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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2513 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 10, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Making a UI clone for Twitter should be not hard. Same for reddit, though moderation and customization functions may require some more work. Making full clone - with whatever ads, analytics, system functions, metrics, etc. exist and not visible to the public may be more complicated. Making it work reliably at scale Twitter works at may be a serious project for a serious qualified team, though it's definitely nothing impossible, just needs investment. Reddit I'd say the same with more investment since there are more options, but bare bones clones of both, especially if they don't need ads/analytics and billion scale, would probably not be too hard.

Facebook is a bit tougher due to a myriad of privacy settings and modes which may require some non-trivial approaches to data retrieval, and then there's whatever filthy black magic that underlies their feed algorithm... Plus it has streaming video, which is its own big can of worms, with which I personally never worked but heard it has a lot of dark magic into it too. Instagram/Youtube are also based on that, so the same applies there.

is their hold on the market mostly a result of network effects and their established large user bases?

On the market - definitely. Even if they had some super awesome technologies, it would likely be possible to reproduce the same results maybe with slightly higher costs and slightly less awesome performance, and for social media network effects beat technology any time of the day. Don't get me wrong - you need a lot of technology to run code at the scale of Facebook, and a lot of it goes not only to the site itself but to support the organization that supports it and makes money from it, but code superiority has nothing to do with their success. In fact, I have seen very successful projects (not ones you named, but also famous names) where the code and the technology behind it are very subpar, but as long as it works and brings in the sweet dollars...

Given the apparent simplicity and minimal improvement in the basic functions (from a user perspective) of many of these sites,

You can make a toy twitter in a weekend. Taking it from a toy to billion-users business with billions of revenue is the hard part.

Aside from server reliability, what other things do they need all these bigbrains for?

  • Maintenance - finding and fixing bugs (there are always bugs)
  • Performance improvements - in every big and old software, there's probably something old and slow and tons of money can be saved by making it faster
  • New features - you may not see them, but somebody else does
  • Revenue - for all those sites that means mostly serving ads, counting ads, selling ads, analyzing data from ads and so on
  • Business analytics - not the same as the above, the ad buyers get the above, this one is for the business itself
  • Internal tools - any large project has build systems, docs systems, test systems, etc. and somebody has to work on those
  • Moderation tools - for pretty much every site that allows user comments, if you don't want for the FBI to visit you, you need moderation tools
  • Catching up with new technologies - there's always new browser, new network protocol, new API, new login method, new security feature, new OS, new mo bile platform, etc. that needs to be supported

Probably a couple of dozens of other things I forgot to mention.

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