WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by def_true_false on Monday October 25, 2021 @11:39AM (#28989051)

That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any way simpler then having regular account registration, unless you just completely ignore security.

WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop app. The web frontend is still crap. Outsourcing account registration to mobile phone companies is ridiculous (same as Signal) -- in most of the world, it makes it pretty much impossible to preserve your privacy while using WA. Endless nagging about plain text cloud backups makes WA E2E encryption completely worthless, since even if you opt-out, 99% of your contacts will have them enabled.

The impressive part, considering the size of their team, was their backend stuff and scale.

Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC. (Their Android app was laughably bad for the longest time as well.)

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by pessimizer on Monday October 25, 2021 @04:06PM (#28992466)

Whatsapp:Erlang as Discord:Elixir. The effectiveness of the teams might more be the effectiveness of OTP/BEAM for network applications.

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by def_true_false on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @12:52PM (#29002801)

Indeed. Discord even has a handful of blog posts about running into its limits.

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by dnautics on Monday October 25, 2021 @06:37PM (#28994044)

almost certainly part of it but not the whole story.

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by Zababa on Monday October 25, 2021 @12:39PM (#28989909)

> Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC

I think they displaced Skype, mumble and teamspeak too.

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by rexreed on Monday October 25, 2021 @01:33PM (#28990661)

Discord displaced Slack in our organization and we're never looking back at Slack ever again.

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by def_true_false on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @01:37PM (#29003451)

In my experience it displaced Mumble and Teamspeak only for casual gaming. If your group is strict enough about muting/kicking people who refuse to fix their mic settings, Mumble or Teamspeak is generally better -- better quality, local volume adjustments, less resource hungry, open mic not being the default, etc. Think tryhard esport players, or just people with old hardware (probably 90% of CSGO players )).

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by Zababa on Tuesday October 26, 2021 @08:21PM (#29008170)

For my group this wasn't about mic settings but mumble being bad out of the box. Maybe because we didn't pay for the servers and used a free something, maybe because of bad luck, I don't know, but every experience we had with mumble was terrible. For teamspeak, while the voice part is great, the message part is (or was at least in ~2016) lacking compared to discord. We were coming from skype/twitter which had better support for """rich messages""".

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Re:WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers by def_true_false on Thursday October 28, 2021 @06:47PM (#29033016)

Yeah, the text chat is just crap. I think most people use a separate thing for that, probably Steam in the PC gaming use case.

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