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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3008 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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Question for the software engineers:

Is there anything uniquely innovative or difficult to reproduce about the software/codebase for any of the big social media platforms (particularly Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/TikTok/Youtube) or is their hold on the market mostly a result of network effects and their established large user bases?

Edit: Having clarified my thoughts after early responses, I think the core of what I want to understand is this: I know that there a many very intelligent people being paid handsomely as software engineers for these sites. Given the apparent simplicity and minimal improvement in the basic functions (from a user perspective) of many of these sites, what is it that these engineers are actually being paid to work on? Aside from server reliability, what other things do they need all these bigbrains for?

Hardest part to replicate is probably the server reliability because that takes lots of intricate work and the AI-driven systems (mostly recommendation / advertising) because you need data.

This matters different amounts for different companies. But I would say that network effects are a far bigger hurdle; the above is just sauce.

So in comparing, say, this site to Reddit, there's probably some complex code for managing the orders of magnitude greater traffic that themotte just doesn't worry about? Or are you mainly referring to baseline server reliability?

@lagrangian covered some of it: the fault tolerance you need as your system scales up. At that scale, freak incidents happen everyday. I still remember the chaos in my office when Google services dropped for a few hours.

Consider also the kind of bugs you start to get when you have users worldwide, all expecting to use their own language and writing system, and expecting UI and help to be available in that language.

Then moderation. If you’re building an up and coming social media, sooner or later someone is going to livestream a beheading or use it to send plausible death threats, and you’re going to be forced to deal with that.

Of course, most startups fail, so these are problems you want to have. But still problems.

Then moderation.

"A webform I can paste content into for others to see? Guess I'll programmatically post enormous amounts of child pornography into it."

Scott had a point about witches overrunning communities. He was right. The devil and his followers notice your website and have endless amounts of suffering children to show everyone.

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