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.
