At this point, Discord is probably larger than Twitter even on the MAU metric and is handling far more concurrent users and absurdly more events. They've had to scale their staff in the past two years, but it's still considerably smaller than Twitter will be even even after the layoffs.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028
More details: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...
There’s also the fact that Twitter is in many ways an Ads and News platform. The comes with significant non-engineering overhead.
I don't know how many people it would actually take to run Twitter, but I suspect the number is far lower than most would expect. In particular, the product team has always seemed enormous to me compared to those at other social media companies when comparing customer numbers and velocity of new features.
Doesn't Discord currently have an infinite retention policy?
Something to think about there
Twitter has been the public space, the conflux where everything happens all together & becomes known.
Its laughable to me that anyone would try to compare the two. From a technical perspective, scaling discord is intensely stupidly easier, since few subdiscords have to scale to tens of thousands of active users. From a social perspective, scaling discord is eighty bajillion gazillion times easier, since each subdiscord has its own authoritarian dictatorial owners who have complete & total say over their regime. And twitter is just everyone, all together, one huge vast chat room, and theres a huge obligation to only boot jackasses if they really cross some hard set lines.
Twitter is 100x the engineering difficulty with far far far far far more fan out, far more engagement, and it's a million times more difficult socially to handle. This belittling shade you throw is grossly out of order & ignorant.
Sorry, do you honestly think that Tweets are more complicated than real time video and voice?
At a certain point the difficulty of the problem you are solving far outweighs the difference in scale. And Discord's scale is nothing to sniff at, either.
I am not a Discord expert, but AFAIK, all three are similar in that they run their own instances. A Wordpress with App and DB per site, and I assume mostly similar to a Shopify Store, and every Discord Server where each and every instances of them aren't interconnected.
Twitter is one giant space with the Top 50 account each having a reach of over 40M users.
And for another point of comparison. Twitter has ~250M Global DAU over dozen of time zones. Weibo in China has similar DAU in a single time zone.
Did Twitter require just that many people? Maybe, maybe not. But a 50% haircut with no meaningful basis in role/performance is an indicator that the layoffs were anything but appropriate.
It's like there's anger at being forced to follow-through on the transaction and decided that he's happy to burn the cash.
Edit: Oh there's already an HN post about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488224
1. Could twitter have been built in such a way that it was a stable company with half as many people?
2. Could you chop X% of twitter off and have the remainder of the company want to and be able to restructure and self-repair into a stable company.
I think the answer to #1 is yes, but #2 is a complete mystery to me.
It's the difference between "Could a raspberry pi run linux?" and "Can I remove half material in my mac by weight of my mac and still have it run linux?"
you can make a twitter clone front + back in a night from scratch
they already have the hard “scale” to handle lots of traffic in a stable/fast manner done
how many employees and managers do you need to maintain this + add new features? 7,000 seems pretty high. 3,000 sounds kind of high too but i don’t know the split between departments like legal, HR, etc.
The biggest issue I see is that the employees are just in the dark. They literally have to follow Musk's public Twitter feed to glean anything about what is going on.
It creates a lot of chaos to fire your executive team then immediately start layoffs. Normally, something like this should be organized and clearly communicated and done with care and empathy. This whole process comes across as rough shod and unplanned.
Both companies have to work with 100s of governments, government agencies, advertisers and large organisations across the globe. Hard to do with just a handful of people.
You could automate all moderation and spam filtering and maintain that system with a team of a dozen people. It would work to an extent but with lots of problems.
20 programmers rolling out features? Sure but don't expect too much.
It’s a Silicon Valley thing to treat that as an optional cost center but Elon is fucking around and will find out in Europe and Asia in relatively short order
I’ve been communicating online since USENET days. I find it interesting to see just how many times the same thing has been reinvented and how bad it can be.
You see this with Google and Facebook where their main product was being the one which got momentum at that time and everything else they try to invent is pure trash. The only growth FB has had is through acquisitions and then it's a scattergun approach. These companies are filled with waste.
You write stuff totally differently depending on whether it's going to be maintained by just you, or a team of 50 DevOps etc. Yes you could probably run stuff on N servers instead of M where N << M, thus requiring much fewer sysadmin support etc but that requires that you designed things that way from the get go.
But how much work is it to realign stuff to run this way? Probably initially more work than just keeping it going as is.
It's like, you can't take a ICE car and turn it electric by just cutting out the engine and sticking a battery where the fuel tank was.
My takeaway was this: there is a strong tendency to want to convince yourself you don't have to let go of as many people as you do. But then you just end up doing it in waves and in fact it's much more painful.
The way Musk did this is inexcusable and reprehensible, but I have no doubt that Twitter was incredibly bloated. In fact, one could make the argument that it didn't really matter who got fired, it could be a random decision. Not very empathetic but from the business perspective I think that's probably the case, and Elon Musk may be a nutcase but one thing he knows something about is how tech companies work.
The good employees will find employment regardless. The bad ones won’t.
Nothing to see here. In fact, the world could use way way way more layoffs now.
If I got laid off, other people will have it way worse. I am strong, smart, capable and not ashamed to do even dirty work. Not worried a bit.
However, lack of counterarguments is the weakest form of evidence, and such situations have the annoying property that public opinion is easily swayed and frequently in the wrong direction.
So does anyone positively know that twitter's employees were not doing much useful, or is everyone (including, possibly, Elon Musk) just following their gut feeling?
If a company doubled in size overnight that would be a huge red flag. Same thing for shrinking. Sudden scale changes are really really hard to pull off.
I've not seen anything about what they working, or even a break down by department, job role etc.
The only thing was something like "10 managers for every developer", and who knows if that's true.
I'd love to see some stats, but doubt we ever will.
I'd also love to get some responses from the remaining high performing tech talent about their opinion of it all. There was that guy who recently blew a whistle on the spread/blind-eye of bots and he seemed annoyed with the corporate culture.
On the other hand, every thread here and on social media is probably filled with upset people who have been laid off, hoping to swing public perception against New Twitter.
It's as clear as mud!
Of course the flip side of that is – without these employees you will also not be able to deliver on all these new features. In Twitter's case Elon has decided that whatever new features the previous leadership were cooking are irrelevant now.
When I was at Square and Jack was also working at Twitter, he split his days evenly across both companies.
At Square we were frustrated he wasn’t spending enough time on us.
I don’t know what it was like after mid 2017.
This means that for scalability reasons, it's easy to create a new "Discord server" as it only has to be connected to the other people on that server, and not the whole rest of the Discordverse.
Twitter has no such luxury. So when that one cat video goes hella viral, the system as a whole needs to handle that access pattern, which is actually difficult to scale. We'll have to wait and see how the site handles the world cup in a few weeks, as that is an event that stresses the service.
There are probably tons of other cross-server relationships that I forgot to mention, simply because I only listed the first few that came to my head.
Employees are almost always in the dark prior to getting “the pink slip”. In my 35+ year career have been through multiple layoffs through multiple companies/buyouts both on the surviving and RIF implementation side as well as the side getting cut. Never, ever was there full transparency and this was intentional. Most often the RIF itself is hidden from the general employee populace until the moment it starts happening. Then it starts happening and everyone sits around during the chaos and wonders if they are next while blood and tears run down the halls of the offices. Layoffs are ugly and there is no way to make them less ugly unless gobs of cash are provided to soften the blow. Even then, speaking from experience, it still sucks…just sucks a little less.
Everyone who got RIF’ed from the executives downward should not have been surprised. His intentions has been broadcast publicly from Musk himself for six months. I think this has actually been more transparent than most and perhaps because it’s more public than most, the external scrutiny makes it seem worse than others. It’s not, because as I said before, it’s always ugly.
do you not? have you heard of metcalfe's law? the value of a network is proportional to the square of the nimber of users. so too is the difficulty in supporting & running the vastly more interconnected network.
video is easy as shit. yeah you need bandwidth/transit. but people join & leave infrequently. they are low impact consumers: them joining does not change the total load significantly, it's only a little more linear growth. whatever to that, irrelevant.
twitter is a vastly wider & more connected not-so-micro- cosm. if there are 50m followers, and they tweet, the burden of rippling that event out is huge. tracking & making visible every fav, retweet & reply further escallates the difficulty by more deep deep orders of magnitude.
it's laughable to me that you would try to say discord has a higher event rate than twitter. first, i think thats horseshit, totslly absurdly flat wrong in extreme if you count favs, retweets, et-cetera. but more so, event rate is pointless. it's event receievers that actually count, that matter. and the little intranet micro-world discords are, by any measure, totally pointless & irrelevant by compare versus the all-connected fabric that is twitter. discord has no scale, is itrelevant entirely, in how far it has to spread any given message/event. discord is a large number of the tiniest little fishbowls; it compares not at all to the sea.
Agree. We used to just stick a giant metal pole in the air and ask others to do the same with a smaller pole.
As far as I can tell it is basically a CRUD app with some real time analytics to surface some trends.
You said some stuff about Events bubbling, like if I Retweet something you seem to think there's a lot of complexity there. But as far as I can figure all that does is create a new row in a database somewhere and when someone who follows me fetches their feed, my new retweet gets included in there.
Aside from the scale, what's hard about it? Am I completely missing something?