Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by veec_cas_tant 1086 days ago
I’m very confident that not everyone on this site could make it work at such a massive scale
2 comments

People on HN in particular tend to oversimplify large projects. Trying to build and maintain an app the size of Twitter would be hard. Trying to tie it into a functional advertising network would be harder. HN just tends to be brightly cynical about complexity in general; in reality there would be very significant challenges (as Musk is discovering now).

But do I buy that specifically Facebook could do it? Yeah, obviously they could. It's not at all surprising that Facebook could quickly launch a Twitter clone. This isn't like the "metaverse", Facebook already runs social networks that are larger and more complicated than Twitter is, and Threads looks to be highly tied into their existing infrastructure.

I could not build a Twitter clone in my free time, but I also don't currently run Instagram.

I'm not very confident, I'm 100% certain that there is at least one person on this site (me) who could not make it work on such a scale.