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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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