Bay Area nonprofit Signal shows how bloated tech companies have become
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Apart from Signal just generally doing a good job here, I see a few other possible factors:
* Signal doesn't see user content, so it doesn't have a content moderation team
* Signal is designed in such a way that it can't comply with most kinds of legal requests for user data, so it doesn't need a large team responding to those requests
* Signal gets some amount of pro-bono legal help, so it might not have as large an in-house legal team as other organizations
* Signal isn't trying to directly profit from user activity, so it doesn't need to study user activity or engagement metrics with a view towards profiting from them; similarly, it doesn't need to manage relationships with advertisers
* Similarly, it doesn't need to try hard to grow its user base (that would be desirable, but it doesn't necessarily increase revenue much)
* Similarly, it probably doesn't need to try hard to expand into other business areas
(I think these things are generally great. Yay Signal!)
I wish we could see more of this! There's something so elegant about sustainable software, software not designed to grow & expand but to scale efficiently & effectively.
[1]: Or other languages, but I only know English. Please let me know if other languages have such a word.
I like Signal, but it's main weakness is centralisation.
From the company perspective, this is still an alright state of affairs, because even when investors get skittish and less overtly speculative, the company can still improve profit numbers by cutting excess staff. Meanwhile in times of plenty, the hiring of that glut of employees drives the company value higher due to the speculation that they're going to be able to do all the things.
It's dumb, but investing is often a web of self-fulfilling prophecies. If investors think a company will increase in share price, they buy, driving up the share price, allowing the company to sell shares at a higher price, giving them more money to grow.
It's also better from a managing perspective because if you have 10% of bloat and then have a bad quarter, you then have a lever you can pull to show you are getting stuff done. Its how managers smooth their performance, you overhire in good quarters to lower the profitability comps, and then fire to buffer up bad quarters.
Another issue might be that without good management, the marginal utility of each new hire goes down fast. As a company trying to launch new features, fixing management is hard to measure and fix, but hiring is simple to measure and seemingly solves the problem.
That means it is better to make $101 with 20,000 employees than only $100 with 2 employees.
That's not how it work: a rational actor would take the $20 million and invest it in 40 different films costing $.5 million each if he could make an expected profit of $.5 million on each of the 40 cheap films.
In other words, a rational economic actor will keep adding employees (or any other expense) as long as adding employees increases profits, but will not keeping adding assets as long as doing so increases profits because assets have opportunity costs.
To account for the opportunity costs, investors commonly speak of return on investment (profit divided by amount invested) rather than profit, because that is really what they're trying to maximize. Recasting what I just wrote in the new, crisper language, the rational actor will add any employee, any other cost and any investment to a firm as long as doing so increases return on investment.
There is also saturation points for advertising where customers don't respond.
There’s also an element of large companies working on many different things, and the more you silo projects the more people you need because many projects end up duplicating work.
You also don’t necessarily see the output of teams at large companies, potentially for years, so you see large numbers of people working but there’s no external/publicly visible product.
But then you also have “we’re successful right now so let’s pretend that the current growth rate will continue forever and hire accordingly” which is mismanagement that eventually needs to be corrected.
i wonder if companies have seen increased valuations from saying they are hiring for tons of positions without actually following through on the actual hiring
But it's likely they leave that job to their beloved Google, since they haven't changed course even after the compulsory handing over of signing keys to them.
Have you tried switching iPhones while actually using signal and having a conversation history? It takes over an hour to transfer.
E2EE Backups are not impossible. I honestly feel like Signal users are lying about how much they’re using signal.
Is there any reason why most social media sites can't be the same way? Network effects account for a lot of it which is why nobody uses Mastodon even though everybody hates Twitter now.
It's just aggravating that you have tens of thousands of engineers working towards things like ads and tracking when those are actively against most of our interests, and the other side of the scale you have fifty people actually working on things useful to users. How do we fix this?
Meredith & Joshua say Signal costs $14m a year in hosting costs. Storage at $1.3m/yr, servers $2.9m, registration fees $6m, bandwidth $2.8m, and additional servers $0.7m = $14m. They say their total costs are projected to be $50m/year, soon.
I wonder Signal compares to, say, Whats App: another volume-focused messaging system that at least used to be run very lean.
WhatsApp and Instagram similarly serve more users per employee than Signal does, at an average compensation lower than what the average Signal employee makes.
It's interesting if their headcounts are similar, although maybe not entirely unexpected. It doesn't take that many people to maintain a messaging service, so there shouldn't be that much of a difference.
If I'm being generous to Signal, I could say that most of the extra employees at these companies (e.g. Facebook) don't directly work on Messenger itself, but work on the surrounding data collection/ad tech. At the same time, there is a certain number of employees that any company needs just for people to handle the administrative/business side of things, so that explains the extra people working for Signal.
If I'm being less generous, maybe Signal really isn't that different, and Facebook et al just have so many extra people because they are liable when it comes to content being posted on their services. For example they need extra lawyers and content moderators to handle all the stuff that is publicly posted on Facebook. This is something Signal just doesn't have to deal with.
This is all just speculation though, I don't have any numbers that indicate which is true.
Instagram had 13 employees with 31 million users when it was acquired by Facebook.
I don't know what the post-layoff employee account is for Meta Messenger as they did not disclose it in their SEC filings, but pre-layoffs it was several hundred.
This must be a typo, as chat is the very thing that Signal is meant to provide. If you meant group chats, that was a widely requested feature from the user base.
It’s important to keep in mind that many of the features which Signal has been implementing, are already present in WhatsApp. The very goal of Signal is a chat app for the masses (not just us nerds), but one which actually respects privacy. The one feature that nearly everyone would agree is controversial, was the payments and associated shitcoin, but even that is a case where Signal would have feature parity with widely-used apps, and it exists in an obscure corner of the UI.
I don't use WhatsApp and wasn't looking for a WhatsApp alternative. It's also fine if these were features requested by the userbase. Fair enough. But I wouldn't know. I was speaking for myself. I just wanted an SMS replacement that did e2e encryption. Nothing more.