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>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still

>I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Sure, Twitter's product is twitter.com the website, but most criticism of it and ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running: they revolve around 'product' features and sociological ideas on how to organize the community of users, what kind of content to allow/promote and what to censor. Likewise, when people talk about the value they see in Twitter, nobody talks about the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes, because its only role is to provide users with the actual product: people go on Twitter to keep up with the news, see funny posts, feel connected with other people during major events or while watching a TV show. The tech is only relevant in that it allows this to happen. By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website. Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas. Sure, if you want to build new features fast you'll need software developers working hard, but much more importantly, you'll need people who understand the product and the users (in their various different communities and habits). That expertise is much harder to quantify and it seems clear that Musk deems it irrelevant, at least judging by the rollout of his most recent features and the utter failure of Twitter Blue

phowat 4y ago
By that definition no tech company is a tech company. People search things on google because they want to find information , not because of the algorithms that bring that information. People use stable diffusion because they want to create images , whatever the cool ai technology behind it.
- nprateem 4y ago
  Exactly. In the real world no one cares what tech stack you use, whether it's a monolith or not. Businesses serve customer needs. Tech is the tool and is only useful to that extent.
- trashtester 4y ago
  I would argue that when the primary products of a company are technologies, they are tech companies. That would include TSMC, AMD, AWS and much of Microsoft. If your products are just BUILT using technology, well then you may consider yourself in another business. Whether that is a clothing, cars, pharmaceutical, weaponry or social media platforms (sorted by increasing potential for harm ;) Still, even if you're in the last category, it may be fair to consider it "tech" if the main challenges/differentiating factors in creating the product is scienc/engineering/technological rather than for instance design, marketing or organizational efficiency.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Hashicorp might still count
TimTheTinker 4y ago
> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas. Bingo. Hard-core engineering has been the lynchpin of Tesla and SpaceX's success -- they literally won via designing and manufacturing superior physical things. It makes sense that EM would blunder by attempting to reproduce that type of success at Twitter. And it will be a blunder, unless: (a) he plans to build one or more new products (or drastically change the nature of the existing product), and (b) those new or drastically changed products will somehow "win" in a big way that Twitter isn't winning now. But at least to me, (a) doesn't seem likely and (b) seems even less likely.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- threatofrain 4y ago
  On (a) Musk has announced that he's going to go full steam on Vine. We'll see if he can take on TikTok.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    I think this is a really interesting move, that, if Elon hadn't fucked things up so badly, could actually have a chance of making the acquisition work. I think that TikTok is a political issue and the government would like to (and IMO should) kill it because of the Chinese issue, but won't because they fear the user backlash. If Vine could gain enough of a user base to be a credible fallback option, then banning TikTok from the US market would be politically feasible, and Vine would be worth a fortune.
    - 121789 4y ago
      I do not think twitter has the ML capabilities you need to built a TT competitor, and they aren’t just competing with TT anymore. YouTube, IG, and FB are already getting pretty close. Elon would have to something pretty different than just copying them
mpweiher 4y ago
> company is on a website that makes it a tech company Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it. > ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running What makes you think that the desired engineering improvements are about "keeping [the] website running"? It seems to me that what is being sought are engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship. That would be pretty cool, I think. And I can imagine a way of pulling it off, because we actually have such mechanisms in the (non-internet) social networks that make up what Jonathan Rauch calls The Constitution of Knowledge.[1] These mechanisms use network effects to amplify good information and attenuate (but not censor) bad information. What is good and bad? The network decides this by what information it attenuates or amplifies. Bad scientific papers don't get cited, good ones do. The stories in the National Enquirer don't get picked up by other papers, and nobody believes them to be true. This obviously isn't perfect, but it's about as good as it's gonna get, and works pretty well in practice. Internet social media disrupted these mechanisms by its extreme virality, which seems to apply specifically to bad information. It just spreads extremely fast, literally exponentially (not the "very large" meaning of "exponential"). Kind of like a virus. And we learned recently that to suppress a viral pandemic, completely 100% sterilising immunity is not actually needed. You just need to slow it down enough to get the R number below 1, ideally significantly below 1. That's what I think the "Do you want to read the article first before retweeting?" prompts are for: slow things down a bit. Of course "slowing things down a bit" is counter to your economic self-interest and fiduciary responsibility when you're an ad-driven company. So getting off ads completely or at least partly is an important part of it. > Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product Who thinks that? Why do you believe that anyone thinks this? While I don't agree with Elon's approach, the causation would clearly be the other way around: there is a lot of engineering to do to get to a better product (less dependent on ads, more attenuation of bad information without censorship etc.). And all that has to be done while under a bit of pressure, this ain't a Greenfield project with unlimited runway. So yeah, might get a bit "hardcore". [1] https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch/dp/0815738862 https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch...
Animats 4y ago
> the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes As someone is reported to have been asked in a Twitter job interview, when a celebrity with 10,000,000 followers sends out a tweet, how do you deliver them all within 3 seconds?
- hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
  It's easy. Just deliver on client first and gradually to server as best as you can...just a joke
- ForHackernews 4y ago
  Maybe a better question would be: why should we ever care? This isn't insulin delivery. It's kind of tragic the amount of engineering talent wasted on non-problems at social media websites.
  - TomVDB 4y ago
    If it works for a celebrity, it also works in case of a calamity.
    - ForHackernews 4y ago
      Does it? Are you sure? I've read reports that say twitter has historically run special-case servers for e.g. Justin Bieber's extremely popular feed.
      - Lapsa 4y ago
        optly named as "Beliebers"
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Given "3 seconds" the calamity message has to be in the same category as "Duck and cover. Now."
      - 4y ago
timeon 4y ago
> It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Yes like Instagram and others. It was not tech stack that was sold but community of users. I guess Musk's lenders knows this.
coldtea 4y ago
I mean, their original setup during early years (and I'm not making this up) required them to restart their Rails service every day, else it would crash/stuck because of memory leaks. That's not a "tech startup" based on "hardcore engineering", that's a startup based on a social idea and implemented with some trivial tech. Scaling this to hundreds of millions is not exactly a "hardcore engineering" thing either. Mostly regular engineering with some good practices (like share nothing) and devops. Tons of companies do just the same, today you can even do it from your bedroom by building on top of AWS, GAE, etc, there are even templates for this...
- bydlocoder 4y ago
  Do you think they still run Ruby that can't reclaim allocated unmanaged memory? Do you have any idea how their stack looks now?
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >Do you think they still run Ruby that can't reclaim allocated unmanaged memory? No, I don't. My point is their initial success years (which wasn't that off the current product) wasn't some hardcore engineering feat: just a cruder-than-average Rails app. Whatever their stack looks now is irrelevant.
- sciurus 4y ago
  I think you're dramatically underestimating the scope and scale of the problems Twitter had to solve. See the thread below for examples of the sort of solutions they had to build because open source or cloud-hosted solutions weren't available or viable. https://mobile.twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281 https://mobile.twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281
- tekstar 4y ago
  Around 2012-2015 we had someone on-call over the holidays do a redeploy every few days because of Rails memory growth at our now-IPO'd ecommerce giant. This growth impacted every rails app back then, the popular ones more quickly is all..
pentae 4y ago
But.. isn't he trying to turn it into a Super App like WeChat? That means they have to build about 10 other huge products plus every new idea the boss comes out with in by next week. After having their headcount cut in half. Sounds pretty hardcore to me
- andyjda 4y ago
  If he’s trying to do that, then I’d say he should focus outside of engineering and more on product design, marketing, and brand. “How to build a Super App” is not that complicated, from an engineering perspective. It does requires hard work, especially if you want to build it fast. But the big problem is not really how to build it as much as how to make it successful: how to make people use your app over other ones they already use. There are apps like Venmo and WhatsApp that cover WeChat’s use cases pretty well, why should people switch to Twitter? Step one would probably be to get people to trust your app. I don’t think the latest developments at Twitter make it seem particularly trustworthy
incrudible 4y ago
It is not about engineering, it is about conformity. As you implicitly acknowledge, Twitter does not need as much engineering, nor does it need creative engineering. For engineering, Elon needs cogs, preferably those who buy into his cult of personality. As for the hard to quantify work, Elon needs people he can trust. Even if the existing people are good, they can not be trusted. Committing to something like Twitter 2 is as good an oath as it gets. The other alternative is to just fire everyone he did not hire himself.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
Engineering, for most digital products, is as good as much you can ignore it exists. I remember the dread that must be dealing with their process load when I get to a whale page, not when I'm tweeting successfully. Anyway, the thing here is that since EM wants to enact that much change in a short time frame as possible, and guessing he's likely to make mistakes along the way, he'll need engineering work as hard as possible.
greyhair 4y ago
I will also say, this was a great analogy > if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas
torginus 4y ago
> By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website. And Uber is a tech company because its a taxi service with an app. And Airbnb is tech company because its a house renting company with an app. etc.

phowat 4y ago

By that definition no tech company is a tech company. People search things on google because they want to find information , not because of the algorithms that bring that information. People use stable diffusion because they want to create images , whatever the cool ai technology behind it.

nprateem 4y ago
Exactly. In the real world no one cares what tech stack you use, whether it's a monolith or not. Businesses serve customer needs. Tech is the tool and is only useful to that extent.
trashtester 4y ago
I would argue that when the primary products of a company are technologies, they are tech companies. That would include TSMC, AMD, AWS and much of Microsoft. If your products are just BUILT using technology, well then you may consider yourself in another business. Whether that is a clothing, cars, pharmaceutical, weaponry or social media platforms (sorted by increasing potential for harm ;) Still, even if you're in the last category, it may be fair to consider it "tech" if the main challenges/differentiating factors in creating the product is scienc/engineering/technological rather than for instance design, marketing or organizational efficiency.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, Hashicorp might still count

TimTheTinker 4y ago

> Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product is like if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas. Bingo. Hard-core engineering has been the lynchpin of Tesla and SpaceX's success -- they literally won via designing and manufacturing superior physical things. It makes sense that EM would blunder by attempting to reproduce that type of success at Twitter. And it will be a blunder, unless: (a) he plans to build one or more new products (or drastically change the nature of the existing product), and (b) those new or drastically changed products will somehow "win" in a big way that Twitter isn't winning now. But at least to me, (a) doesn't seem likely and (b) seems even less likely.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
threatofrain 4y ago
On (a) Musk has announced that he's going to go full steam on Vine. We'll see if he can take on TikTok.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  I think this is a really interesting move, that, if Elon hadn't fucked things up so badly, could actually have a chance of making the acquisition work. I think that TikTok is a political issue and the government would like to (and IMO should) kill it because of the Chinese issue, but won't because they fear the user backlash. If Vine could gain enough of a user base to be a credible fallback option, then banning TikTok from the US market would be politically feasible, and Vine would be worth a fortune.
  - 121789 4y ago
    I do not think twitter has the ML capabilities you need to built a TT competitor, and they aren’t just competing with TT anymore. YouTube, IG, and FB are already getting pretty close. Elon would have to something pretty different than just copying them

mpweiher 4y ago

> company is on a website that makes it a tech company Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it. > ideas for improvement don't revolve around the engineering aspects of keeping a website running What makes you think that the desired engineering improvements are about "keeping [the] website running"? It seems to me that what is being sought are engineering solutions to, for example, stop the spread misinformation without censorship. That would be pretty cool, I think. And I can imagine a way of pulling it off, because we actually have such mechanisms in the (non-internet) social networks that make up what Jonathan Rauch calls The Constitution of Knowledge.[1] These mechanisms use network effects to amplify good information and attenuate (but not censor) bad information. What is good and bad? The network decides this by what information it attenuates or amplifies. Bad scientific papers don't get cited, good ones do. The stories in the National Enquirer don't get picked up by other papers, and nobody believes them to be true. This obviously isn't perfect, but it's about as good as it's gonna get, and works pretty well in practice. Internet social media disrupted these mechanisms by its extreme virality, which seems to apply specifically to bad information. It just spreads extremely fast, literally exponentially (not the "very large" meaning of "exponential"). Kind of like a virus. And we learned recently that to suppress a viral pandemic, completely 100% sterilising immunity is not actually needed. You just need to slow it down enough to get the R number below 1, ideally significantly below 1. That's what I think the "Do you want to read the article first before retweeting?" prompts are for: slow things down a bit. Of course "slowing things down a bit" is counter to your economic self-interest and fiduciary responsibility when you're an ad-driven company. So getting off ads completely or at least partly is an important part of it. > Thinking that by having engineers go "hardcore" you're automatically going to have a better product Who thinks that? Why do you believe that anyone thinks this? While I don't agree with Elon's approach, the causation would clearly be the other way around: there is a lot of engineering to do to get to a better product (less dependent on ads, more attenuation of bad information without censorship etc.). And all that has to be done while under a bit of pressure, this ain't a Greenfield project with unlimited runway. So yeah, might get a bit "hardcore". [1] https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch/dp/0815738862 https://www.amazon.com/Constitution-Knowledge-Jonathan-Rauch...

Animats 4y ago

> the great distributed system that runs behind the scenes As someone is reported to have been asked in a Twitter job interview, when a celebrity with 10,000,000 followers sends out a tweet, how do you deliver them all within 3 seconds?

hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
It's easy. Just deliver on client first and gradually to server as best as you can...just a joke
ForHackernews 4y ago
Maybe a better question would be: why should we ever care? This isn't insulin delivery. It's kind of tragic the amount of engineering talent wasted on non-problems at social media websites.
- TomVDB 4y ago
  If it works for a celebrity, it also works in case of a calamity.
  - ForHackernews 4y ago
    Does it? Are you sure? I've read reports that say twitter has historically run special-case servers for e.g. Justin Bieber's extremely popular feed.
    - Lapsa 4y ago
      optly named as "Beliebers"
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Given "3 seconds" the calamity message has to be in the same category as "Duck and cover. Now."
    - 4y ago

timeon 4y ago

> It's been more than twenty years since the dot-com bust and people still think that just because a company is on a website that makes it a tech company. Yes like Instagram and others. It was not tech stack that was sold but community of users. I guess Musk's lenders knows this.

coldtea 4y ago

I mean, their original setup during early years (and I'm not making this up) required them to restart their Rails service every day, else it would crash/stuck because of memory leaks. That's not a "tech startup" based on "hardcore engineering", that's a startup based on a social idea and implemented with some trivial tech. Scaling this to hundreds of millions is not exactly a "hardcore engineering" thing either. Mostly regular engineering with some good practices (like share nothing) and devops. Tons of companies do just the same, today you can even do it from your bedroom by building on top of AWS, GAE, etc, there are even templates for this...

bydlocoder 4y ago
Do you think they still run Ruby that can't reclaim allocated unmanaged memory? Do you have any idea how their stack looks now?
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Do you think they still run Ruby that can't reclaim allocated unmanaged memory? No, I don't. My point is their initial success years (which wasn't that off the current product) wasn't some hardcore engineering feat: just a cruder-than-average Rails app. Whatever their stack looks now is irrelevant.
sciurus 4y ago
I think you're dramatically underestimating the scope and scale of the problems Twitter had to solve. See the thread below for examples of the sort of solutions they had to build because open source or cloud-hosted solutions weren't available or viable. https://mobile.twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281 https://mobile.twitter.com/danluu/status/1592774269733601281
tekstar 4y ago
Around 2012-2015 we had someone on-call over the holidays do a redeploy every few days because of Rails memory growth at our now-IPO'd ecommerce giant. This growth impacted every rails app back then, the popular ones more quickly is all..

pentae 4y ago

But.. isn't he trying to turn it into a Super App like WeChat? That means they have to build about 10 other huge products plus every new idea the boss comes out with in by next week. After having their headcount cut in half. Sounds pretty hardcore to me

andyjda 4y ago
If he’s trying to do that, then I’d say he should focus outside of engineering and more on product design, marketing, and brand. “How to build a Super App” is not that complicated, from an engineering perspective. It does requires hard work, especially if you want to build it fast. But the big problem is not really how to build it as much as how to make it successful: how to make people use your app over other ones they already use. There are apps like Venmo and WhatsApp that cover WeChat’s use cases pretty well, why should people switch to Twitter? Step one would probably be to get people to trust your app. I don’t think the latest developments at Twitter make it seem particularly trustworthy

incrudible 4y ago

It is not about engineering, it is about conformity. As you implicitly acknowledge, Twitter does not need as much engineering, nor does it need creative engineering. For engineering, Elon needs cogs, preferably those who buy into his cult of personality. As for the hard to quantify work, Elon needs people he can trust. Even if the existing people are good, they can not be trusted. Committing to something like Twitter 2 is as good an oath as it gets. The other alternative is to just fire everyone he did not hire himself.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

Engineering, for most digital products, is as good as much you can ignore it exists. I remember the dread that must be dealing with their process load when I get to a whale page, not when I'm tweeting successfully. Anyway, the thing here is that since EM wants to enact that much change in a short time frame as possible, and guessing he's likely to make mistakes along the way, he'll need engineering work as hard as possible.

greyhair 4y ago

I will also say, this was a great analogy > if a pizza delivery company decided to invest in better cars because people criticized their pizzas

torginus 4y ago

> By that logic Walmart is a tech company because I can buy stuff on their website. And Uber is a tech company because its a taxi service with an app. And Airbnb is tech company because its a house renting company with an app. etc.