[gwern]

You know, you could write a decent essay with that as a prompt. Suppose you did sketch out a CRUD social network site which can auto-scale on AWS. Would anyone want to use it? Of course not. All those people at Facebook are doing something, adding value some way. Think about all the things they are doing which your auto-scaling prototype completely omits. (...And so on from there covering all the stuff like network effects and spam-filtering and cost-engineering and language support and per-country customizations which do not scale but make Facebook what it is.)

[twic]

A CRUD social network site which can auto-scale on AWS or on your own server in no time. Get the code here and you can test it for yourself and see what happens. This is just the first prototype. I don't know how long it will last and how many times it will be updated, but for now I am happy with what it has turned out.