 3898 days ago
Well sure. I don't think many people think all those people were sitting around twiddling their thumbs all day, but none of those open source projects ultimately benefit Twitter. If those had been OS api clients it would seem prudent (except twitter doesn't like third party integrations any longer).
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pinaceae 3898 days ago
my guess this worldview on for-profit companies is google's fault.

google ads is funding the other google, which behaves like a non-profit. and it works, as their ad business is amazing.

but, it sets a really bad example to follow. twitter thought a long time they could operate like google it seems. time to bring back reality.

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