A decent team could reverse engineer a version one in a month | Hacker News Reader

A decent team could reverse engineer a version one in a month

twitter.com

37 pointsaresant61 comments

There are so many alternatives, like Mastodon -- I never quite understood this complaint. Why don't these people just start using the alternatives instead of using Twitter? It's because Twitter has the audience. Why does the audience use Twitter? Because they want a moderated platform. Dealing with spam, showing recommended tweets (picking who gets amplified/distribution is another form of moderation btw), and ensuring harmful content isn't allowed to reach critical mass.

The revealed vs stated preferences here are so obvious that tweets of this genre seem to be likefarms...

On the contrary, Twitter’s users generally seem to believe that Twitter’s moderation is abysmal, and they have clamored for years for it to be better than it is, on a variety of axes.

People largely haven’t moved off Twitter because the people they want to follow haven’t moved off Twitter; the people they want to follow mostly haven’t moved off Twitter because why would they move away from where their audience is?

>On the contrary, Twitter’s users generally seem to believe that Twitter’s moderation is abysmal

If that's the case why would anyone move to a platform that has less moderation?

Twitter is the bottom of the list when it comes to MAU among social networks (FB, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and Reddit all have a higher MAU). Sure Twitter is overrepresented in the tech world, but it's not that captive. There are larger audiences elsewhere. And, to be fair, almost every other platform has a heavier hand when it comes to moderation than Twitter. Twitter still allows porn!

Twitter, is probably the best product you can build when it comes to a text based, real time, social network. If there was a better product people would have moved. When it comes down to it, most complaints come down to "I wish the Twitter moderation rules applied to everyone else but me".

On Twitter, little guys with benign accounts will get randomly suspended over essentially nothing. And yet, you can get spammed by people constantly creating new/alt accounts calling you the N word in your replies and Twitter does jack shit to them even after multiple reports (happened to me personally). Meanwhile the big names, for the most part, get to say whatever harmful nonsense they want and have immunity.

It's the worst of every world.

I think the problem with twitter clones is that they're free speech absolutist, which in principal is good, but it obviously attracts the worst and others get turned off. I checked out alternatives and regularly within the first page you can see truly cringy stuff (name your -ism). How about an alternative that just has a sensible policy about what can and can't be posted? Or a "bring your own filter" feature where you can pick your filter and discover algo, and people can create open-source or private versions you can pick from. Want the wild west? There's a filter for that. Want something like twitter but without inflammatory politics? How about twitter with slightly looser censorship? All could be crowdsourced filters

But it has to be easy. No separate domains or configurations. One shared global state but you can swap out rules.

> How about an alternative that just has a sensible policy about what can and can't be posted?

I'm reminded of https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

"""The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong."""

If alternatives also decide to ban the stuff that Twitter bans, then (at best) that's only appealing to the narrow range of content bad enough to get banned by Twitter, but wouldn't be 'sensibly banned'.

I think it sounds good in theory, but I wonder for the 'morbid curiosity'. I've found it's very common to just peek into the latest topic, even if it upsets you greatly.

Right now, whenever I see JK Rowling tending on twitter, I get frustrated and I know I won't like what I will read, but I click through anyway.

If it's as easy as you suggest, it's easy to disable the filters and expose yourself to this negative content, even if you know its not nice for you

I don't get why any of the social media platforms WANT to be involved in censorship. Just let people pick their own filters. It seems about 50% of the hate on Facebook involves them trying to be involved.

The only answer I can come up with is that they feel their ability to control engagement completely is more important than user control.

Legacy media like to drum up shock stories about social media sites to defund them through grilling companies advertising there.

> "bring your own filter" feature

This is literally the solution.

Not really. Those who hate free speech want to control your speech. There have been more than enough times the same folks who hate a subset of speech have complained about the same speech in private signal channels.

Free to impart and to receive.

The government can’t choose what I hear, but I have a right to listen to what I want.

Yeah you should have the ability to block who ever you want.

Indeed. There was a poll done earlier this year[1] that reported 27% of all voters (48% of democrats, 14% of republicans, and 18% of independents) support fines or imprisonment for "individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications".

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/par...

Take anything Rasmussen says with a grain of salt. They are not out-and-out fraudulent, but they are generally the least accurate of all major pollsters.

Also, there's this:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/531830-rasmussen...

They weren't great in years past, but endorsing a coup d'état is pretty bad in my eyes. I didn't know this previously; I'll have to adjust my opinion of them.

> Take anything Rasmussen says with a grain of salt. They are not out-and-out fraudulent, but they are generally the least accurate of all major pollsters.

>Also, there's this:

>https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/531830-rasmussen...

>They weren't great in years past, but endorsing a coup d'état is pretty bad in my eyes. I didn't know this previously; I'll have to adjust my opinion of them.

How did you get the impression that they were "endorsing a coup d'état"? As your article said, they outlined a scenario where that could happen, but I couldn't find anything that's an endorsement of it. If anything, the fact that they quoted stalin by name makes me think they're against it.

First off, because everything they said about the law is bullshit. The vice president has no authority to throw out votes. This is a complete fabrication. Either the writer legitimately believe this is legal, in which case they are clueless, or they know it is illegal, in which case they are lying. Either is bad.

Second, because of this:

>If they are (as more than 70% of Republicans believe) certificates from non-electors appointed via voter fraud, why should he open & count them?"

"Many people are saying": the classic weasel words. They can endorse this with an appeal to the authority of common knowledge and discuss it as if it's a reasonable hypothetical, all the while maintaining plausible deniability that they're just repeating what "everyone knows". Well, I don't find it plausible.

Read the replies to the tweets. The fascist types definitely interpreted it as Rasmussen agreeing with their position,. The non-fascist types interpreted it the same way. People do not communicate with formal logic. The meaning of speech is the meaning people take from it, not the meaning you would get from dissecting it on a whiteboard.

It's ironic that the guy who makes you sign a TOS before he'll sell you a car is bitching about the Twitter TOS..... on Twitter.

That's like, double irony.

Elon complains on Twitter for not accepting freedom of speech? He fired an employee for posting a video on youtube https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tesla-empl...

It's less about freedom of speech and more that the individual violated their NDA.

Tesla is not a public forum. I don't know what you expect the response to be for an employee that violates terms of service of their employer and posts public criticism about the company and product. Whats the appropriate response? If you got a job at a bank and posted on social media about how the bank is evil, do you think you'd keep your job? Have some common sense.

I think that's different than complaining about censorship (often at the behest of politicians) on ubiquitous public forums. And the rules are not clear and you may not even get an explanation. And all major platforms and even infrastructure providers like AWS more or less act in unison. I think it's a valid complaint.

Twitter is also not a "public forum". They are a private company (exactly like Tesla) and can choose what people and what content they want to serve.

This. I don't know why people think that Twitter and other social platforms are public forum. People blocked by Twitter don't lose their freedom of speech. Besides, what most of the people crying about this want is not freedom of speech, it's freedom of repercussions.

Exactly. If Twitter bans you, you're free to make your own Twitter or other speech platform. That is, the internet itself, not the private sites on it, is the public square.

If what you have to say is so revolutionary, surely people will be coming to your new site in droves to hear your amazing commentary they can't get on Twitter.

Except nobody actually cares about what these people have to say, or else they'd have already done so. Half the time you can bet it's some middle aged dude pissed off that he got reported for calling someone a slur or spreading 5G-mind-control-level conspiracy theories.

And refuse to bake the cake?

This isn't equivalent. If Twitter bans someone for the sole reason they are religious, then you could argue that as a public accommodation they are discriminating against that individual. That would fall in line with the case about a refusal to bake a cake.

PG with the useless takes again, and Elon complaining that you can't put out shit takes on Twitter. Yep, seems par for the course for these two.

If you disregard scaling challenges (which is fine for an initial launch when there won't be hundreds of millions of users at once), and skip most of the advanced features (ad network, DMs, spaces, ML recommendations and trends), I'd say building a baby version of Twitter is actually possible to do in a month with a small team. Heck so many of these alternatives already exist.

Of course the much greater challenge is overcoming the network effect. How exactly do you convince the entire Twitter userbase to switch over? Why would they even want to switch? Only the extremes on either end are using the app as an ideological battleground. The majority in the middle are perfectly happy with the current curated experience.

The NSA has eChirp, a classified clone of Twitter. No scaling problems since it isn't on the Internet and classified networks have at most a few hundred thousand users at a time, but I don't think it took them anywhere near a month to create this. I'm not sure it took a week.

I’d be surprised if a team could enumerate all of Twitter’s features in a month. Most of the complexity is in content moderation and ad targeting, neither of which are transparent to users. They certainly don’t bring $1 billion a quarter just by serving tweets.

The assumption was that feature parity with _version 1_ should be attainable in that timeframe. Not the current state of the platform.

> The assumption was that feature parity with _version 1_ should be attainable in that timeframe. Not the current state of the platform.

No, what Paul meant was the "initial version", not Twitter's version 1. Of course he didn't list what features this MVP has. It's this flippant bullshit that shows Paul walks around the room giving feedback and never actually builds.

I initially thought this was PG larping the HN trolling position of “this tech could be easily replicated” (1) but reading the entire thread I’m not sure sure!

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Trolling?? Also why do people keep ignoring the "For a linux user" part?

But to the topic, why would it be non-serious? If you can't make a basic clone of most websites in a month, you're not a very good web dev team.

> Also why do people keep ignoring the "For a linux user" part?

Because people like to feel superior and it is more fun for them to be trite while doing it; it is the same reason why people keep referencing the early reviews of the iPod, ignoring that that device did suck and only became popular years later when they made both product improvements and introduced iTunes.

> If you can't make a basic clone of most websites in a month, you're not a very good web dev team.

Also: 100% this. People then like to whine about "but the scale is impossible to pull off" and frankly that isn't even true either (though to do it cost effectively I agree would be difficult, but if you don't know how to throw together something very similar to Twitter that could even handle billions of users with just a few engineers in a month in 2022 using all of the tooling we now have at our disposal then you are clearly an amateur)... the hard part isn't building the tech now, it is bootstrapping an actual community, which maybe Elon could do? or maybe he couldn't. I'm pessimistic, but I also wouldn't be shocked if he pulled it off.

...billions of users? Seriously? I take your point about scale not being impossible.. but Twitter seems to have roughly 250 million active users. So claiming that anyone ought to be able to scale to billions is perhaps optimistic of all of our skills.

Making a basic clone is not what makes Twitter Twitter.

The line 'de-facto public square' to me suggests democratic oversight via regulation (i.e. what the First Amendment is) but interestingly no-one else in the thread or here seems to even consider that as worth mentioning. Bit of a collective blind spot that reveals a lot.

edit: I wonder how much the new EU proposals would do for this. Probably nothing directly, but the introduction of competition should let people vote with their wallets in terms of what kind of free speech they want to support.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30819184

(in response to the original tweet) People are governed by social rules in the "Town Square". If you say something people don't like, you will face consequences (whether that be legal, social or physical).

The same is always true on twitter. It's just that you can reach millions of people rather than hundreds. I don't know if our social or legal systems have caught up with this international instant explosion yet.

Until that happens, I'm all for moderation (even if it can ban the wrong parties sometimes). I see it as an overall net positive.

People joke about 'safe spaces', but it's necessary. People live their lives online now. And we increasingly don't have control over what we see and read. The spaces absolutely need to be accommodating to the most people as a consequence of that

But billionaires need the safe spaces. Before twitter the rich would stay behind their castle walls rather than spouting off in public, or they'd do well enough to bring an army with them when they want to go to the town square.

Elon seems to be aghast at the idea that twitters Praetorian guard doesn't exist entirely for his benefit.

Occupational hazard of being a titan among mortal men I guess.

> People are governed by social rules in the "Town Square". If you say something people don't like, you will face consequences

People are less confrontational in real life, than the internet would make it appear.

On the downside the internet also tends to remove nuance from content, thus it seems hard to assess if a comment belong to abrasive characters, people that badly express their controversial point of view, or trolls using sarcasm.

At least that's my impression about Twitter uproars I see spill to other platforms ocassionaly.

Disclosure: I have no idea what the original context is, which sparked of the Twitter clone comment by pg.

Twitter’s core functionality is trivial. What’s not trivial is the business side.

You can build something like Twitter in a month, but you cannot build the nightmare that is the Twitter API. You will be billed like the AWS, perhaps a bit richer. You will be suspended from regular use within limits, you will be given a very short backlog and Twitter will gatekeep any and all remotely useful information.

I'm surprised that no one mentions that the value in Twitter is not in the software and hardware but in the community around it. Yes, you can rewrite the software and duplicate every other aspect but getting a world wide community to use it is a multi-billion dollar project if it's even possible to replicate. Not to mention the years it will take to get people to use it.

If it was software and hardware only, it would have been done already since people are constantly calling for its replacement. There's only one twitter. Looks like it's here to stay until people get tired of it.

I don’t see why anybody holding stock in an Elon Co. would want him running his mouth with potentially fewer restrictions?

Pedant here: if all you want is a clone, do you really need to "reverse engineer " it? In the end, don't you only care about whether you have a working micro-blogging site or not? If that's the goal, isn't it just regular engineering? Do you really need to replicate twitter's internals exactly?

Copying the entire set of features (tweets, friends, likes, lists, DMs, et al) and figuring out how they are put together still qualifies as reverse engineering

So what's the difference between regular engineering and reverse engineering? If I asked some software engineer to make a micro-blogging site with "tweets, friends, likes, lists, DMs, et al", does that count as reverse engineering?

Well that's not enough information to give to an engineer. You just listed several huge features by simply naming them. That isn't a spec. If you said "... like Twitter" then that would require some form of reverse engineering on the developer's part.

its all about the network. and a distant second is making it scalable and robust. moderation and UI design is important once you have scale so that normal people feel comfortable using it. IMO twitter is failing pretty badly on the last two and if a well funded competitor came along, it wouldn't surprise me if twitter goes the way of myspace

Back in 2008, I guestimated the flow rates (in a spreadsheet lost thanks to google) and figured a single PC could handle all the tweets. Other machines would see a streamed copy of the database, and handle showing the users their feeds.

I think Paul is right. If you want a stream of short messages (text only, with a fixed number of BYTES length), it wouldn't be hard at all. Especially in a world full of gigabit ethernet networks and SSD storage.

> text only, with a fixed number of BYTES length

Ever heard of Unicode?

Yes, I've heard of it, which is why the length restriction would be measured in BYTES, not characters, or glyphs, or whatever. To prevent any kind of buffer overflow.

You can see where some of the HN commenters get their outrageous takes from. You can "reverse engineer" Twitter in a month if you had .01 [1] the traffic and none of the advertising elements.

1 - https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2013/new-tweets... From 2013 Twitter peaked at 143,199 Tweets per second.

Free speech is only in reference to government punishment. I can spout off and the government won't punch me in the mouth. The person standing next to me, however, might.

I don't understand why we keep expecting private companies to behave like the government.

"free speech" (the idea) =/= "1st amendment" (codified in law).

A comment from a few months ago explains it in more words:

> I don't think that "common misconception" actually exists at all, that's just a rhetorical defense used by people who are trying to stifle free speech in practice.

>Many people want free speech, as a concept, ideal and aspect of living a safe and fulfilling life. When they are being deprived of that right, if they are in the USA, the people depriving them are quick to point out that the first amendment doesn't protect them... but that's completely irrelevant.

>As an example, imagine the constitution had a right which said "The federal government will not murder you". Then today, some people are murdering everyone they dislike, and when some people point out "we're afraid of getting murdered and want to live in a society where there isn't murder" and immediately internet commentary is full of people responding "Actually, you only have a right to not be murdered by the federal government, you're confused about how your murder rights work".

>It's not that the oppressed are confused about what's written in the Bill of Rights, it's that they care about the underlying ideal in a broad and practical way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29486077

The first amendment is popular. True free speech absolutism isn't quite so popular. The average person would agree that slander and libel are bad, for instance.

A billionaire claiming that twitter is harming free speech. I fear that I've seen it all, now.

a decent dev can reverse engineer a firmware in one day.

if you throw a team at a primitive ruby app, it will cost a month, sure

or 20 minutes https://twitter.com/dhh/status/738333393688100865

Reply on news.ycombinator.com