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Social Platform Design at Scale

HardSystem Design00:00
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Your question is Social Platform Design at Scale. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Design a social media platform similar to a very popular existing one (scaling, DB schema, API design; asked about sharding; requirement was ~10,000 MAU). Asked in the Onsite round 3 stage.

Explain the core entities, APIs, storage choices, access patterns, and sharding strategy. Address how the design could support an ML-ranked feed without coupling feed generation to transactional writes. Discuss availability, consistency, pagination, observability, and graceful degradation. State assumptions explicitly and identify which decisions would change at larger scale.