I remember a couple years ago there was a guy claiming he could run Twitter himself on 4 really big servers.
There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
The most straightforward explanation as to why Craigslist remains king is simple: network effects.
Even more people like stable UIs.
Maybe people prefer a "newer" web interface when it doesn't have ads, banners, popups, auto-playing-content, clutter (see yahoo), oversized images, 25 tracking scripts loading, but the lesson seems to be that too simple trumps too complex. An example that gets it exactly right IMHO is gmail.
The OTHER problem with having a nice UI is then people start to want to redesign every year, buy new logos, constantly adapt new design and FE trends (make it flat! make it angular! make it ES6! make it react! now pre-render on the server!).
People who like modern UIs greatly outnumber
people who like ones from the '90s.
Just like in games like shooters or Starcraft the pros actually turn down graphics settings - they don't notice the graphics any more so they don't are!
Same as why after a month you stop noticing the wonderful paintings you carefully selected for your home's walls. I haven't looked at mine in years. That#s why we get reddit /r/funny posts where people replace the family portraits in their parents house and then make a reddit post with the funny replacement picture "2 weeks and nobody has noticed anything yet".
Brains are made to tune out anything
a) not new
b) not used
So you end up with Google and reddit as major websites.
I'm not quite sure where that leaves websites like USAToday, but I highly suspect people learn to navigate it despite the graphics, and the design only serves to attract people initially. I on't think it helps retain users once they've been there for a while, except that keeping it stable helps keeping customers.
I know that Germany's top 1 or 2 news website www.spiegel.de (the other one competing for the top spot is a tabloid, bild.de) decided to stick to a much more text-based linear design even after a recent major redesign.
So while a look at actually successful websites doesn't tell us that simple designs always win your claim certainly isn't supported by the facts. Probably not as-is, and when it applies a lot of terms and conditions apply: What kind of people does a site attract? What kind of content do they serve? How long do people stay, how much do they interact with and use the site? Is it mostly "look at" content, or are there many interactions (reddit: lots of "using", USAtoday: mostly "looking")? Etc. I would make the claim the more people actually use a site (interact with the contents - clicking, navigating, writing, searching in the broadest sense, not just the "Search" function, for example trying to quickly find the top comments on a page) the less important the "fanciness"/"modernity" factor. As you use an interface your brain stops noticing how it looks and concentrates on how it feels (for example when it's always hard to hit that tiny "expand" icon on a comment thread right next to a complete different icon separated by only two pixels, how the icons look like will be lost).
Apartment searching on Craigslist was so bad for so long, services like Padmapper sprang up to supplement it. Now Craigslist has a similar mapping feature to Padmapper, but still far clunkier.
Their forums were never very good, and have largely atrophied.
Sometimes change is good.
There’s WhatsApp. A billion users, and 35 employees, running on less than 100 off-the-shelf servers.
It looks similar but to say it hasn't changed is silly
Maybe 1 person can't make twitter by himself, but I think the necessary number is much closer to 1 than it is to 4,100
>Good point. I think it's easy to forget how much work engineers can make for ourselves (Uber has >700 microservices)...
Worse, are these asshole companies crowding out the H-1B system with all these extra positions?
Only a very strong non changing management that say no to nearly all feature changes can make that possible.
99% of companies and projects is not that. New features, new management, new customers, new priorities, leads to exponential complexity of services and staff numbers. And over-head staff such as sales, support, legal, hr, localisation, etc.
I love Medium and I hope it succeeds. It sounds like their headcount was substantially higher than it needed to be and that this layoff was the right move.
I wish Ev had mentioned all the additional facts that are in this article by one of Medium's investors: https://500ish.com/long-medium-b9ddfe2c3a0a#.ch2benant
Not the number of servers, necessarily, but running a big site with a small number of engineers.
https://blog.linkedin.com/2009/06/15/video-linkedin-scala-te...
(Video is offline)
To which Twitter's Nick Kallen replied on stage, incredulously, "... I don't think that's correct."
I worked with said person and I feel like he would get along very well with Arthur Whitney.
It's definitely easy to make guesses on how an org could be streamlined from the outside. Though Medium needed to grow quickly and that takes having a lot of people to create features, sell, etc. They didn't grow and needed to scale back and change their strategy. I've seen quite a few startups go through continuous hiring booms then layoffs over and over again.