Well, let’s see. IG was acquired by FB in April 2012 and had somewhere above 10M users at the time. Around the same time, Twitter had around 140M accounts in US alone, nearly 500M worldwide. Do we want to continue the apples vs oranges comparison further. Happy to keep citing scale differences. :)

Source: Wikipedia pages for both

Do you also have a source showing that the number of engineers required scales linearly with number of users?

It in fact scales exponentially.

Internal sources only, but topics like regionalization, localization, bespoke caching implementations, hardware-level optimizations, content moderation, policy adherence (e.g. GDPR, CCPA), long-term monetization (especially if supporting advertisers as a direct customer), 3P support, public APIs, documentation, SRE (a fledgling product doesn't need 5 9s), analytics (internal and for advertisers and 3P partners) and for the most part, security, are non-exhaustive examples of things you can mostly ignore when your product supports 10M users that are unavoidable when your product supports half of the US, a good chunk of the rest of the world, and other large businesses that consume you at large business scale.

You listed a bunch of requirements without an argument that fulfilling those requirements actually entails an exponential growth in employees.

That's true, but also hardware and software hasn't stood still in the past decade.

I'd definitely like to hear more about the scale differences. So far at best, you've accounted for one order of magnitude. How do you explain the second?

> Well, let’s see. IG was acquired by FB in April 2012 and had somewhere above 10M users at the time. Around the same time, Twitter had around 140M accounts in US alone, nearly 500M worldwide.

So increasing your user base by one order of magnitude requires increasing the number of employees by more than two orders of magnitude? Rate of employee acquisition should probably never outpace rate of user acquisition, so I think that's a pretty clear sign that something was off.

Was instagram selling advertising to giant brands yet when they were bought? Sales staff balloon because they are really good at selling themselves to hiring staff and also because any brand that pulls in more than $10M in revenue expects to be treated like the only king of the world in pretty much every interaction and literally requires handlers, and the number of handlers required scales with the size of the brand.

You can potentially solve the handlers issue by being ruthlessly cutthroat. If they want hand-holding, they can hire a third party to manage advertising on Twitter. They probably already do in fact, so if you are a third-party, do your job and know your tools.

As for sales staff being good at selling themselves, agreed, so maybe Musk's ruthless firing spree will end up as a good thing. Maybe.

>You can potentially solve the handlers issue by being ruthlessly cutthroat

No, that just results in those businesses and brands leaving you, unless you can provide them a LARGE revenue stream that is impossible to get anywhere. A large brand will absolutely give up a little money just to spite you and your company for not treating them like god.

In my mind the issue is less “is it conceivable that a small team can run a bare bones version of the Twitter app with hundreds of millions of users” and more “can a small team manage a big distributed system that was designed to be managed by many different teams, with no handoff period”.

> I do know Instagram had 13 employees when Facebook bought them.

It was also pathetically unprofitable, and had serious problems with inappropiate child photos, gore etc.

Some of those problems require man power, there is no 10 man team who are very good at devops who can solve that.

The person I responded to was specifically talking about the tech stack. I wholeheartedly agree that the difficult part of running a service like Twitter lies in the soft problems.

But the profitability requieres a big tech team regarding ads and recomendation algos etc.

And moderation requieres humans but also a big tech team regarding bots, known offenders, etc.

it's not exclusively a tech problem but in a tech company tons of those responsabilities will be handled, addressed and solved by product and tech teams. And on 10 people, no matter how smart, they got no chance

Child safety advocates have praised Elon for his quick action in removing inappropiate child photos from Twitter, as well as dealing with the hashtags traffickers use. Something people have been asking for years for and little was being done.

Nobody knows what the secret hashtags are. The claim is unverified and unverifiable, and probably signal-boosted from a single wild tweet.

Unless you wish to ask for people to openly post child porn guidance you're gonna have to rely on the people actually following the issue for years. For what it's worth business insider claims they checked said hashtags and the content was gone[0]. Said user is allegedly going to release today an article in a corporate outlet that did fact check it[1] so we'll see.

I have no reason to distrust her and can't see any reason for her to lie about it.

0: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-child-sexual-... 1: https://twitter.com/elizableu/status/1595109108608544768

> Musk responded to the tweet saying that the issue is "Priority #1."

Obviously it's "top priority"! Is there any other acceptable answer? This answer means nothing except that he saw the question.

The reason for distrust is that the Q people have been insisting that Trump was secretly engaged in an enormous battle with pedophile rings, and using the typical, constant, and normal arrests of pedophile rings as proof. Now, another claim of a right-wing hero bravely picking up the sword and vanquishing the forces of evil, but again, no evidence! No proof at all. We just have to take her word for it, eh?

Of course, she can't give out the hashtags and allow independent verification, yet somehow hordes of pedophiles already know these hashtags? (How are they publishing those to each other, and if they have such a channel, why aren't they using that instead of Twitter?) So who is she keeping the hashtags from then?

So I remain super skeptical.

>Obviously it's "top priority"! Is there any other acceptable answer?

the answer means nothing, yes, the supposed good action that triggered the question is the important thing. The only relevant part of the article is them claiming to have verified it, so it's Business Insider's word added to hers.

I'm not even going to touch the conspiracy theory madness, it's irrelevant, and the person in question has zero signs of being afflicted by it, her entire existence in the platform seem to have been focused on actually working against the issue.

Its also been pretty widely publicized twitter's issue with CP[0][1][2][3], and given how hastags are the way you find things in the platform it's natural that's the way they'd do it.

> Of course, she can't give out the hashtags and allow independent verification, yet somehow hordes of pedophiles already know these hashtags?

She is giving it out to journalists and apparently they are confirming it, it's not a tragedy that someone does not want to amplify possible child abuse, actually teaching even more pedophiles how to find it.

> How are they publishing those to each other, and if they have such a channel, why aren't they using that instead of Twitter?

Twitter is protected by its sheer scale, is huge making detection harder than dedicated sites, and is far far more stable, safe and accessible than some darknet website they'd have to run themselves on average.

> So who is she keeping the hashtags from then?

From the general public to not further humilliate the victims, from other pedophiles because its not some hivemind, the list goes on.

Not everything is about Trump, and you're falling for the same level of conspiracy if behind all this out of all this you see pizzagate Qanon.

[0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-brands-blast-tw... [1]:https://nypost.com/2021/01/21/twitter-sued-for-allegedly-ref... [2]:https://www.theverge.com/23327809/twitter-onlyfans-child-sex... [3]:https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/child-sex-abuser-twitter

I honestly don't understand how anyone reaches 2022, given all that we've experienced in the past several years, with enough faith in journalism remaining intact to pay any credence to "X happened, but we won't show you any evidence. Trust us."

For me, such a story is totally meaningless. It conveys no information about reality either way. The chances of truth or falsehood are exactly equal.

We have different epistemologies.

> from other pedophiles because its not some hivemind

Did you think critically about this? If so, for how long?

How are the pedophiles teaching the sooper-seekrit hashtags to each other? Is in the manual "So You've Decided to Become a Pedophile" that they send to new members of the vast conspiracy?

The problem with these conspiracy theories is that any inspection of how they might actually operate, day to day in the real world, is always neglected and handwaved away.

The whole point of a hashtag is that they spread virally, or are obvious terms. The very idea of a secret hashtag is an oxymoron.