It's definitely not a perfect comparison and technical debt is a very compelling factor. It's a point of comparison, though, with some things more difficult for Twitter but also several things Discord has to deal with that Twitter doesn't.
I don't know how many people it would actually take to run Twitter, but I suspect the number is far lower than most would expect. In particular, the product team has always seemed enormous to me compared to those at other social media companies when comparing customer numbers and velocity of new features.
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I think there’s probably a lot more to consider. Like the fact that Twitter is much older and likely has significant technical debt.
There’s also the fact that Twitter is in many ways an Ads and News platform. The comes with significant non-engineering overhead.
It's definitely not a perfect comparison and technical debt is a very compelling factor. It's a point of comparison, though, with some things more difficult for Twitter but also several things Discord has to deal with that Twitter doesn't.
I don't know how many people it would actually take to run Twitter, but I suspect the number is far lower than most would expect. In particular, the product team has always seemed enormous to me compared to those at other social media companies when comparing customer numbers and velocity of new features.