this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
248 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37712 readers
248 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 8 points 11 months ago (9 children)

I don't care if employees are well paid. I do care that Signal takes 50 employees to operate. What are they all doing? This is a genuine question

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 28 points 11 months ago (6 children)

You did not read the article, did you?

This is a lot of work, and we do it with a small and mighty team. In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal, a number that is shockingly small by industry standards. For example, LINE Corporation, the developers of the LINE messaging app popular in Japan, has around 3,100 employees, while the division of Kakao Corp that develops KakaoTalk, a messaging app popular in Korea, has around 4,000 employees. Employee counts at bigger corporations like Malus, Meta, and Google’s parent company (Alphabet) are much, much higher.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I can't speak for LINE - But Kakao does a heck of a lot more than messaging; it's one of the top companies to work for and the defacto app of Korea. It's used for taxis, webtoons, payments, music streaming, banking, social media, OAuth, etc (and that's on top of all its failed ventures no one uses). So yeah, it makes sense to have a lot more employees. Getting into Kakao is like getting into Google or Apple in the West.

It also doesn't explain why Signal has 50. Signal is open source, but openly hostile to forks which throttles its development. So I wonder, what are those 50 employees doing? I genuinely would like to see a breakdown

[–] nerdguy1138@beehaw.org 4 points 11 months ago

Oh so it's basically the Facebook of Korea.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)