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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

> Well, we generally consider social media companies tech companies. And since they don't really have anything else other than the tech stack (and the users on it, but they don't "have" those), not sure as what you would characterise it.

Consider where the bulk of the revenue comes from and you’ll find out what industry the company is actually in.

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So ads.. as much as I dislike the industry, that's also an eng intensive task, right, as you attempt to predict user tendencies, raise engagement by showing the right shit, capture more data, and engage in the bot arms race.

Interestingly enough, it turns out that Twitter never really built a DR system for performance ads, hence why the brands pulling out can crater their revenue.

What is a DR system?

DR is an acronym for Disaster Recovery, seems to be what they meant (but I'm not sure).

nope, it's direct response advertising, which is the stuff that gets you to click and purchase online.

Both FB and Google have really successful systems for this, and it insulates them massively from brand safety concerns. It appears that Twitter never invested in this (which is kinda insane tbh), and hence the large brand advertisers have a lot more power over them.

> raise engagement by showing the right shit,

The stated goal is exactly to get away from that...

Maybe youre right about them pursuing engagement for its own sake, maybe they're not in that game.

Though, whatever approach you have in discovery, or ranking posts, you're having an impact on your users, and promote a certain dynamic, no? I imagine their next approach won't be the equivalent of letting go of the steering wheel, just maybe not mindlessly chasing the same metrics as they are currently.

Maybe that's a little too social psych to call tech/engineering, but I imagine the data science that would support that would be quite exciting.

Not that I personally disagree that revenue source is a good metric, but that's not the consensus.

Facebook and Google are generally considered tech companies.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+facebook+tech+companies&t=o...

And of course the current attempt is to not have advertising be the primary income source.

Facebook and Google have huge tech operations, but Facebook and Twitter are content distributors and market aggregators, not tech companies.

You can buy a jet or a rocket, but you can't buy a Twitter or a Facebook. You can't even hire part of their stack. (FB has content deals and APIs for advertisers and marketers, but not - so far as I know - direct access to the servers.)

Which is why AWS is a tech company. But Amazon is an online store that happens to use tech.

It's like saying book publishers are really just printers, or FedEx is really an airline and truck driving company.

Some publishers do indeed do their R&D for print operations and logistics. But they're still primarily content houses. Any engineering that happens is a means to a productive end, not a product in itself.

I always thought tech was used as the lever in a tech company..

Doesn't matter what you sell, or service you offer, but if you're leveraging technology to add large numbers of users with a marginal increase in cost, I see that as a tech company.

This generally means there is an internal focus on the technology itself as any improvement can have a direct link to a user's LTV.

But maybe I'm talking less tech company, and more tech led organisation..

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