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A comment on Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users. Parent comment

Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by bushbaba on Sunday January 29, 2023 @10:44AM (#34569096)
dropbox needs sales teams to sell their product to the enterprise. That’s easily 100-200 people. Then you need support for when those enterprise customers complain, easily another 50+. Infrastructure is done in house with massive storage arrays needing 24x7x365 oncall rotation. Again easily another 30+ people. What about their android and iOS apps. Web apps. Etc

It adds up. Sure they probably have fat to trim, but twitter gives us a great case study how often the massive headcount is focused on revenue generation activities the user isn’t privy to.

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Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by humanizersequel on Sunday January 29, 2023 @12:27PM (#34570349)
>twitter gives us a great case study how often the massive headcount is focused on revenue generation activities the user isn’t privy to

Does it? Twitter the product has been fine (barring clumsy design changes driven by Musk) after the massive downsizing, and they still make billions. I was under the impression a lot of the lost revenue was because of Musk's caustic image that made brands pull their campaigns from the platform.

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Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by mmiyer on Sunday January 29, 2023 @01:11PM (#34570883)
Less Musk's caustic image and more the lack of moderation due to the layoffs meant a rise in content that advertisers did not want to advertise next to.
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Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by spookthesunset on Sunday January 29, 2023 @01:58PM (#34571401)
There was an older podcast from Darknet Diaries[0] that was about a very popular chat app called “Kik”. Kik was targeted at teens and younger, with an estimated install base of 1 out of every 3 American teenagers.

Long story short they were bought by some holding company that completely neglected the platform and stopped any kind of moderation, DMCA notice or anything else. The result? It became a huge magnet for trading child porn.

While listening to this podcast I thought of how Elon gutted twitter to the bone and probably fired entire teams designed to deal with this kind of content…

[0] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

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Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by ROTMetro on Sunday January 29, 2023 @04:04PM (#34572730)
Let's see how next year's sales cycle plays out for Twitter. They are banking on providing a McDonald's value menu model, when those big corporate ad buyers are expecting (and need in order to realize value from the relationship and keep their own jobs by ensuring no embarrassment to the company) a personalized service experience.
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