Comment by mandevil

I don't think this is true. Twitter is able to support roughly as many users as before on only 20% of the employees, but those users aren't Twitter's customers. Their customers were the advertisers who paid them money to advertise to those users. And the majority of Twitter's staff before the acquisition were working for those customers- either keeping conversations to be the sorts of things advertisers wanted to be associated with or categorizing and data-mining the messages that had been sent to figure out the ads to show users or building a advertising management platform for those customers to use or maintaining relationships with all of the advertisers.

After the acquisition, advertising revenue dramatically dropped (to a low of about 1/3 in 2025 though it has apparently recovered up to only down about 50%!), because all of those functions were gutted. This is why Twitter tried to switch to "buying a blue-check" and other premium features (e.g. access to Grok), because they had fired all of the people necessary to run a real advertising business and they needed revenue.

And I know that you don't need that many employees to support Twitter's customer facing business because Bluesky does basically the same thing (message storage/search backend+web app+two mobile apps) and they worked for over a year on just 20 million in total raises (and no advertising or any other revenue)- they did a Series B in 2025 that raised over 100 million, but they were operational for over a year on just 20 million in raise. So yeah, it doesn't take that many people to just present the messages of users to other users, but what Twitter did was to cut back on what they did for their customers and accept the big drop in revenue that came with it, and that's not really proof of anything.