yeah, people won't ever admit that Twitter was already dead.
It's probably because many Twitter former employees lurk here on HN and can't understand why nobody is rooting for their beloved platform, of course shame on EM for his abusive behaviour, people before money, always, but nobody will miss Twitter if it really dies.
Half of what Twitter does is superfluous and the rest is badly executed.
A normal company would not survive with only 20% of the staff, Twitter might thrive, because honestly, at its core, as many have already pointed out, Twitter is “writing on a bathroom wall”.
Also: never forget that this happened and then Kashoggi was killed by the Royal Prince Bin Salman
But while people are worried now that Prince Al-Walid invested 1.9 billion dollars in Musk's Twitter, they also forget that till 2020 he owned 4.6% of Twitter through the Saudi investment fund he controls, the shares were acquired in 2015, when the spy was already working for Twitter and the management had already confronted him about the issue!
I don’t think so. The tech stack is (was) quite impressive, if we don’t forget that Twitter is basically a real-time read-write database which is famously hard to scale/distribute.
Not the same. A single tweet may need to be distributed to 50 million followers. I’m not a distributed database guy, but that to to me looks like a very different problem than what WhatsApp faces.
Let’s not compare all employees to devs. Twitter has (had) absolutely business critical other teams, they are a very human-facing company. Does whatsapp have to make decisions whether to ban/unban a former US president? Also, I think Twitter gets a much more uneven usage - their daily usage is lower, but peaks can be similar (~1 billion user).
Also, graph algorithm’s likely don’t scale linearly, 10 times more edges may have much much more resource usage.
So you're saying WhatsApp had no critical other teams, but Facebook bought them anyway for a record breaking sum of money at the time, because they looked nice on picture?
If Twitter's Grand Pubah sends one tweet, it goes to 118M people. I can't see how many times he tweets per day, but it's way over 10, and just that would generate 1.2B messages.
When Elon tweets, I'm guessing Twitter doesn't go do 118M write transactions to all his followers. But what it would have to do is flag all 118M accounts as "something as changed". Then the next time one of his followers is on Twitter, which could be a month from now, that flag means "uh oh, better go see what changed", and to do that, all of the follower's "following" accounts have to be accessed to find the change, if there is only 1 change flag per Twitter account.
If Twitter keeps a change flag per "Following" user, that makes finding changes easier, but also means lots more flags to keep updated.
Or, you could go "stateless" and not use flags, but then it seems like you'd be doing a lot of work for users who may not see it for days or months.
How many people do you talk with on WhatsApp? Also, how many of those live in very very different geographical areas? I feel twitter’s graph has much more edges, and the nodes (users) can’t be partitioned as well.
Also, Twitter does real-time data analysis, which is another of their money sources, and takes a huge amount of computing.
It's probably because many Twitter former employees lurk here on HN and can't understand why nobody is rooting for their beloved platform, of course shame on EM for his abusive behaviour, people before money, always, but nobody will miss Twitter if it really dies.
Half of what Twitter does is superfluous and the rest is badly executed.
A normal company would not survive with only 20% of the staff, Twitter might thrive, because honestly, at its core, as many have already pointed out, Twitter is “writing on a bathroom wall”.
Also: never forget that this happened and then Kashoggi was killed by the Royal Prince Bin Salman
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud...
But while people are worried now that Prince Al-Walid invested 1.9 billion dollars in Musk's Twitter, they also forget that till 2020 he owned 4.6% of Twitter through the Saudi investment fund he controls, the shares were acquired in 2015, when the spy was already working for Twitter and the management had already confronted him about the issue!