Something to think about there
Twitter has been the public space, the conflux where everything happens all together & becomes known.
Its laughable to me that anyone would try to compare the two. From a technical perspective, scaling discord is intensely stupidly easier, since few subdiscords have to scale to tens of thousands of active users. From a social perspective, scaling discord is eighty bajillion gazillion times easier, since each subdiscord has its own authoritarian dictatorial owners who have complete & total say over their regime. And twitter is just everyone, all together, one huge vast chat room, and theres a huge obligation to only boot jackasses if they really cross some hard set lines.
Twitter is 100x the engineering difficulty with far far far far far more fan out, far more engagement, and it's a million times more difficult socially to handle. This belittling shade you throw is grossly out of order & ignorant.
Sorry, do you honestly think that Tweets are more complicated than real time video and voice?
At a certain point the difficulty of the problem you are solving far outweighs the difference in scale. And Discord's scale is nothing to sniff at, either.
do you not? have you heard of metcalfe's law? the value of a network is proportional to the square of the nimber of users. so too is the difficulty in supporting & running the vastly more interconnected network.
video is easy as shit. yeah you need bandwidth/transit. but people join & leave infrequently. they are low impact consumers: them joining does not change the total load significantly, it's only a little more linear growth. whatever to that, irrelevant.
twitter is a vastly wider & more connected not-so-micro- cosm. if there are 50m followers, and they tweet, the burden of rippling that event out is huge. tracking & making visible every fav, retweet & reply further escallates the difficulty by more deep deep orders of magnitude.
it's laughable to me that you would try to say discord has a higher event rate than twitter. first, i think thats horseshit, totslly absurdly flat wrong in extreme if you count favs, retweets, et-cetera. but more so, event rate is pointless. it's event receievers that actually count, that matter. and the little intranet micro-world discords are, by any measure, totally pointless & irrelevant by compare versus the all-connected fabric that is twitter. discord has no scale, is itrelevant entirely, in how far it has to spread any given message/event. discord is a large number of the tiniest little fishbowls; it compares not at all to the sea.
Agree. We used to just stick a giant metal pole in the air and ask others to do the same with a smaller pole.
As far as I can tell it is basically a CRUD app with some real time analytics to surface some trends.
You said some stuff about Events bubbling, like if I Retweet something you seem to think there's a lot of complexity there. But as far as I can figure all that does is create a new row in a database somewhere and when someone who follows me fetches their feed, my new retweet gets included in there.
Aside from the scale, what's hard about it? Am I completely missing something?
I don't know how many people it would take to run Twitter, but I suspect the number is far lower than most would expect. In particular, the product team has always seemed enormous to me compared to those at other social media companies when comparing size and velocity of new features.
Doesn't Discord currently have an infinite retention policy?
There’s also the fact that Twitter is in many ways an Ads and News platform. The comes with significant non-engineering overhead.
I don't know how many people it would actually take to run Twitter, but I suspect the number is far lower than most would expect. In particular, the product team has always seemed enormous to me compared to those at other social media companies when comparing customer numbers and velocity of new features.
I am not a Discord expert, but AFAIK, all three are similar in that they run their own instances. A Wordpress with App and DB per site, and I assume mostly similar to a Shopify Store, and every Discord Server where each and every instances of them aren't interconnected.
Twitter is one giant space with the Top 50 account each having a reach of over 40M users.
And for another point of comparison. Twitter has ~250M Global DAU over dozen of time zones. Weibo in China has similar DAU in a single time zone.
There are probably tons of other cross-server relationships that I forgot to mention, simply because I only listed the first few that came to my head.
This means that for scalability reasons, it's easy to create a new "Discord server" as it only has to be connected to the other people on that server, and not the whole rest of the Discordverse.
Twitter has no such luxury. So when that one cat video goes hella viral, the system as a whole needs to handle that access pattern, which is actually difficult to scale. We'll have to wait and see how the site handles the world cup in a few weeks, as that is an event that stresses the service.
At this point, Discord is probably larger than Twitter even on the MAU metric and is handling far more concurrent users and absurdly more events. They've had to scale their staff in the past two years, but it's still considerably smaller than Twitter will be even even after the layoffs.
Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14748028
More details: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/08/real-time-communicat...