This is one of those _things_ that I suspect causes many greybeards to grimace.

What's a tweet? We can haggle this up and down so cut me some slack. 200 bytes? 50 bytes? gzipped -90%, 5 bytes.

Holy shit what absurd amount of traffic could a 1gb fiber connection handle?

oh huh 200 million tweets a second. That's silly. How wrong could I be? -- then you run down the numbers and you realize that no matter how wrong you are, a twitter-clone-for-most-people oughta be cheap. The network effects and fuzzy human reasons are their moat, nothing else.

One of those fuzzy human reasons is how amazon EC2 eats your ass. Just gobbles it from stem to stern.

They have pictures and video now. You also have to sort them in real time, check for blocked, mutes, etc, and each tweet is amplified to followers so one tweet requires e.g. 700 copies or 1M copies depending on follower count.

The text part is basically solved at this point, but not quite that easy. I hear dealing with blocks is one of the slow parts.

HN doesn't host pictures or video. I come here well before I do twitter, reddit, facebook, youtube or anywhere else on the internet commons.

I hazard there's a verdant, halcyon prairie between the two zones. The common zone of maximum extraction, and the hypothetical 200$-a-month-operating-costs text only twitter that can service 5% of the entire planet.

Perhaps, but you'd be missing a lot of good memes

When I look at Twitter, I think first about the business model, and then I think about the app. I think, today, it's a lot easier to build Twitter the user facing app, even at scale.

Where I see your engineering headcount blow up is in moderation, legal and advertising; which I think everyone skips over when doing their mental math. Campaign management, targeting, reporting, and optimization on such a large corpus of data is where I struggle to see even a team of 5 building that in a couple of weekends.

> 200 million/sec

OK, but you aren’t just pushing raw ASCII across the wire, you’re getting those results out of a database.

For a weekend clone, someone will probably just use an RDBMS (a very reasonable choice). I’ll be generous and say they can retrieve a given tweet in sub-msec time, say 10 usec. Suddenly, you can only send 100,000 tweets/sec, ignoring all other overhead (which of course you can’t).

I’m sure there is unoptimized code and some unnecessary bloat, but fundamentally there are limits on data retrieval that are very, very hard to get close to.