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Comment by glenngillen | Hacker News Reader

This is such a disingenuous take. Twitter isn’t just a web page that displays the last thing saved to a database. It curates a different version of that for the millions of users reading it. That’s before you think about Spaces, the whole advertising platform that supports it, the abuse systems, and the infrastructure required to do all of that at a scale far beyond some bootcamp clone.

HN discourse should be above this.

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Just to give one example, I (and many others) have tens of thousands of blocked accounts. How do you implement that efficiently, at scale? Are you gonna do an extra database check for every single tweet that comes my way? Hopefully not.

And if you think about how Twitter works for five seconds, just consider everything that has to happen when an account with 100M followers posts a tweet. It's an absolute nightmare.

Out of curiosity, what do you mean by tens of thousands of blocked accounts? Are those your bot accounts that get blocked or it is you blocking people from your feed?

I think they’re referring to accounts that they blocked, so that content from those accounts wont show up in the feed.

A bit off topic, but any book/article recommendations for building things at Twitter/IG scale? I know for example IG switched to a "fan-out" approach early on to handle accounts with a lot of users. Would love to learn more about this.

In some previous HN thread, I dialed in on a recommendation for "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann, which I honestly still haven't gotten around to reading so....YMMV. Maybe if you search HN for that book title, it might lead you to other useful discussions?

> HN discourse should be above this.

vomit inducing "Be better" post..

"I disagree with you so your comment shouldn't be allowed here"

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