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Comment by laurencei | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy.

But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel there is a real opportunity for Twitter to streamline its engineering and operational costs?

Is there a breakdown available of where/how they spend their money?

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> when I see things like $100m in losses

Twitter lost $521MM in 2015, $578MM in 2014 and $645MM in 2013. Hundred million dollar losses would be a step forward at this point.

the problem is that by other metrics twitter is doing pretty well. There are very important people who will engage you in conversation (such as here) and ask you to DM them on twitter. That's insane.

What do you think would happen if Twitter didn't exist? You'd probably just email them or something.

huh? If cell phones didn't exist, you would make an arrangement to go meet someone at a certain time and place, and if you both didn't show up, OH WELL. "stood up".

That doesn't diminish from the value and buy-in of cell phones and is a bizarre argument to make regarding the value, if any, of twitter.

I don't really get this analogy. Cell phones are a qualitative improvement in that situation. How is sending a DM an improvement over sending an email?

I guarantee you that every single person sending and receiving DM's has an email address, so you'll have to ask them.

Ask you to what? Deathmatch?

regardless, it is a preferred method of communication (to the exclusion of other types) of many people, and is absolutely huge.

Pretty sure "DM" here stands for "Direct Message", i.e. private message.

Majority of those losses is because Twitter pays its employees large amounts of stock to retain them. Check out this analysis on how exorbitant Twitter's stock based compensation is vs. Facebook: https://medium.com/@fwiwm2c/stock-based-compensation-faceboo...

So if the stock price collapses, losses will decrease?

If their employee compensation, which includes stock-based compensation, decreases then their expenses will go down and their losses will decrease. Of course, presumably their ability to attract and retain employees will also decrease.

A lower stock price could translate into lower stock-based compensation costs but you'd have to dive into the details of what they issue and how they issue it.

That's probably the only good thing about Twitter then. The people making the site should be better rewarded than those at the top, that have less to do with it.

I don't know, but they do seem to need a lot of developers, and developers don't come cheap.

Summingbird and Heron come to mind as quite-probably-very-expensive projects that seem to solve some very Twitter-specific problems. My completely uninformed, biased, pulled-out-of-thin-air suspicion is that said problems are largely self inflicted. It reminds me of Fog Creek's longtime insistence on using their own in house programming language.

FogCreek uses their own in-house programming language? Is there more of a story there?

https://blog.fogcreek.com/the-origin-of-wasabi/

https://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/

I have the same belief. The business could easily be run with a fraction of its current overhead -- IF it was willing to accept a "small is beautiful" existence.

The problem is, "small is beautiful" doesn't get you multibillion-dollar IPOs....

If a company morphs into a non-profit, I can't imagine that would be good for existing holders of options (pointedly including upper management who would make the decision in the first place).

They have 3,860 employees.

Doing what? Holy shit.

Did you like this?

[Yes / No]

Sales, user engagement, quality control...

> quality control

Weren't we talking about Twitter?

Fwiw, this article was posted was just the other day on hn : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314

Yep. And, frankly, even within large or large-ish profitable companies, it's not uncommon to hear people making complaints along the lines of "What on earth do all the people in $XYZ_GROUP even do?" Now, I have no doubt that there are indeed inefficiencies within many companies and those inefficiencies tend to increase with scale. But there probably aren't 4x the number of people in finance, for example, that there need to be.

Their Boston office is almost entirely Fabric/Crashlytics. Almost nothing to do with Twitter proper.

We routinely run 5MM simultaneous TCP/IP connections on a single 12-core box (with Erlang!).

There's no reason for Twitter to need all those employees and all that hardware. If someone can get it at a fire sale price, and reduce it to 100 employees, they can have a nice business.

Whatsapp?

edit: which had a ratio of 1 engineer to 16 million active users when acquired http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...

How big would your salesforce (and supporting components) be?

Twitter's needs are several orders of magnitude greater than that, and those kind of problems have a habit of being exponential.

It's not even the same kind of problem, they've got to tailor their response to every user.

Finally, their investors simply cannot accept 'a nice little business'. They need Twitter to deliver serious ROI.

If Twitter only needed to serve the states, sure. But they need to sync servers globally and provide decent bandwidth to every corner of the developed world. That's a big $ technical problem.

As a point of reference, even the Wikimedia Foundation had almost 300 staff and contractors as of 2015. This is admittedly a lot fewer than Twitter employs today. However, I suspect that even a minimalist Twitter without sales, etc. needs more employees and would have more of other types of costs than Wikimedia.

And frankly, much of the same criticism applies to them. A tiny tiny sliver of their constantly multiplying budget is spent on actually hosting the Wikipedia.

That's somewhat fair. It's certainly true that Wikimedia has a fair number of active projects that haven't had much of an impact. Apparently there have been at least some discussions of streamlining their work although organizations universally find it hard to avoid scope creep.

I'd point out though that, according to Wikipedia :-), the Internet Archive has a staff of about 200 so a few hundred employees/contractors doesn't seem out out of line as the baseline for a non-profit information infrastructure project.

> As a point of reference, even the Wikimedia Foundation had almost 300 staff and contractors as of 2015. This is admittedly a lot fewer than Twitter employs today.

Exactly, that's actually a pretty good argument for why Twitter should downsize substantially.

In no way does Twitter need more than 1,000 employees.

Do your 5MM connections do anything that garners the attention of CNN and Google realtime search indexing?

Do you have backend data services and data analysis jobs behing those 12-core front-end servers?

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