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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?

Network effects, mostly.

The last novel model was TikTok's: short vertical videos fed to you by an algorithm forever. Everyone replicated it as quickly as possible, but couldn't defeat TikTok.

Twitter is another good example: no amount of money spent by FAANGs helped them build a viable clone. Bluesky is thriving purely on network effects.

The engineers are paid to lower operating costs and improve engagement with the ads. Social networks are some of the biggest datasets in the world, and people expect them to work for free and 24x7: every dollar you spend on running them is coming out of your ad revenue. At this scale it makes sense to do things like develop your own compression algorithm for data and get the major browsers to support it to lower your traffic costs by 1%. Or to hire the author of the programming language your software is written in and to give him a team to improve its performance.

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