> Making a viable business out of it is hard.

Even Twitter wasn’t able to figure that part out

Arguably Twitter wasn't trying even the most obvious things that were laying on the surface, e.g. account fees, or tweet promotion to one's existing followers, or fees for following, etc.

It's an excellent platform for dissiminating information to interested parties, and it doesn't have to be ads. We have a company's account and we'd paying if they's allow us.

Plus they are bloated as hell, which is also contributing to their business apathy.

And here comes Musk. If he manages to make Twitter profitable he deserves some credit.

Twitter gross profit for the twelve months ending June 30, 2022 was $3.181B, a 11.24% increase year-over-year. Twitter annual gross profit for 2021 was $3.28B, a 39.58% increase from 2020.

True but as with all tech companies at the moment Twitter is also going to feel the pinch and they don't have the business size to wear it as well as the others.

"Only someone with the raw talent and vision of Elon can make twitter profitable" has effectively said by many here.

That twitter is already profitable either means a) the current team are on the same giga-genius level as Elon or b) people are talking absolute nonsense.

Twitter might be better able to survive the pinch - or would have before being lumped with a massive pile of debt. They have 2 costs; servers and staff and one revenue stream; advertising. Simple model and easy to balance the two sides of the equation.

Before the Musk buyout they paid $51mil to service the small amount of debt they had, post the takeover they will be paying ~$1bil to service the debts he has added to their balance sheet.

There are plenty of ways I can think of to make Twitter profitable, but none of them are ethical. There is no good that will come from this.

Making a Twitter clone that could handle 10 users is indeed quite trivial. Making one that would handle 0.4M+ users is not.

Not really. Twitter is really a very simple messaging system with messages being public.

If you take some pub sub like Kafka, Nats or RabbitMQ and bolt some code into it, it really is trivial. You scale by using Kubernetes for services and by sharding and replicating the DBs. It's really easy these days.

Maybe it was more complicated in 20 years ago.

This is pretty much like saying that Dropbox can be trivially replicated with rsync(1) or that one can code Uber in a weekend. Perhaps you can do so at small scale for yourself and your friends. The essence of Twitter (or Dropbox, or Uber) is indeed quite simple.

However there's orders of magnitude more effort that goes into:

* Usability

* Performance

* Stability

* Security

* Localisation/internationalisation and accounting for cultural differences

* Monetisation - ads, payment platform integration, fighting fraud

* Fighting abuse, both automated and not

* ... and thousands of little things that will come up when building something big.

Think of this another way... Twitter would not employ literally thousands of employees if there was nothing for them to do. It is not a charity. I don't buy that building anything that can handle hundred of millions of users is simple.

These are all valid points but none speak to GP's comment that the scale aspect is no longer as difficult to solve.

One can say that aforementioned classes of problems are semantically, conceptually different from scalability, but they will inevitably come up when building something the scale of Twitter and will require mountains of technical work to deal with.

Disagree. Back in 2006 it would have been really hard, but not in 2022. We’ve figured out all sorts of novel ways to scale platforms.

I’ll put it another way. Which job would you rather have? Build a scalable Twitter clone? Or operate the business and make money?

How do you make sure it’s not an epic cesspool? It’s not an engineering problem.