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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

Whatsapp literally has nothing to moderate or do. The infrastructure is basically just a mail man to deliver messages, and that's it. Almost everything is encrypted, there is nothing to moderate really.

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I also have to imagine the graph and recommendation engine exponentially increases the infrastructure requirements and code complexity.

Is moderation a material part of Twitter's headcount? Like is that what 1000 people are doing?

Yes, or hundreds at least. Every platform has to deal with this problem, if they want to keep users and advertisers.

https://sports.yahoo.com/twitter-locks-hundreds-content-mode...

There is also development on social features like topics, the algorithm, spam filters, Ad management and much more.

So its not really a fair comparison.

I could be wrong but I somehow imagined most of this people doing nothing other than banning regular users for twits taken out of context or some other bs activism on Twitter to create "engagement"

just running infrastructure at a certain scale is a really hard problem. You will deal with hosts going bad for arbitrary reasons (some hardware, some software), weird infrastructure problems (networking broken, spurious connectivity in routers, etc), deployments not being rolled out to all hosts in the same version, etc.

You can work around a few of those by having really good tooling, and by trying to offload to cloud providers which do a bunch of the work for you, but it still won't be easy. At the scale at which whatsapp and Twitter operate 50 engineers is nothing - in many products this will be less than the size of teams who just do some basic server rollout and operations.

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