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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3011 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?

To put it in perspective, I was able to put together a decent Yelp clone within 8 hours. I had a webserver framework and Adderall but that'll give you an idea of what a ~3x engineer can do. With AI that's probably gotten better.

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