As a backend engineer, I feel offended by this statement of yours.
I wish people would stop claiming how they could clone a social media app in an afternoon / weekend.
Now, social media apps are worthless without the aforementioned features that would have to be omitted to get it done in a weekend, so obviously there's some hyperbole going on with statements like that. However, on a fundamental level its correct. The technical requirements of building a social media app are small/easy and within the scope of what a startup on a shoestring budget could manage if they felt like it was a good business opportunity.
The issues start to pile up only much later down the road. Maintaining scalability after you cross some critical threshold of traffic gets hard, but you don't have to think about that until you're at or near the threshold anyway. Not a lot of barrier in getting started.
Now, to create a Twitter clone in a weekend when there's no Twitter to go by? Nope.
Well, how about recommended posts / people to follow (ML)? Sponsored posts with a buy button (3rd part integration)? Growth and metrics (data analytics)? A software product is never just about pixels on the screen; and trivializing the engineering effort behind it is insulting to Twitter employees, some of whom are brilliant engineers I know.
My counterpoint is that it's not actually the idea that's interesting, it's the fact that they've convinced lots of people to use it, and have built a system powerful enough to support that scale.
I do think that Twitter's biggest asset are the network effects that it currently enjoys, but I don't think that it would be trivial to recreate what they've done in order to create a Twitter competitor. It's not insurmountable, but it's not trivial either.
The original comment was clearly meant to trivialize the engineering. "One guy can do it in a weekend" is hyperbole, it's something you say when you're trying to communicate that anyone can do something in a relatively short amount of time. If there are a bunch of downvotes I would assume they're more for the hyperbole than people actually disagreeing with whether or not one weekend is enough time to write "non-scaling Twitter", which isn't specific enough for anyone to argue about how long it would take to do.
I fail to see where I am dismissing the accomplishments of the Twitter engineers in pointing out that creating, what is essentially, a RSS feed with a 140 character limit over a weekend would be difficult.
I believe you are complaining over something no one has stated.
There would be no desire or need for advertisement or money making or tracking people when there are no owners, no benefactors but the people using it.
The end is nigh for traditional SV unicorns that offer no barrier to entry in a distributed and anonymous internet.
Twitter should have treated itself like a utility, and focused less on the online advertising race-to-the-bottom that it is sure to lose due to the aforementioned poor user experience and negative sentiment about the platform's future; this announcement is only going to continue to contribute to poor impressions.
The other monetization directions they have played around with---namely selling access to researchers and advertisers, and certifying identities of accounts for celebrities and brands---are a much better fit for the platform, and would have sustained a fast-moving company of 50 hotshot engineers. But the constant pressure to get bigger and bigger has served Twitter poorly. I'm sad to say that I think it will be a ghost town in a few years.