Anyone interested in talking about the product decisions instead of Musk/Zuck hate?
- Interesting that they went with a stand-alone app instead of baking this into IG like they did with Stories (which killed Snap overnight). I wonder how much they’ll advertise the download inside of IG.
- Can’t say I like the name. Doesn’t evoke much emotion in me. The term “thread” is rarely used by normies without the word “Twitter” in front of it. And the choice of the plural form is interesting.
- The logo looks like it belongs to an app that should start with the letter ‘a’. Confusing that they go with a t-word like Twitter but then make the logo look like a different letter. Also, no color? Will it really stay black and white or will it adopt the IG gradient?
It’s a text-based app, which dramatically changes expectations. Instagram Stories was, like Instagram, photos and videos. That allows consistency in how things work (not that it does in practice because some gestures were based on shared expectations with Facebook Stories, others with TikTok or Snapchat, but… you get it).
Facebook designers have suffered quite a bit from dealing with very inconsistent media format: comments on one photo in an album are one of the obvious ones, or a poster criticizing and sharing a video and comments assuming the author shot the video is familiar to anyone with less media-savvy friends. Limiting media forms to consistent sets makes sense to have a smoother experience.
Facebook, and later Instagram once the first one was burned, has done a lot to have a social graph that makes sense: actual people and well-established pseudonyms, famous people and brands, etc. It’s the Social part of what is known internally as “The Graph” and a very crucial asset, something that was expected to be shared across properties: Facebook and Instagram, of course (hence the horrifying confusing relation between your Facebook account with your civil name and your pseudonymous account on Instagram, outing a few people that way), but also the MetaVerse lately and yet again with some controversy. WhatsApp fought against having the Social part of the graph as a default because WA had its own graph; that was a tough battle. It’s not fully isolated: WA Shopping leverages Inventory, the Things part of the graph, massively so.
Despite all that drama, this confirms that Facebook wants to leverage its Graph further, specifically Instagram’s—likely a victory from Ad Partners who want brands to feel comfortable early and spend fast.
The spaghetti logo looks nothing like what I have on my screen, so I think it’s a good one (Instagram gradient was to avoid having to deal with Facebook’s curse of starting very distinct, to be one of the too many blue apps far too soon). The name starting with 't' could be a way to capitalize on people who search by app name and their muscle memory that the app with ranty posts is called t-something.
I think the IG graph is more similar to the Twitter graph than the FB graph. Also, IG has much more of a “cool factor” which they’re hoping Threads will inherit.
I follow my grandparents on FB, and I don’t necessarily want that on my Threads.
Does Facebook have globally-unique user handles? Instagram seems to the the only Meta property where the handle is not PII (real name or phone number).
Among Meta properties, Instagram is also the closest to Twitter as an interest-based social network (rather than limited to people-you-already-know)
Any unique identifier assigned to an "identifiable" person is PII. It doesn't matter if it is an IRC or Instagram handler, or a twitter username. It is PII if it can be associated to a person.
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly.
Snapchat is overwhelmingly the primary way my much younger sister uses to talk to people of her age, discord is the second.
It was quite surprising, I was also surprised people of her age are exchanging discord handles IRL like we used to with MSN/ICQ etc. and then just use it for DMs. She doesn’t even use Snapchat stories because “no one watches stories” and are just direct DMing her friends, and posts general audience stuff to TikTok.
I immediately went and bought Snapchat shares when I found that out.
I actually think Threads is a great name. . . it sounds like discussion threads. Also, the name Twitter is beyond awful because it sounds twitty! :)
Seriously, I have no dog in this fight. I stopped using Twitter about a year ago when everything went full Elon. I might use Threads at some point, if it gains enough traction.
@ was used to reference people looooong before Twitter popularized it. In fact, it was users on Twitter already using the paradigm that made the engineers integrate it. Same as hashtags.
> I don't seem to remember that. Where was that used? The closest I can think is email, which is where I thought Twitter borrowed it.
IRC, chat rooms, web forums. Pretty much any sort of group social arena.
The symbol lends itself to the usage, not vice versa. That's like asking "why do people use quotation marks around quotes"; because that's its intention.
“Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find you with your full username @username@threads.net.” [1]
People on the Fediverse expected it very much. Meta already was trying to talk to the larger instances "off the record"[1]. Fediverse users are already planning to boycott any instance which federates with Meta to block any Embrace, Extend and Extinguish moves.
Why? I would love for the general public to be able to connect to Fediverse. I don't love Meta per se, but let be real here, the majority of people are not gonna sign up for random instances that run by someone they don' know, to interact with a very small and niche subset of people, with a risk of it being shut down by that said person due to whatever personal circumstances they may have. It's the biggest obstacles when convincing people to switch to Mastodon.
If this rumor is real and Threads takes off, you can still stay in whichever instance that you like, but now be able to get updates from the artist, the experts, educators, politicians, the influencers that would not have joined the Fediverse otherwise. And more importantly, more people now can get updates from you. Reach might not be something you personally appreciate but it's very important for content creators.
Come on, Facebook is not doing this out of goodness of their hearts. They have some hidden motive (e.g. EEE, data scraping), as always, and it's good people finally don't trust them from the start.
I’m with you here and really it’s just a minority of fedi instances that are going to defederate and that’s fine. I look forward to hopefully being able to follow creators once again without needing to use bots
Too late for that :-). But good example: gmail is gatekeeper for “deliverability”. EEE doesn’t have to be a malicious conspiracy. It can happen as an emergent property of consolidation.
>If this rumor is real and Threads takes off, you can still stay in whichever instance that you like, but now be able to get updates from the artist, the experts, educators, politicians, the influencers that would not have joined the Fediverse otherwise. And more importantly, more people now can get updates from you. Reach might not be something you personally appreciate but it's very important for content creators.
Then those content creators can set up their own (or pay someone else to do so) Fediverse instances. The Fediverse is decentralized on purpose to avoid the kinds of lock-in that FB/IG/etc. require.
I want no part of that, which is why I don't use such centralized services. As such, why should I allow those same centralized services run by greedy scumbags anywhere near my instance(s) or even my consciousness?
Can you provide me with a cogent argument as to why, after making the effort to get away from those toxic ad-riddled environments, I should welcome those same folks into my world? I imagine that could be an interesting discussion.
The main reason why is that Meta is a colossal vast data gathering beast, that for example flagrantly fucks around bypassing the GDPR. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36583651
Now, I personally I think it's trying to swim up the waterfall & ultimately worse for everyone, but: Mastadon specifically has had a strong history of being anti-search, anti-scraping. You aren't supposed to be surveiling folks at industrial scale on the fediverse.
There's widespread skepticism about Meta respecting rules of the road. Having a huge giant shark join the pool of lots of little fish seems like a scary proposition. How we can still protect & have sovereignty over our different fedi-sites is a real question when there's a company with so much technical, economic, and popular leverages.
Mastodon's culture of anti-everything is naive. All posts (except "DMs") are public and can be scraped and made searchable at will for anyone mildly motivated to do so.
I'm honestly pretty skeptical about the fediverse aspect of Threads. It suggests that if I open a new fediverse instance and follow their accounts, I can suck in their timeline and do with it whatever I want. In particular, to bypass ads.
Hence, I could make a "best of Threads" fediverse instance without ads. Or maybe put my own ads on it.
Or, I could build my own client on top of the Threads instance.
> Mastodon's culture of anti-everything is naive. All posts (except "DMs") are public and can be scraped and made searchable at will for anyone mildly motivated to do so.
It's the opposite of naive: it's extremely well thought out and heavily deliberated. Making so many things "public" by default is an invite to people. It's an intentional welcome mat in old school "Internet 1.0" sort of way. But just because you want to welcome people doesn't mean you have to welcome robots (crawlers, etc). Many instances do that deliberately in a very old school "Internet 1.0" way by saying so in their ROBOTS.TXT file (in addition to other places).
In the old web, crawlers were expected to read ROBOTS.TXT and no matter how "public" they thought the website was they found, ROBOTS.TXT was supposed to be the final word.
Anyone scraping or making searchable "at will" random chunks of the Fediverse is easily violating some number of ROBOTS.TXT files. That is an ancient technical convention that isn't new or naive. The internet knew even then that bad actors would ignore ROBOTS.TXT files. The old internet learned to name and shame the bad actors, and in some cases would back that up by force with firewall blocks and in some cases lawsuits. Mastodon does that too. That's why a lot of Mastodon instances are preemptively blocking Threads, because they don't trust Meta to follow good behaviors such as checking ROBOTS.TXT, because Meta hasn't shown a history of being a good actor there and because Thread's privacy policies seem to imply that they don't care to be a good actor for their own users (to the point of not supporting EU users at all because GDPR is "too hard"), so it makes it much harder to assume they will be good actors with respect to all of the conventions around Mastodon data including the classic ROBOTS.TXT.
The Mastodon culture of "public for people, but not for ROBOTS, or only select ROBOTS" is an ancient internet tradition. It's hard to call that naive, when it has decades of history and internet social norms (including good outcomes) behind it. What's naive is thinking that because some major corporations stopped respecting good social norms in the name of increased ad revenue that those norms no longer apply and "anything technically possible is allowable". Read the ROBOTS.TXT in the room and stop being motivated by technology for technology's sake without respecting ethics. Be a good actor in any ecosystem.
You and I agree. I've been on the web since 1996 and the credo you talk about is deeply ingrained in my ethics.
But it's still wishful thinking. We live in the age where AI is so bold as to scrape the crap out of even the largest of other big tech companies without blinking. Without permission, attribution, compensation. So surely a little Mastodon scrape isn't a problem.
There's no need to talk about how unethical it is, we agree. Problem is that it's hard if not impossible to stop. That what I mean by naive.
I don't think it is naive to believe and fight for ethics. I think it takes a lot of courage, especially in a time of disillusionment where you can often feel like the entire industry has lost its mind and put only the most unethical people in charge. I'd rather fight for ethics than say "we can't have nice things because no one is ethical". That takes guts.
I don't think it is is exactly "wishful thinking" to believe that the way we get back to promoting ethics in software is expecting people to behave ethically. We sure are doomed to be disappointed when people turn out to fail us, but that's all the more reason to fight for it, to remind people what ethics are and why a polite society needs them. All of those disappointments are teaching opportunities, if people are open to listening.
(Will Meta learn anything at all from all the Mastodon instances that have pre-emptively blocked them on ethics concerns? Who knows? Mastodon can teach, but it can't force the student to learn. Is it worth Mastodon trying and fighting to teach Meta, no matter what happens? I'd say yes. Ethics are as much a social construct. How we talk about them, how we try to teach them, that says a lot about who we are and what our ethics are.)
I'd rather have even the attempt at ethics than despair that "ethics are technically impossible to enforce". We know ethics can't be programmed, that's why we have to enforce them socially.
The "general public" already can connect to the Fediverse, by making an account on a node in the Fediverse. See, simple. We don't need Meta for that. :)
General public doesn't even know what ferdiverse node is, nor which one to choose. They will choose a simple service from a big corporation with a huge budget on marketing.
Yeah, I do get the EEE angle people are worried about but that should really be halted from the Extend phase onwards if and when it comes up, otherwise people are just going to use the popular one - which will be Threads. It will start with an established userbase. It will start with the marketing Meta can throw at it.
Nobody outside of the HN crowd gives half a fluff about distributed social. They'll use the one that lets them interact with people they know. If that means they can talk cross-instance, sweet, they will. If they can't, Mastodon and ActivityPub in general continues to be a pain that the majority wont bother with.
If that's Mastodon's goal, fair enough. I think it's a bad goal.
Care to elaborate? I haven't had the pleasure of checking Mastodon out. (You're talking about that, right?) And also, which instance are you talking about?
FWIW, I've been using the Fediverse as my primary social media for ~a year, and I've not experienced these technical/social issues being described.
Yes instances occasionally have issues... But I've experienced less outages than on twitter.
Yes there are unsavory types on some servers, but in my experience most are pretty good at defed-ing from them if needed, and you can block/mute individuals.
Picking an instance is a major hurdle. There's no usable feed from the get-go. Following people, especially from other instances, is not intuitive. There's no functional search, no quotes.
Mods are volunteers and can wipe you out at a whim, or just decide to quit the instance. They'll also regularly defederate with other instances, which means they break your followers and whom you follow. There's a perpetual worry of losing everything. In any case, media attached to your content is regularly wiped out, to save costs.
You'll have a feed and see like/boost/whichever icons showing zero. Then you open the individual post and it has non-zero values. Which still is wrong. The original post might have 100 likes but your version shows 15. Not only will it lag, it may never sync as this entirely depends on users on your instance following particular users on other instances.
Worse, the same is true for replies. You will not see most other users replies as those replies are only federated if that user is followed by anyone from your instance. Hence you'll get an original thread with tons of similar replies because users are not seeing the other replies.
I could go on, but almost nothing about it works correctly in the way conventional social media does. It is sorely lacking in basic features and features that are there work poorly.
Second, the cultural part...
Mastodon is basically a community of leftist tech folks, lgbtq, and general misfits. Nothing wrong with that, everybody deserves their place. The problem is that they developed a culture of anti-everything and extreme safetysm.
The bar for hate speech is so low as to exclude most people. They're against any type of commercialization, institutes, influencers. They're against any type of growth or improvement and consider the broken parts of Mastodon features, not shortcomings.
I don't mean to escalate this into a culture war discussion, I'm saying that this attitude is what sabotages Mastodon as a whole from improving and growing, and possibly becoming a much larger and more serious alternative network.
The culture is so cynical and counter productive that even those in the ideological bubble can't take it anymore, this constant in-fighting.
None of this means the entire Mastodon experience is useless. I have used it and it somewhat works. But the more you understand about how it works, the more you realize it can't possibly be a replacement for conventional networks.
It's worth noting that the only time I've payed any attention to twitter is in the last several months, so it's weighted to be worse than it was prior to recent happenings.
The server where I have an account has had downtime twice in the past 200 something days, and had search go down once in that time frame. Occasionally I'll see an update from another server saying "<search|image hosting|replies> are temporarily down", but life goes on fine and they rejoin when they can.
> if Threads becomes too successful for the Fediverse.
I wager most Fediverse users aren't worried about this (at least speaking for myself). The status quo is 2 or 3 big private companies and a few thousand federated alternatives. If Meta betrays the community, things will go back to square one and core functionality of their app will start to falter. They need the community more than the community needs them.
When threads goes live there will be tens of millions of people with existing Meta user profiles entering it overnight. There are currently ~13M Mastodon users, most of which I'm sure are not really active. So depending on how federation into ActivtyPub is set up, it will be like Eternal September x 100. Their content will likely dwarf anything out in Mastodon land. And judging by what I see on Facebook and Instagram, I don't hold out high hopes for the quality of that content or the behaviour of those users.
I'm not worried about it really because I think the ethic of fediverse as such that they will be quickly de-federated. But it won't be fun along the way.
Mastodon doesn't fill your timeline with content from other instances, by default. If 100 million Facebook users federated with Mastodon overnight, 0 organic Meta-related posts would make it into my timeline. Only content reposted from Meta by people I follow would show up.
Defederated or not, Meta will have pretty much zero bearing on the instances outside their bubble.
"They need the community more than the community needs them."
You have to be kidding me. The entire fediverse is little over 1M MAU, almost all of them not monetizable. So...tiny and useless. Threads can launch whilst being fully defederated and instantly become the fediverse.
All of this is true, but none of it contradicts what I said. Meta needs Federation to flaunt the bigwig researchers and developers from other instances. They will eventually build their own stockpile over time, but they wouldn't start with ActivityPub support if their intention was to eventually remove it. If Meta leaves the Fediverse, it goes back to how it is today. That's not a nightmare scenario for most people who are already using Mastodon, and it would put the leverage back into the hands of the users who could coerce Meta users to switch instances for more lax federation.
The ActivityPub ecosystem stands to lose nothing either way. Meta is walking a fine line with the remainder of the community that trusts them, but stands to integrate into a pretty nice system if they pull things off.
There is a very real concern that there will be a flood of hate speech, scams, and ads. Meta has shown themselves to be absolutely terrible at moderation in recent years.
Believe it or not, most Mastodon / Fediverse admins & users aren't interested in taking over the world and having a huge reach. They just want a nice community.
It continues to boggle my mind how so many tech folks just don't seem to understand that "maximum scale" is not everybody's idea of success, and that not everything is built to "take over the world".
It's not pathetic. EEE has been shown time and time again (MS, Google, etc.). Also, Meta is a company known for dubious practices and anti-competitive behavior. So why trust them?
If my current mastodon instance blocks Meta, I will move to a different instance which federates with them. The entire point of federation in my eyes is that it lets me talk to as many people as possible.
Sure, that's your prerogative, federation broadens your reach. But what's the point if it only opens the door to toxicity and negativity? It's about meaningful connections, not just more of them.
Another thing I like about Mastodon is the lack of an algorithm. I only see posts from people I explicitly choose to follow (or posts those people explicitly choose to boost).
I do not plan to follow people who are excessively toxic or negative. If Threads launches, and 100% of its users are toxic, I will not follow anyone on Threads. But that seems unlikely to me.
Edit: I suppose it's true that people I don't follow can still reply to my posts. Idk, I suppose it's possible that federating with Threads would make my replies super toxic. But, like, let's see how the community develops first.
I have been a rather happy user the last few months but the last couple of weeks it's turned pretty narsty; downloaded my data and turned off my main instance account, and I'm waiting for the schism to happen before I go back in.
I have zero issue with Meta using ActivityPub, cause whatever they try, it makes them at least somewhat permeable in theory. I do have zero intention of interacting with them on any level though.
It won't last -- if it even launches with this feature -- pretty sure.
As others have pointed out, most hosts will simply de-federate them pretty quickly anyways, and then it will become a useless feature that they turn off.
I suspect it will be one-way anyways, to capitalize on the existing content produced by Mastodon users out there already while they bootstrap. There's no way they'd offer their own content up into the fediverse without the ability to tie it to ads and engagement.
Given the cold reception they've gotten, it will be interesting to see if this feature even makes launch.
That sounds logical. Federation without conditions would make no sense at all for Meta. You could then run an ad-free Threads copy, create any client you want, easily train your AI on their content.
Surely if such deals materialize, many idealistic Mastodon instances will defederate with Meta. A few big Mastodon instances might not. Next, the idealistic Mastodon instances will defederate with the Meta-compatible Mastodon instances.
Which...makes large Mastodon instances pretty pointless. They'll be largely isolated from the rest of the Mastodon part of the fediverse. They can interact with Threads users, but in that case...why wouldn't users simply use Threads?
Yeah talk about good old days. Pidgin or Adium (or Finch, in the terminal), I could have google chat, facebook chat, and even IRC in one app. Throw OTR plugin on that & I we had end to end chat encryption over google & facebook. Very sad day when they shut these down.
Agreed. As an interesting look at the human side of technology decisions, Google dropped XMPP federation the year after I graduated high school, leaving me extremely isolated from all my friends once we went our separate ways.
So they allow Threads-to-Mastodon, but they key question is whether they allow Mastodon-to-Threads. The former is just a way to recruit users to their platform, while the latter gives access to their platform without being a user.
Reminds me of how Instagram absorbed Snapchat usecases with stories. Instagram tackled the competition for ephemeral stories simply by implementing Stories as a feature.
This time, Threads is a fully fledged app. Getting users to adopt a new app might take as much time as getting Messenger installed. Still, Instagram has a robust social graph to lead users towards downloading it. In fact, they seem to have already onboarded users when they implemented part of Threads with the status update feature in the Instagram messages view.
Twitter will probably remain used by relatively "anti-social" people. In the States, that may be by politicized users, fueled by Elon's freedom fighting. Here in Japan, Twitter is very popular because of the sense of anonymity, coupled with the use of Kanji characters that achieves concision within 140 characters. Instagram might be too social for us (esp. male older than 25).
It will probably pain me to see the diaspora of users among many microblogging services. The transition to a new microblogging hub may be painful for both Twitter Inc (ie. X Corp) and Twitter users.
It's funny to see that Threads is the re-implementation of Facebook status updates before news articles swamped the Newsfeed. Meta's microblogging came back full circle.
It's funny that there is a narrative that Instagram killed Snapchat with their stories feature. Snapchat still has something like 383M DAU. That's a massive user base. Instagram Stories definitely blunted Snap's growth, especially with millennials and older.
I'm really interested in seeing what my Japanese friends do. I don't live in Japan but have made a bunch of friends there in my travels. They're super active on Twitter for baseball and car discussion.
Twitter is a much better social network in Japanese than in English. You are more likely to encounter people who want to discuss hobbies than being trolls. I think they'll stick to the end, just like the Titanic.
Making the jump seems a little challenging right now. Some Japanese people have tried Truth Social, even dominating the trends with Japanese keywords. I'm not sure if they'll stick there given its context with American politics.
As Twitter became popular in Japan with the 2011 Earthquake, the migration to Threads might be another earthquake away (which happens often here).[1]
I wonder who will be the core users of Threads in Japan. Twitter was popular among nerdy "Otakus" who often engaged in anime, gaming, or electronics. Facebook/Instagram always tended to be avoided by that demographics. Instead, Instagram in Japan is popular among young women, who post selfies or food pics. However, I'm not sure if they'll be receptive to a text-focused service.
[1] Side-anecdote: Twitter is the best earthquake detector. Whenever you feel a shake, Twitter users will confirm it sooner than traditional news sources.
If you don't know about it, then https://misskey.io/ is an extremely good Twitter alternative that is almost exclusively used by Japanese people. A lot of Japanese artists and others are eager to make the switch from Twitter too.
Also, Twitter isn't the best place to confirm if there is an earthquake anymore, since the website is completely private if you don't have an account. I use https://unnerv.jp/about/more instead now, since it's on Mastodon and can interop with misskey and other fediverse software easily.
Misskey is one fediverse software that can be used to host any instance. What you're seeing is one such instance. There are hundreds of others: https://www.fediverse.to/search/?sw=misskey
For what it's worth, the same friends I refer to on Twitter (Japanese baseball fans and those into cars) are also even more active on Instagram. That's how I found many of them to begin with. I'd say 70/30 split of male/female in my experience at least.
That's interesting! I didn't expect some demographics of Twitter to transition to a photo-centric social network like Instagram. I guess watching baseball is a hobby that happens outside and is suitable for snaps.
Are your friends mostly posting photos of baseball matches?
For baseball generally photos of themselves from their seats and then photos of the ballpark/field, so not all that different from American friends on IG. Also sometimes just photos or videos from batting cages or pitching cages.
For cars, typically group touring (basically group caravan drives to various landmarks and other places), photos of the cars with cool views or at interesting places, car shows, club meetings, etc.
A big part of twitter is the web client... and embedded tweets all over the internet.
Did they start this product by cloning instagram and removing the image centric approach? Why is this not a website first? My gut feel is that this competes as much with instagram as it does with Twitter.
The web version is downright awful. Maybe given this is a greenfield project, it won't meet the same fate... but yea. The "web version" of instagram is basically here's a 4x scaled version of the app without much regard to a desktop UI/UX.
4x scaled? On my machine the web version is tiiiiny. Even when we had 800x600 screen resolution websites showed more content than Instagram.
It also shows signup takeovers after clicking 2 links so without some sort of scraping proxy like Nitter it will be just as useless as Twitter if you only want to follow from the outside.
I feel like I'm at risk of blowing both of your minds here, but you can change the size of the website by just scaling it in your browser to exactly the size you want, likely using ctrl-+/- (maybe cmd).
Another bug I've had several times on the web version is that when I open the account privacy settings page the "Private account" checkbox will load for a few seconds and then change my account from private to public. Quite annoying especially since that also approves all pending following requests. I don't know if they fixed in the last few months but I'm kind of afraid to check.
Have you tried to use the instagram web version though? It used to be better, getting incrementally worse on purpose every "redesign". It's borderline web hostile.
They're probably getting the highest traffic they've seen in years. And they'll continue to get it until `threads` search results are dominated by the Threads app.
Facebook has DNA to optimize feeds.
It, simply, lack the DNA to build good products from scratch.
My gut feeling no one will care about Threads, 6 months from now.
EDIT:
- Facebook was all-in on cryptocurrencies. The project is fully gone.
- Facebook was all-in on Messenger as a platform. The project is gone as well.
- Facebook also launched dating a few years back. That project is dead too.
- Someone pointed out in comments that Feed & Like as a concept was also based out of an acquisition called FriendFeed - https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/
Groups has also slowly become a killer feature of FB. There are very strong niche communities there; it’s a direct competitor to Reddit in that way. It’s pretty much the only reason I keep opening the FB app, but it is enough to keep me opening it.
As well as local area groups there are quite a few niche hobby groups on Facebook. I'm converting a van into a campervan and on Facebook there are groups specific to converting my van that have the same number of users as the whole vanlife subreddit.
The only thing I don't like is it is tied to my real name and friend circle... I see in my feed friends posts in groups I am not a member of, so I guess it does the same for me. In my recommendations was a BDSM group... Yeah not on Facebook :D
That's a byproduct of pages you've liked, people you follow and groups you've joined. Beyond that, content you've engaged with.
Take time to prune and shape your network. Unfollow people / brands you have no interest, friend/follow those you do. Maybe join a group that matches your interests or local community groups.
Kind of like clutter in your house, taking time to clean up as your interests evolve, or to some extent undo sins of the past, can make for a better experience.
The last point is that they show you more of what you engage with. So if you want to see more friends and family, actively seek them out and engage and they'll start being more prominent.
They're horrible for archived data. And in technical ones, they encourage people to post the same shit questions over and over. Meta won't encourage any effort, because effort stops people from using it, so you end up with tons of low quality, disorganized, unsearchable shit.
Facebook Groups are very popular in the country I live. (Reddit is too American-centric to have ever really caught on.)
I'm in groups on legal stuff (19,000 members), boardgames (16,000 members), family stuff likes activities for kids (9,000 members), roadtrips (5,000 members), camping (9,000 members), food (41,000 members), dog lovers (14,000 members), and a general city group (150,000 members), a group for my neighborhood (22,000 members), a musicians network (3,300 members), pens (montblanc, etc; 8,800 members)
Most those groups are just for my city (i.e. the dog lovers is just for dog lovers in my city).
On french facebook there's a whole community that's actually exactly subreddits, it's called "neurchi de [...]" ("neurchi" is "chineur" reversed, which translates to "bargain hunter"). Any niche, or not niche, topic has its neurchi group that range from low hundreds to 100,000+ for some.
I tried Marketplace a few times but always gave up because the search filter was so bad. There was no way to force it to include a particular search term, e.g. searching for "rtx 3060" would return tons of posts without "3060" or even "rtx" anywhere in the title/body. The distance search was also useless, since no matter how I tried to restrict the search to around my city, it would just randomly return posts from cities hundreds of kilometers away.
Perhaps the bad search was by design to show you as many posts as possible? Either way, it's worse than reddit search, which is saying something...
It's a terrible product on many levels but is clearly successful because it uses all the usual Meta dark UX patterns to hack attention and engagement. I (horrifyingly) find myself clicking on marketplace and just browsing all the time.
More so, as a seller... it gets far more leads than the other classifieds options around here. We've been casually selling berries and misc produce off our small farm on it, and it's kinda crazy how many people reach out for random $10 containers of red currants or fresh garlic scapes, etc.
Maybe it's specific to numbers or tech or something, but in our area fb marketplace is THE place to sell/buy used baby/kids clothes. It's mindbogglingly high traffic. Put up used but decent looking item from sought after brand and you get literally tens of requests in minutes. If you're looking to buy then good stuff is gone like in half an hour. And were not even a big city.
Marketplace is so horrible on so many fronts that it's unimaginable that it's successful, but it is. Most likely thanks to the network effect. It's a good target for disruption IMHO.
eBay is too international, Craigslist is USA only. FB marketplace is probably a local focused, but for each country. I'm just guessing here, I don't have the data to back this up.
How was messenger an acquisition? wasn't it simply taking FaceBook Chats and making it a standalone app? It seems that meta just has a very curated list of products, and most seem to be hits, and most seem to be regularly iterated upon.
> Facebook has DNA to optimize feeds.
Isn't that the exact thing that Threads would need to succeed? It's a new feeds-based app, piggybacking their existing social graph. That means you have followers/following immediately.
They even have the market opportunity as twitter stumbles.
Facebook Messenger existed prior to the acquisition. Beluga was a mobile only product that was essentially an acquihire of the 3 member team to work on the existing Messenger mobile platform.
>Facebook was all-in on Messenger as a platform. The project is gone as well.
Facebook Messenger platform is still very much alive and well in both the games and the support / chat bot / reservations space.
They have pretty much killed messenger for me, I used it everyday to chat with most of my friends but now its bloated and filled with ads so we moved on to different platforms. Its too bad because I loved messenger but now I only open it once a week.
> games / chat bot / reservation space
Yea thats the bloat that killed it for me, I just wanted something that lets me send messages to my close friends, nothing more, nothing less.
I could believe that they slapped too many ads on it (though I've never seen them?), but I struggle to believe that adding games/chatbot/reservation integration bloated messenger on your end. Isn't that all purely server-side integration that doesn't affect you if you're not using it?
Similar happened with LINE. They used to have a Lite app that only had the ability to encrypted chat + send files + make voice/video calls (& had a dark theme with no trackers). But they killed it off last year to make everyone ‘upgrade’ to the full app which is packed to the gills with games, trackers, delivery, etc. & the download is tenfold+ larger. When I didn’t upgrade they swept my account under the rug & despite a supporting Win/Mac/Chromium apps, your primary device must be Android/iOS or they won’t let you access the account (similar to Signal’s shenanigans).
> Isn't that the exact thing that Threads would need to succeed? It's a new feeds-based app, piggybacking their existing social graph. That means you have followers/following immediately.
Reels and Stories, while directly ripped from TikTok and Snapchat have probably taken quite a bit of market share from each of those apps from people who already use Instagram as their main platform.
I suspect this has some potential to keep users who were getting FOMO on Instagram from signing up to Twitter.
> Facebook was all-in on cryptocurrencies. The project is fully gone.
For what it's worth, their cryptocurrency project is absolutely NOT gone. It's gone in the Facebook-ownership sense (in that it was barred from continuing the project by the SEC (?)), but the code and teams are absolutely still iterating on what began at Facebook. Aptos, Sui, and 0L are all projects that have launched to fanfare within the last year.
I'm up for lambasting Facebook as much as the next guy, but I don't think government blocking their projects existence counts as failing.
Getting blocked by the government was hardly a black swan event; it was a major risk factor. Facebook absolutely has the lobbyists and political connections to have a good understanding of the risk, as well as have some influence on it.
They got it wrong in this case. It happens, but Facebook doesn't deserve a complete pass for chasing a high profile project that ended up being a dead end for them.
All of your examples are unique, distinct separate product and problem spaces, whereas Threads is pretty aligned with Instagram as-is. A lot of the plumbing for Instagram is likely reusable for threads, and a lot of the same optimization techniques might apply just as well (or with minor tweaks). I don't think this is as much "launch something new" as it is "instagram with a mask on".
So. multiple attempts at cloning Snap, HouseParty, IRL etc. into standalone products were unique. And this one is just a minor tweak on Instagram?
Let's discuss this in another 6 months.
I can't predict what the future of Twitter is, but Threads would have been shuttered by then.
Snap was cloned extremely effectively within Instagram (stories). So was TikTok (reels). I'm actually surprised they aren't taking the same strategy here. Why create a new app? Why not add Threads to the existing Instagram, in the same way as Stories and Reels?
What apps are you referencing that Meta/Facebook launched and failed to clone Snap/Houseparty/IRL? Their snap competitor is Instagram, and it's still doing very well. Instagram is _also_ their TikTok competitor, and Reels has done a solid job in that space as well.
Thing is, these were intentionally created as experiments with the expectation that they would be eventually shut down, with whatever learnings integrated into the mainline apps.
Since about 2017-18 there has been a unit at Facebook called NPE, New Product Experimentation, tasked with producing these.
NPE was created in 2017.
Facebook had "Labs" in 2011-12.
The same idea keeps showing up again and again every few years thanks to a hugely profitable ads business.
Facebook gaming is huge platform that exists within the Messaging platform. While they may have consolidated from a standalone app to a service in an existing platform, that is not a "fail" by any measure.
The same goes for Facebook Events, which is hugely popular within the Facebook platform.
I understand what you asked for, but it's a distinction without a purpose as indicated and just by that measure is misleading.
Many of these experiments are intended to start out as standalone apps that have their best features folded back into the main product and the user's transitioned over. That's by design. Framing it as a failure is not reasonable from that perspective.
This is especially true of many of the products you listed that are arguably some of the most used function of the main platform like messaging, gaming, and events. They all contribute a significant amount to the DAU for Facebook.
Facebook should make a LinkedIn copy. LI has taken the majority of the feed eyeball time.
LI must have more DAU/MAU than Twitter - most people are just scrolling the LI feed, adding random people to their network (better than adding "friends" on FB), posting/re-sharing longer text+image content.
I'm not the target audience for either, but how is your LinkedIn feed even remotely similar to Facebook? On Facebook I see what my grandmother does, on LinkedIn I see female recruiters posting pictures of themselves with some text about some position they're recruiting for, or how to leverage AI from the same people people who used to push growth-hacking. Completely useless as social media.
I will do the counter-argument: this app is from Instagram, so it might have an higher success rate. To have worked in big corporate, new products are often entirely managed by a division, and only a reporting is done to the central entity.
Also worth nothing Instagram has been pretty good at eating other apps’s lunch, specifically Snapchat and later TikTok. Obviously Snapchat and TikTok are still things and are quite popular but the instagram versions of those features are quite good and the network effect is important.
That is true, I’m a bit baffled they didn’t integrate this in some capacity into instagram itself. With that said I think this has a higher likelihood of success than instagram apps made for instagram users since this is an Instagram app using Instagram to launch a twitter replacement.
Fair point although I think “Hi there’s a new Instagram tab that is twitter” would be a more effective way to gain users than “go download a different app that you then have to log into using Instagram”
> However, it is not good at launching standalone apps either.
That's ok, and in many ways preferable and transparently communicated in many cases. They spin off an independent application, build an audience, figure out what features best convert and migrate those to the primary platform and transition the userbase over to it. Rinse and repeat.
It allows them to try, learn and refine in a sandboxed environment and bring the best over.
They often talk of this process in terms of their "experiments"
> Someone pointed out in comments that Feed & Like as a concept was also based out of an acquisition called FriendFeed
Nonsense. Facebook added the news feed in 2006. FriendFeed was founded in 2007. Facebook acqui-hired them for employees, in particular to hire Bret Taylor as CTO, nothing else.
My gut tells me you’re quite wrong about this one. I’m quite the cynic, but I think this is a lovely confluence indeed. It feels like when you can tell that the batter is about the hit the ball out of the park just a second before the bat has even made contact with the ball.
You won't find one because you've given an arbitrary limitation that is contrary to how Meta do business. Threads is not even standalone because it uses the Instagram graph.
I’ve never used it in the US, mainly because not many people in the US use FB so the user base for that feature would be dead. Abroad it’s pretty popular.
Big signals that Musk made a lot of mistakes with twitter if Meta scrambled to ship a competitor like this. I don’t use Twitter so I won’t use this either but it’ll be interesting to see if the instagram folks can take this market from twitter.
> But hooooly crap does it underscore how much of a catastrophe Musk’s actions are
I think that pretty much nails it. This is Zuckerberg's life - social media & nearby segments - and he's still in his prime (very active, attentive to threats / paranoid) as a competitor in the business sphere. If you give him an opening to cripple Twitter opportunistically, he's going to take a shot.
Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)? It would be hilariously delusional if so.
It kind of did, just by network effects, but he’s spent the last 6+ months systematically filling it in. This last weekend might be the walls crumbling down
Twitter was great because you could broadcast and get picked up by news orgs and viewed by everyone for years. And it didn’t need a CRM or IT staff to deal with, just someone with a phone.
Now that that’s over it can’t meet the needs of services like my local power company pushing updates.
> Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)?
I don’t think he cared [0], because he’s always wanted to gut Twitter and remake it as a a very different service that is not really in the same market (very different substantive functions and revenue model.)
On the other hand he seems to have very not-evidence-based and turns-out-to-be-wrong-at-every-step map of how to get from a ad-supported microblogging platform to a user-pays long-form-content-and-financial-services platform.
[0] It did, through network effexts, but his plans were incompatible with focussing on preserving it.
> I don't think normal non-technically inclined people are going to move their twitter activities to "Threads".
Normal, non-technical users (including the key ones that produce a lot of content that other people come for) are often already on Instagram, and many are moving more of their presence their recently even without a Twitter-like UI in response to changes on Twitter. So, that’s something Meta can leverage to build Threads if they manage it well.
Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)? It would be hilariously delusional if so.
Oh I didn’t know that. At any rate those product folks at instagram have likely been salivating for the last couple months. Probably would be an extremely fun team to be on right now.
Musk's actions generally speaking make a lot of financial sense, it's just that he bought a company that wasn't founded on financial sense, and now all that debt requires payment because the economy is in tatters
> Musk's actions generally speaking make a lot of financial sense, it's just that he bought a company that wasn't founded on financial sense...
He bought it for ~40% more than it was valued and then scared away a lot of advertisers. That does not make financial sense, and is in large part the root of Twitter/his money problems.
His actions make zero financial sense. He bought it 30-40% overvalued, has tanked its income, destroyed its brand reputation, absolutely set fire to advertiser trust & safety.
Most estimates put it at ~25% of the value he paid 7 months ago.
All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that. That was t there until he came along. Another failure.
About the only positive financial thing you can say he did is cut payroll costs. Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
It will be studied in MBA programs as an example of what NOT to do
>All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that.
No, Twitter was already in debt. The alternative was letting it die, which mind you I don't think would have been a bad idea, but if Musk's goal is to keep it alive then the huge amounts of debt would certainly do that.
>Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
The site did not have the efficiency or importance to warrant the number of employees it had.
Buying Twitter at the price he bought it at made no sense once the market turned. It would have made financial sense to structure the deal in a way that it was easy for him to get out of, but he didn’t. Twitter has also now been saddled with additional debt with interest that needs to be paid on a regular basis since it was a leveraged buyout. I’ve been thinking about the deal since it happened and it certainly doesn’t seem to make financial sense to me.
The economy is in great shape despite how many people try to cope a recession into existence. ("Inflation" is a bad thing that can only happen in a good economy.)
He bought the company because he was mad they banned a hate speech account he thought was funny, unbanned them and brought all the other racists back to juice the numbers and so he could reply-guy them, and instantly lost all the advertisers because they don't want to be associated with statue avatar Nazis. That was not good business sense.
Killed audience? Most certainly, but as far as revenue I do think he's making headway. The fact is once you start demanding money for things people leave. The idea that users = money has never been true.
Now call me crazy but I disagree. I think - or rather I feel - he's doing an excelent job somehow. He's doing what other executives are afraid to do: he's building and building requires some walls to be hammered down ; and yeah this makes some noise and smoke. He's moving fast and breaking things (if you'd excuse the easy punt). To me, what he's doing is exciting and I think twitter is gonna thrive once the big work is done.
I don't like to use insults around mental health, or I totally would ;) Musk wants to build an "everything app" where people conduct business and accept payments. And he's shown over the past weekend that he is fully willing on impulse to literally just stop everyone from using the website.
So who on earth would be irresponsible enough to trust Twitter with anything essential or important after this? Who is going to build a storefront on a platform where they might wake up one day and find out that all of their customers are rate-limited from using the platform? And then the CEO jokes that he's doing people a favor by making them touch grass?
A bunch of artists who had (shortsightedly) built their business models around using Twitter as an art platform woke up one day to find out that their artwork can no longer be embedded in other websites. A bunch of government agencies and public services just found out that "check our Twitter for updates" no longer works. With no warning and with no announcement, all because Elon is mad that OpenAI hasn't cut him a check.
That is a business-destroying decision. Other executives are afraid of doing this because it's the kind of thing that permanently hinders your platform from ever being treated like a reliable place to do business or build on top of. It puts a mark on your businesses reputation that will never go away. And it's not a tech issue, it's a trust issue. Finish the big work and make something exciting, sure, but nobody with an ounce of sense would ever trust Elon not to pull the rug out from under them now.
You're going to build a business on a platform that might randomly decide to effectively shut itself down on a whim? Imagine if you had an Amazon shop and Amazon decided tomorrow with no warning that every customer on the platform is limited to buying at most one item per day, and also external links to Amazon no longer work for guest checkout unless your customer makes an account. How are people defending this? It makes no sense.
> Musk wants to build an "everything app" where people conduct business and accept payments.
Which is a bad idea. China has everything apps like WeChat because monopolies are easier to regulate, but customers don't actually like them, which is why we don't have them elsewhere.
When the App Store was launched, most apps had a single backend they connected to. I’m thinking of say the FB app or the Google maps app which only talked to Fb and Google respectively.
These payment apps integrate with a much wider arrays of backends from multiple providers and allow you perform many more unique use cases. E.g., making charitable donations and paying an insurance premium are unrelated but the Indian payment app I’m thinking of enables it.
This brings it closer to being an “everything” app.
We also have banking superapps in Russia - and even more. I still wouldn't say that's an "everything app", all of those features are related to payments and they can be in a banking app.
I take no view on whether Elon will be successful on making Twitter more profitable. But as a user -- and someone that typically supports Elon -- I have to say he's made the app subjectively worse IMO. I find the "For You" page and algorithm to boost more "junk" content than before. I used to find it interesting, now it feels like scrolling through Instagram meme pages. I'm at the point where I am thinking of uninstalling it.
Sorry your For You page sucks, but that's a you problem. My For You page is excellent - I see mostly the kind of tweets I like, and when I see a tweet I don't like I tap the not interested button. I actually love the new FYP way more than the old home feed, and the option to switch to the chronological "Followed" feed is more visible than before.
This is complete bullshit. I have the exact same experience Parent has, my feed used to be full of interesting people from tech, science, and journalism. Now it's ~80% meme feeds sprinkled with a small helping of what I actually care about. How is that my fault, as a user that had a perfectly good curated feed prior to For You existing?
The only reason my FYP is good is because I blocked all the different meme accounts they added. A good algorithmic feed for a power user is one that 1. shows people you follow but 2. in relevance order not chronological order.
The current one is half trying to be the new Reddit account experience and half trying to show you politics news you'll get mad about for engagement.
As someone who wants all of the other things he's supposed to be building, I can't imagine how you would not see Twitter as an objective step back.
Every single change he has made to Twitter is exclusively to claw back income from users because he made all of the advertisers leave. Anyone competent would have just added the features they wanted without burning 80% of the company's income and staff.
The cherry (or turd?) on top is that the platform is manned by a skeleton crew.
I kid you not: I recently saw a screenshot of a post by an engineer asking ex-Twitter engineers for help debugging an issue.. on Blind. Mind you, I don’t blame the engineer at all: it just gives you an idea of the mess Musk has made for himself.
I think the fact that the platform is still running is a testament to those who built & documented the infra. It’s also a feather on the cap for those who remain to man the ship, particularly if there was no other choice.
One catastrophic outage is all it really takes at this point.
Elon has said he's ok losing money on Twitter. Its about providing a free speech platform where people with opposing views are allowed to express them.
For the Turkish Gov thing, I should've specified US citizens on US Soil. The argument he claims is that a country can decide how they want to operate businesses inside their own borders. Twitter must comply. Its better to be allowed to operate in another country than be kicked out and have another more government subservient tech company replacement step in. If you believe otherwise, I think I would need to hear a strong argument that its the better alternative.
If someone is one of the most highly influential people on the planet managing gigantic marketcap companies like Tesla/Spacex, It makes sense from a personal safety standpoint not to dox their location each time they travel. Doxing people fits whose narrative again? I'm not convinced thats a 'narrative'.
Banning links to substack was temporary. Substack released a competitor and was scraping their contact data. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/apr/11/row-between-tw.... How would you handle the situation where you have a company losing money and competitors are sucking your data dry?
In regards to scraping users from the platform your moving away from, Facebook did the exact same thing to twitter in 2013. The veterans running these companies know the playbooks.
https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1650894515702763521
Its naive that people sit on the sidelines opining they should've done the opposite when all the evidence points to blocking scraping as a standard business practice (and scraping is illegal if the company forbids it in their policy). Most people saying otherwise have not run a company or startup in a competitive environment where every other player wants to steal their lunch.
If someone is crawling your content, that's usually bad behavior.
If a user signs up somewhere else, and wants their data to be ported over, there is very little to legitimately complain about. Even more so when the scraping is just contact data for that user, because that's very little server load.
Go away with this "steal their lunch" stuff. It should be legally mandated that users can transfer contacts between services.
Also blocking API access is very different from blocking user-posted links.
1. Wikipedia had the same issue with the Turkish government, fought it in Turkish courts and won. Twitter bent over and used the "but another even worse app will take our place" excuse you're using here. They're not helping free speech here.
2. Flight data is public, no one is doxing anyone. The incident Musk used as proof that this was bad was while he was in a car... far from his plane.
3. Twitter banned Mastodon links before Substack. Was Mastodon scraping Twitter's contact data too?
You see, the problem is not even what he's doing with Twitter. It's his company, who cares? It's claiming that Twitter is the internet's "town square" and that he is anti-censorship, while restricting access to the platform and censoring content. It's complete bullshit and people like you fall for it and even defend it.
I'd respect Elon Musk more if he came out and just said "this is my platform, I'll ban stuff that affects me or affects my revenue, get out if you're not happy." Instead, he says one thing and does another.
I can't think of a single improvement to Twitter in the past 9 months. What changes I have noticed have ranged from annoying (extra-long tweets, a lot more white supremacist content to block) to destructive (boosting paid users, recent usage restrictions).
Elon has chased off all the biggest advertisers, turned into an abrasive online personality that elevates insane conspiracy theories, and now you can only view 800 tweets a day. That doesn't sound like an "excellent job." I had some hope for when he took over Twitter, because Twitter was not well run...but he's made the previous CEO (who was not a good CEO) look like a genius. He even failed to lure Donald Trump back...I mean. The only reason people are still on Twitter is because there is no alternative, and there are still very valuable voices on Twitter. Once or if they leave, it's all over.
Oh, wait, this feels like the start of a cyberpunk story.
If TikTok gets banned, where to the users go? Instagram.
Threads could replace Twitter.
Reddit is going downhill... Maybe Meta could even buy it in a firesale?
Outside of chat apps like Discord, Slack, Teams and Telegram (which compete with WhatsApp), Meta will have consolidated most of the world's social media under them. And that's assuming they dont buy out Discord.
I hate how right you are. I do my best to stay out of the Facebook ecosystem (although I am sure they have an extensive profile of my web activities). I am surprised they have not tried to make their own non-crypto financial system. Could embed it into restaurant storefronts and the marketplace.
Meta does not have the support of legislators. The EU would regulate any service that would even aspire to become a Western WeChat way before they have any chance to succeed.
WeChat is so much more than just a messaging app. This is a common misconception when comparing WeChat and Whatsapp. The functionality of those two is not even remotely comparable.
That claim does not ring true to me. Maybe a few years ago, but now? I don't use whatsapp and I don't know anyone who uses it, except for a group of expats from South America who probably use it because it's still widespread in South America and their friends use it, maybe?
> Reddit is going downhill... Maybe Meta could even buy it in a firesale?
The problem is Reddit has very little real value, and to get that value you'd have to go even further into pushing its users away from the platform as you'd need to be able to target and identify individuals.
Unlike Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc the majority of Reddit is very intentionally anonymous, not even requiring an email address. A sizable portion still use 'old reddit' because of how awful and hostile the redesign was.
To get it to a point of profitability it would need to be more viable for advertisers, and that only comes with forcing them down users throats, which traditionally is not a reddit thing and would alienate people even more than they've already done recently.
It's also worth noting its 18 years old and still hasn't come remotely close to being profitable.
> The problem is Reddit has very little real value
I think the fact that users already go looking for a specific thing at a specific subreddit makes the value instantly apparent.
Being able to target users with an interest in your niche is infinitely valuable. Personalised ads are the entire business model of google and facebook to behemoths.
The problem is reddit is led by the most unqualified management of any top 10 most visited world site and they spent 2 quarters developing NFT profile pictures instead of mod tools, or advertiser platforms.
Having non intrusive ads, with good quality, that directly relate to what you care about? Is a dream of users and brands. Have an AMA with a movie start or a videogame developer and have them pay for it as marketing, or allow a weekly "share your news" from brands where they can talk new products, or versions of their thing.
There are a million ways to monetise reddit, in ways that the community would not be angry. But making it look like tiktok, forcing a terrible app, spending billions hosting your own images and video, and having mods do free labour for you while you fight to get any money in... is not the best way to go about it.
Reddit has a lot of value, just not people who can utilize it. Anonymous nature of Reddit doesn't matter when you have Meta's cookies while accessing it. Content is also nicely categorized so they can easily push, for example, insurance and credit card ads on r/PersonalFinance. It is pretty wild that Mark Zuckerberg is the only person to figure out how to make money off of social media after more than 20 years of social media existing.
Imagine if Meta bought Reddit, pulled the need for ads and gave the volunteer moderators access to Meta's team of 50,000+ moderators. "You deal with the conversations and the messages from users, we'll take care of the taking down user content that is against the rules." Meta uses the content to train their AI models, removes API pricing (or reduces it greatly, no need to IPO and therefore no need to show revenue).
As a Mastodon/Fediverse user, I hope the rumors that this is based on ActivityPub are true. I'd love for there to be an easy-to-use interface for everyone that brings more people and content into the Fediverse.
If you want to leave Twitter cause it keeps breaking there's a few groups you might fall into:
a) you don't give a damn about openness or tech or any of that but just want something that works
b) your first priorities are "where the people are" and "it works" but federated and open protocols are a big bonus
c) you absolutely want to go somewhere more open instead of another centralized service
Group A is big, and generally folks not on HN. HN itself splits between groups B and C.
If you think group B is a fair bit bigger than group C, but want the open stuff to thrive in the long term, then an initially-"friendly" Meta controlled app can harm you by attracting a big part of the people in group B and then slowly degrading the experience for folks using open clients over time until finally cutting it off. Most of group B won't migrate again at that point as long as they don't fuck up the experience completely.
Whereas if the Meta version wasn't "friendly" at first, much more of that group B might move straight to open things, and then stay there, creating a larger long-term userbase.
It's a way to keep people from fully jumping ship to open solutions by offering short-term openness that will dwindle over time.
If there are more Threads users than non-Threads users then non-Threads instance admins have to choose between adapt or risk emigration. EEE is a consolidation tactic after all.
Many of the people on Mastodon today are perfectly happy without Meta users on it, myself included. If they try to hard-fork, I'm fairly certain the self-hosters would just walk away and let the links/outgoing support break on Meta's app. They need peering networks more than peering networks need them.
They don't have a diverse content-base yet. The Fediverse "shall provide it" to them if it goes according to their plans. Once this deed is done, the Fediverse is no longer valuable to them.
The EU believes social networks and messaging apps should all connect to each other. This is a bad idea (it makes spam filtering impossible) but nevertheless it's in the DMA.
Mastodon admins might find that law applies to them too.
I'd wager Mastodon is ready for this. Abhorrent/illegal/spamming/offensive/offending instances can be defederated from to remove liability at a server-level, and users can self-moderate with "block instance" functionality from their client. Both sides are sufficiently equipped to filter their respective feeds.
It's the realm of pure fantasy to envision a world where the EU bans an original community project to force everyone into a Meta-designed fork. Mastodon users should be safe as long as they're free to run their own server and client software.
That's fine. Blocking their entire website from ever hitting your feed takes 2 clicks.
My point is that this really doesn't matter. If they use ActivityPub as-written, both clients and servers can stop Meta content from reaching their feed. If you just find Threads content annoying, you long-press the post and tap "Block Instance". If you're a site admin and have been given a legitimate reason to block Meta for API abuse (eg. poorly-moderated content, spam, advertisement) then you can exercise your defederation power and be within your right.
Meta has money to pay app developers to develop a good app.
Most ActivityPub services have taken ages to get decent apps and even now Mastodon has some obvious problems. Opening someone else's profile if nobody on your server follows them shows you a barren timeline with no history and there's still no way to tell Mastodon "go fetch toots from this user's outbox".
Meta has lots of money, which the Fediverse does not and needs money to stay online. This is why admins of very large instances signed NDA with Meta to federate with them.
This will not benefit Mastodon/Fediverse, but it will benefit Meta because of the already available content. It's basically solving their chicken-or-egg problem for them.
I'm not at all sure this will be good for the Fediverse. I already see Meta "improving" upon ActivityPub in incompatible ways, urging people to just use their app (potential quote: "you can see all of the Fediverse anyways") and in the long run (when their own "instance" is big enough) will pull the plug again and be on its own.
Free Software isn't about picking and choosing who gets to run your program or interact with your protocol. Federation is, but the concept of Meta using ActivityPub has nothing inherently wrong with it.
If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things will just return to the same status quo they are today. Multiple content silos with thousands of freely-federating alternative platforms. As a Mastodon user I can't say I'm very scared of it, such a decision would hurt Meta more than it helps them.
> Free Software isn't about picking and choosing who gets to run your program or interact with your protocol. Federation is, but the concept of Meta using ActivityPub has nothing inherently wrong with it.
Meta can ActivityPub themselves all day long, as far as I'm concerned. If I were a server operator, I wouldn't let them anywhere NEAR my users though, so no federation with them.
> If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things will just return to the same status quo they are today.
This is very optimistic. EEE in the past didn't turn out that way. I can imagine the Fediverse being an empty husk with no (significant) life left, but that's just my fears.
Many people already imagine the Fediverse being an empty husk with no significant life left. I'm using the platform today, and I'm perfectly happy.
The EEE attempts on a major open platform haven't even reached step 3, arguably. ActiveX, XServe, Flash and Silverlight all failed spectacularly at their goal of co-opting and extinguishing the concept of the internet. Considering how Meta has no meaningful leverage over the Fediverse community, I think your fears are unwarranted. Best case scenario, Meta plays by the rules and federates well-regulated content into everyone's feeds like Twitter with less extremism. Worst-case scenario, Meta goes crazy and takes all the normies with them to their closed Threads landscape, returning things to how they are now (dense with nerds and misfits). I don't think Meta enthusiasts or current Fediverse denizens would care either way.
Off topic, but wasn’t Xserve just Apple’s rack mount system running Mac OS X Server? How was it trying to co-opt and extinguish the internet? (Not snarking, genuinely curious)
There is a pact to instantly defederate, many have already preemptively blocked their domains.
I deleted my account this morning, with a backup natch - nice thing about Mastodon, I can start up exactly where I left off, including whatever followers come over to the non-Meta side of the schism.
People act like the schism Fedi being small is a bad thing, I don't think we're supposed to interact with the entire planet as individuals. We apes do not have the capacity to handle it.
The limit of people we can effectively interact with in a group setting is around 150. This is a limit of our brain, probably the neocortex, because bigger neocortexes lead to bigger group sizes in primates.
Most big servers seem to be in a pact to defederate from Facebook before it even goes online.
I also remember the rumours stating that the Federation part was exclusively targeting large Mastodon servers, and also mostly unidirectional (from Mastodon to Threads).
I don't think the federation support will be all that great from what I've heard. But who knows, maybe it'll bring the Fediverse to the mainstream.
So for the record, the author of the "pact" has been publishing blatant fiction under the guises of "unverified rumors" and nearly everything you said here falls into that. All of it has been confirmed false by either Meta or representatives of the fediverse who met with Meta.
Meta isn't making any special deals with large servers and basically no large servers have signed the pact. Most of the pact signatories are single user servers or similar, there's a handful of small to medium sized ones, and even those who are defederating Meta will not defederate the servers that do federate with Meta.
Oh, absolutely. Even amongst all of the large servers, which expect to allow federation with Threads, none of them intend to give Meta special treatment. If they can't keep their house in order, they will end up getting defederated.
That being said, the big question will be how open Threads is to the rest of the fediverse. It likely won't include the global federated feed, so the question will be how much Threads users end up interacting with the average Mastodon user. It might end up being we only see Threads users when they either manually know a user they want to follow, or Meta promotes content from folks like George Takei into Threads and we see trash comments on that.
That doesn't seem to be true. There are a lot of instances that have signed the 'pact' to defederate Threads right away, but those tend to be mostly small instances.
Looking at the largest 30 or so instances by users most of them seem to have a 'wait and see' approach, which seems much more reasonable to me.
What's great is I can easily swap to an instance that is federating!
Unidirectional federation sounds like a nightmare on the UX side, so if that's the case I imagine it'd be Threads to Mastodon, enabling you to follow (but not interact) with Threads users.
> What's great is I can easily swap to an instance that is federating!
Define swap. I'm hearing instances which federate with FB will be defederated as well. If instances need to be federated to "swap", it likely won't be easy.
You should look into the story of XMPP and how it got killed by Google. The situation is pretty much identical to what Facebook is doing here, and the ending will likely be the same: once Meta gets enough users, they'll subtly break federation with ActivityPub, and everyone will just move to Threads because that's where all the content is. So, in the end, we end up with just another centralized app owned by a tech giant.
From a user on a small mastodon instance, no thank you. Admins of the smaller, more colorful, and technical instances are already getting ready to actively block and defederate as necessary. We don't want or need Meta bringing their digital typhoid to the fediverse.
One reason I haven't started Mastodon is that I don't want my experience to be ruled by self-righteous egotistical reddit mods. It's better for users when the admins are professional and checked out.
If only you were so lucky, Mastodon admins are way worse.
Not only might they mod at will in the way reddit mods do, Mastodon admins take it several steps further by bothering other instance mods about their moderation. And then yet another step: whom they federate with. They'll form little secret discord channels where they gather and form cancellation pacts on entire instances, based on a whim.
Is this not one of the primary advantages of federation and decentralized networks though? I think that there's a strong argument to be made that Everything networks have a deleterious effect on the collective human psyche because we're simply not designed to contemplate or accommodate so many radically different worldviews at once. Instead of creating societies with a strong emphasis on individual rights we exist in a pressure cooker of mental illness and anger amplified by algorithms that is pushing is closer and closer toward regulating one another out of existence.
Freedom of association is one of the most fundamental freedoms we have and democratic, free market societies can only flourish as long as we all agree to leave one another alone. You or I may not fully agree on the utility of say gay marriage or vaccines or religion or any number of cultural differences, but neither of us should be compelled to seriously entertain or fundamentally alter our way of being and thinking to please the other. This is how the old internet worked, the only reason we feel that it's impossible now is because we've been made to believe in totalizing systems of power that flatten and threaten to erase (by legal mandate or otherwise) different subcultures.
That's really cool. Someone from that project must've been really attached to the name.
It's interesting that Facebook/Instagram keeps launching new apps to identify new usecases. Most of them rarely gets heard of, but perhaps they gain a lot of insight even when they shut down.
On the flip side, I hope it's not like Google where services are launched to die soon for the sake of enhancing a promo package.
What I dislike about Twitter lately:
- overarching political propaganda
- crypto bros
- AI bros
- profit chads
- constant fighting over idiotic topics, some driven by Musk itself
What I care for when I open Twitter:
- news
- hearing from other people from the dev community
Threads need to realize the importance of the blue check and implement it. Prior to Musk, I would see a tweet, open the replies and look for the blue checks to see what "prominent" people were responding. Now that the blue check means nothing, that's impossible and you have to weed through all the content.
You can argue that's a good thing, that a person with 10 followers might be as interesting as someone with 100,000 followers, but it's not for me.
But you still have to pay don't you? I like verified users, but I also want to know who is prominent user. So maybe two badges? One just for verified ID and one for prominent user (the old blue check).
Remember when we used to call that filtering and it was a feature and not a con?
Not for actual censuring in cases where it’s demonstrably harmful - but I’m not required to give attention to someone’s opinion just cause they feel like blasting it into the void. Twitters gone too far the other way.
There’s a real opportunity here for Meta, but their success is far from a given. To get this right they are going to need to make some product decisions that aren’t in their nature.
#1 should be completely, actually bifurcating the experience from their other platforms. If they want me to use my Instagram login and want to make it easy for me to follow my IG followers, fine.
But the temptation to “carry” the network or the content over from Instagram or Facebook is going to be strong for them, because it looks like a baked-in advantage their investors will expect them to leverage to its fullest. In reality it’s the total opposite - I’ll be gone instantly if a bunch of low quality content from people I’m not interested in hearing from (read: that girl from high school I might follow on Facebook.)
Well I for one am actually looking forward to relevant ads.
On Twitter I've been shown everything from industrial mining supplies, nipple covers, psychology research papers, super yachts, home shopping network junk and just now an ad for an oral dosing technology conference.
Twitter is positively inundating me with "ads" from people boosting their twitter profiles, all dedicated to crypto, health "hacks", finance gurus, yoga teachers etc etc. I feel like Apple ads were the ones I saw most and now I've not seen an Apple ad in over a week. It really feels like advertisers are all pulling out
I’m finding Apple News actually provides me ads I click, and Reddit did briefly too. Neither of those apps ask nearly what Threads is asking. They are more tailored towards the content being shown though, and I turn down permissions whenever I can.
Anecdotally I’ve never purposefully clicked an ad on Twitter, I think either the buyers or the algorithms are off there.
That's always happened to me; I think if you follow any doctors, it shows you ads for medical conferences, but I can't tell if that's Twitter messing up or the people placing the ads setting the display audiences wrong.
Did Twitter always show you the same drop-shipper ad multiple times on the same thread? I'd be mad if I were an advertiser on Twitter, some of those ad impressions feel fraudulent to me, as a user.
I appreciate that Apple has their privacy practices highlighted in a easy to read card so that developers don’t get to hide it in legalease and a click away in a privacy policy.
The next step would be to actually prompt users about this, in the same way that you would get a prompt confirming that if you would like to download a large app when on mobile data. “It looks like you are trying to install the app Threads which reads the following information about you. Are you sure you would like to proceed?”
This would be a natural progressing of the “Ask not to track” dialog that they implemented awhile ago
or simply add a colored indicator next to the download button. If an app collects too much info, it shows a glowing red exclamation mark; if it collects nothing, it's a green smiley face.
I think it is surprising they went with the Instagram branding. Instagram has a better brand reputation than Facebook but I would also say that the brand image is still more for young and fun content, less serious things. Which I would think appeals more to younger people 20-35yo.
While what makes twitter great is that it is a more serious platform where you can get the ‘insight’ of professionals (journalists, politicians, etc).
That being said, Twitter’s brand is in the toilet right now. Maybe that is enough for this to attract people.
I do wonder what the alternative would be? Whatsapp branding? Feels off too… Would it have been better to use a new brand?
I wonder how their logged out web experience will be. I think Twitter has historically (until recently) been very permissive about letting anyone view and embed content from the site and I think that’s helped it become more socially pervasive. Instagram is really popular but has typically locked down the web experience unless you log in.
This was the social network that was supposed to support ActivityPub, right? So… maybe logged out support will be good? I’m still not holding my breath though.
I have a few accounts for various things (personal account, hobby, another hobby).
Recently I tried probably 10 separate times to create a fourth one not even linked to those three, and Instagram outright refused to let me do it with any email address. It even got to a point where on the browser I tried making the account it refuses to let me log in with my normal accounts these days.
Same here. Banned instantly for no reason. The problem is that some official entities like Fire departments are using these closed for-profit services and at the same time those services are adding login screens even for just read access.
I tried to join a few months ago and had the same problem. I couldn’t join through the app no matter what I tried. Instant ban with no way to get unbanned. But I was able to sign up on the website without an issue. And once I had a working account, I could create multiple alternate accounts through the app.
It’s frustrating Instagram doesn’t have lists so you need a separate account for every interest.
Yeah but it feels a bit like being negged. Like they can't just say "this is the process to make an account". They have to say " you are faaaakkeee prove to me you're real!".
Any guesses on how much you'll be able to read, when following a link with a Desktop browser? Half a thread, or more? Before the inevitable full-page login overlay hits you straight in the face, as they always tend to do.
Or any custom front-end! Honestly if threads supports activitypub then Twitter is gone just like that - they show that they can afford to do everything Twitter does and without the lockdowns, whining and negging.
I don’t know much about how ActivityPub actually works, is it possible that Threads could provide too much content to the network and DoS smaller instances from building feeds?
Simple: Facebook and Meta have garbage reputation compared to Instagram brand.
The public associates Facebook/Meta with excessive data collection, overhyped VR, intrusive tracking, etc. That association is much weaker with Instagram.
To be clear, I'm not saying that Instagram actually is any better than Meta/Facebook - but that their public perception isn't as disasterously tainted.
It's interesting. In media, Instagram is often portrayed as a device for young teens to feel insecure about themselves, leading to suicides and depressions, and the lack of any meaningful intervention by Meta/Instagram. Is that really a better public perception than privacy violations? Realistically looking at this, I doubt they'd get much of the Mastodon crowd, which is, grossly exaggerating, mostly tech and LGBTQ. So what remains is "normal" people who care about "normal" topics. I doubt these people care much about privacy (most of them are already on FB and Instagram).
Seems like the Instagram handle will be the Threads handle. IG, like Twitter rely on the handle concept, whereas Facebook never really did in the same manner.
Yes, this is the answer for sure. You can get a good username on it, because you have one on Instagram. That's a big deal for a lot of people, I think.
Reinforce insta as a “platform” where features are now labeled as “apps”. Continues to reinforce engagement metrics at insta app level, so big win politically for the insta org inside meta. I’m sure a lot of promos coming down next cycle. Also very easy user acquisition since it piggy backs on existing insta user base.
Insta maps more to the public facing vibe that Twitter does, whereas Facebook seems more for friends and family. Insta also more easily monetized than say WhatsApp, so the business moves all track.
Overall curious to see what happens to the landscape. At a minimum it may leach away engagement from Twitter, so probably not very favorable for Twitter stock price.
On the fediverse, there's already a huge number of instances planning to block this app when possible as it isn't really in the spirit of the fediverse - it's proprietary, owned by a large company and centralized
It kinda doesn't matter? I would wager this will likely eclipse the fediverse's total userbase in a day or two. They simply post a banner for logged-in IG users, "Tap here to get the new twitter-murdering app, no signup needed", and they have an instant eight-figure userbase.
Yep. Assuming this [1] site's count of 10m fediverse's total users is accurate, Instagram would only need 2% of their ~500 DAU to sign up to surpass it; only 0.5% of their MAU.
My knee-jerk reaction to this is that it's immature posturing. The internet is a decentralized protocol with centralized entities. Email is a decentralized protocol with centralized entities. But for this decentralized protocol (Mastodon/ActivityPub), centralized entities are a bridge too far?
>. The internet is a decentralized protocol with centralized entities
Maybe they're mature enough not to want that?
Sign up to protonmail.com for some privacy, to have your emails not read by Proton Inc., and quickly realize that most – if not all – your contacts are receiving your messages @gmail.com. All your emails will still be exploited by Google Inc.
There are good reasons to want the Fediverse to remain… diverse. Blocking isn't posturing, it's acting.
> by one of the most toxic and damaging tech companies
I mean, this bits not great.
Facebook didn’t write a fediverse compatible app because of warm fuzzy good feelings and wanting to contribute back to the community, they wrote one so they could capitalise and absorb the existing user base.
They’ll do exactly the same thing they did with fb messenger at the beginning: massive interoperability with existing protocols and communities, followed by later deliberately breaking compat.
I think Facebook/Instagrams very "PC-model" of moderation will allow for Twitter to coexist with them.
There's a tangible difference in Twitter now that Musk took over. Raunchy, sometimes offensive jokes are now actually possible on the site. I use Twitter a lot more than I ever did because of it. I don't want Instagram 2.0 with nothing but "models" and stolen videos.
The circle of Web 2.X (3.X?) progress continues! This was called the 'Facebook Wall' in 2007. You could write stories, post links, photos, etc. It worked and scaled. Not much longer until they progress into a 'student directory and message' app, exclusively for college and university students.
But, I generally feel social media is dying in far bigger ways thank just these dilutions.
People don't trust it, and are caring far less.
They hey-day and the novelty has completely worn of for the majority who are not narcissistic enough to put the energy in to arguing or self-promoting.
The only reason I like anything on Instagram anymore is because I feel sorry for my friends who are on their honeymoon and think anyone cares about their posts. They're my friends so I just randomly click like on their posts while inside I think to myself, why the fuck don't you just get off your phone and enjoy your holiday? I mean, I'm obviously happy their having fun, but I'm sad they think it's important to show everyone what they're doing 5 times a day.
I have some other friends who are semi-pro athletes and the same thing, I "like" their posts only really because they want people to care. Aside from that, it's something I look at while on the toilet for 5 minutes and then put it away.
I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer.
There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't been able to fulfill it due to scalability and network stickiness reasons. Meta can absorb all of twitter's traffic without breaking stride, and they'll have a userbase in the millions within hours of launch that's able to hop over from IG.
I couldn't disagree more. I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great, and the fact that they're heavily branding it with Instagram, using Instagram logins etc suggests to me that they're just looking for another angle to vacuum up user data. Maybe I'm unusual but the accounts I follow on Instagram and Twitter do not have a huge amount of crossover so the fact that their onboarding process tries to replicate your Instagram social graph makes me feel like this will replace Instagram posts composed of Notes screenshots rather than replace Twitter.
Not to mention, when was the last time Facebook successfully launched a new standalone social app? Remember Poke, their Snapchat clone? If you do you’re in an exclusive club. They had to pivot the entire Instagram app in order to compete with Snapchat and Twitter isn’t a big enough threat to ever justify doing that. I think it'll get merged into a "text" type of Instagram post eventually and otherwise killed off.
Side note, but:
> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative
I actually don't think there is. Twitter always had a relatively low number of users compared to other networks. The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it being where journalists and celebrities break news.
There's two channels here. From a user perspective "what made Twitter great" is also the least attractive parts for any other company to try and mimic. The absurd levels of pornography, the anonymous fan and joke accounts. From a business perspective, "what made Twitter great" was the easy to digest brands, the non-anonymous accounts sharing their day, and journalists/other named professionals providing up to date information directly without the need to learn how to video/image edit.
Meta does not understand the former, but they certainly do understand the latter. It's all they care about, and why they're bothering with this. It's certainly not out of a desire to replace Twitter for the goodness of their hearts, no they want the valuable aspects of Twitter.
I don't see how Twitter, without making any serious changes, will become anything more than a wasteland of people too crude for Threads but also too illiterate for Mastodon.
I'd add that there are more user cohorts than you describe. There are the scrollers that just want a constantly changing feed to "engage" with (typically though not always, showing little discretion about whom they follow), there are the "industrial producers" (whether corporates or individuals) who want the world to benefit from their wisdom (showing little to no discretion about who follows them - the more the merrier), and there are the "communitarians", who want to actively engage with a more narrowly defined set of the tribes they are members of (showing greater discretion in their social graph, and also taking part in providing tribe-relevant content).
Of the three cohorots, the latter is by far the smallest (my own guess), and these are definitely (from my experience) finding homes on Mastodon (tribe-specific servers).
A lot of LGBT twitter tribe are not going to move to a site where they have to post under their government name, for their own safety.
(A very important axis for social networks is the "IRL or not" one; Facebook and Linkedin are "IRL", Twitter and Mastodon are very definitely not. Which way is Threads going to go?)
Good points. The question therefore becomes what persuades advertisers to spend money on there and so what will drive a critical mass of users and content to get to that point. No doubt the "industrial producers" and the peddlers of dopamine and outrage will be what gets the platform there.
> "what made Twitter great" was the easy to digest brands, the non-anonymous accounts sharing their day, and journalists/other named professionals
You should be in sales lol, just sell the B2B folks on ads and sign them up for multi-year deals like Spotify, by selling a tiny set of uber celebrities and brand names that no one gives a shit about enough to switch platforms. Forget what the users are doing which is posting as much as ever.
I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes. Apparently Meta is the competent one now because they pigeonholed a cloned feature on their platform + the alternative is no longer cool among the tech crowd on a niche programmer/startup forum.
Honestly FB being as successful as it was for so long should get some credit. Nothing sticks around forever and they generated massive amounts of wealth. It's wayyy bigger than Twitter still. As I say with Twitter even if they did lose 30% of their users that's still hundreds of millions of people using your website.
> the big expensive Metaverse plan was cancelled.
Has it really? Do you mean the scale/timing of their play (too much too early) or more generally.
>I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes. Apparently Meta is the competent one now because they pigeonholed a cloned feature on their platform + the alternative is no longer cool among the tech crowd on a niche programmer/startup forum.
The intelligentsia hates Musk far more than Zuckerberg right now, and will cheer on anything that could potentially hurt him. There's also some wishful thinking that Threads will institute the sort of mass censorship of right-wing speech that was present on Twitter, but it seems unlikely that there will be very different standards than what you see on Facebook, which is often derided as a right-wing boomer-infested hellscape.
I chuckled quite a bit when I realized Musk was buying Twitter to put an end to the totalitarian censorship practiced by the left. And unsurprisingly, Musk is now the big adversary.
Having enemies or groups to disagree with is more important than you think. If the lbgt2s can't shitpost nazi content they soon discover the differences between each of themselves and attack each other. A tribe needs an enemy
There's been no mass censorship of right wing speech anywhere in the US. There has been censorship of both mis and disinformation performed independently by companies who didn't want their customers to die for preventable illnesses or become the next Unabomber due to Russian influence campaigns.
There was a recent study that was floating around the news showing that this, never happened. The study went on to show that actually conservative viewpoints were boosted by social media algorithms.
What actually was happening was mass hysteria, and a political base being radicalized by a cult like leader who claimed every single thing was "lugen press", and anything bad that happened was an attack on them.
Maybe that content was boosted by algorithms which were trained on engagement. The content was indeed popular, if only because it was contrarian. Contrarian viewpoints flourish if people believe that the press doesn't hold government to account. But that is a different topic. Algorithms vs direct influence.
But there were still propaganda efforts, especially for the topic of mis- or disinformation. It served as an excuse to curb content. Trump decried the press, but at the same time he was correct in that the media tried to smear him with a Russian collusion story and promoted and suppress certain other topics. This isn't about conservative vs democrat, this is just underhanded political play. So the worst part is that he was partially correct about the press being instrumentalized. If they just reported critically and honestly, he would never have had an argument here.
Another bad result from this is that this of course might strain the relationship of a country being accused to meddle in elections. It turned large parts of the domestic populations against an imaginary enemy. Not saying that this is relevant for current developments.
You could maybe excuse the press because they have been fed with false info. Checking sources is their job, but worst of all, is that they now claim that voices need to be censored because of misinformation, just as they spread it themselves. I doubt they mean their own and I can fully understand the lacking trust in large press companies.
The press did not try to smear him with the Russian collusion "story". That story is and was very real. The Mueller investigation lead to dozens of criminal charges, of trump appointees and foreign Russian agents. Whoever convinced you otherwise had a successful propaganda campaign and you are one of millions of victims.
The probe did not find collusion, but that isn't the point.
The fact that he was put under that much scrutiny is political play. We have diverging opinions here, but I believe if there were any serious failings, we certainly would have heard of it. People tried to smear him with some failings of alleged contacts. Everyone even slightly connected could be smeared with allegations like that.
But the fact remains that A: The probe did NOT find collusion and that B: the probe was launched on falsified information that was created to start a political prosecutions. That is in my opinion something far more serious than anything the probe laid open and furthermore should obviously be discouraged.
That's not a "conservative" viewpoint. That was a politicaly insensitive take to have that lead to asian hate and violence at the time. I still don't think that the lab leak theory was ever proven to be true. I think the official stance is "it could be".
I don’t really care about the ideology; my point is that it was wrongfully suppressed.
> That was a politicaly insensitive take to have that lead to asian hate and violence at the time.
Is there literally any evidence of this at all? The virus originated from China either way, and if anything, it’s less offensive to blame a mistake at a virology lab rather than the general sanitation level of Chinese wet markets.
The lab leak theory was politically insensitive to the people who backed research at that specific lab. That’s it.
Another example is the leaked contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which have since been confirmed to be authentic. Censored as “disinformation/misinformation” at the time, turned out to be completely true, and again, censored because it was embarrassing to specific powerful individuals.
It's news to me that Twitter mass censored right-wing speech. They did at one time have some standards against hate speech (though they barely enforced them), but certainly nothing against right-wing speech.
I am an anonymous user on Twitter and never saw any pornography. What do you think did I do wrong?
I get that advertisers and credit card companies get careful here, but I think sanitized content will just never be popular. It won't be restricted to pornography, it never is. No platform is interesting if advertisers and other stakeholders prescribe "positivity content". Instagram was successful because people connected with their friends. They will struggle as well if the platform gets more and more commercialized. Celebs will only ever attract certain demographics. New users might look into new platforms. Those will probably be just as shitty as the last one and the cycle continues.
When these social networks became connected to ones professional career.
Let's say you are a marketing director for (small video game company) and are using social media (Twitter, Reddit, etc. etc.) to market, network and hype your games.
Suddenly, porn appears. Possibly your characters in the game get rule34'd. Do you engage?
No one is going to sacrifice their 30+ year career for a bit of free advertising to a video game that you're only going to put 1 or 2 years more into.
I think "mainstream" porn is accepted for the most part. But you don't have to go very far before people ask "How old is that character by the way?" and then everything goes to shit.
Are children following your professional account for video game news? Etc. etc. Its just too much of a risk in practice.
-----
EDIT: Wow, a bunch of downvotes. Okay, I'm a Pokemon fan. Tell me, how long do I have to go on Twitter before I accidentally come across rule34 of Pokemon characters? We all know what's out there, I'm sure we've all seen the internet. Nothing against rule34 artists or anything, but these are not things you want to interact with if you're making a career out of video game marketing. There's some pretty uncomfortable taboos that are being explored here.
I don’t think Meta even needs to care about the valuable aspects of Twitter. If everyone on Twitter jumps ship to Meta, Meta will own even more social media and there’s no way that isn’t a win.
Meta has been big enough for antitrust since at least 2010 when they went on an M&A kick[0]. Definitely they should have been blocked from buying Instagram back in 2012. Problem is, by that point governments had effectively hollowed out their antitrust enforcement agencies[1]. So the only option now is to break companies up.
Related note: I don't think anyone should be talking about Threads in the language of competition. Either this displaces Twitter entirely or (more likely) it dies on the vine. While there's been a lot of movement to Mastodon and Bluesky, Twitter is still around. There's no competition between the two; they're serving different markets. The people who jumped ship are the kinds of people who were already getting sick and tired of Twitter's toxicity. The people who remain are either hardcore outrage addicts or journalists and politicians feeding their addiction.
[1] This is often couched in the language of the free market, but practically speaking this was done because bigger platforms are easier to understand and easier to regulate.
Surely letting every alphabet group and Cambridge Analytica grab some of that treasure trove of "oops, our API was poorly scoped" data was prioritized higher than breaking up or otherwise slowing down Facebook.
A quick search suggests Meta face or faced two antitrust cases in the USA (acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, and separately a restraining order against the purchase of Within Unlimited), and have been warned of the possibility of antitrust charges in the EU (regarding advertising).
I find it mind blowing that people refer to Twitter as "once great" now that it is known that it was essentially a disgusting totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool for one of the 2 political flavors in the US.
I just don't get how someone can feel that this is better than what it is now and just casually ignore that fact.
I also don't get how people can claim that Twitter is now going to die because "???". HN is into soothsaying now?
The persecution fetish many right wingers had over twitter didn't really play with the vast majority of users. Twitter existed for normal people acting normal, not for "lefists".
It existed for advertisers. All the "censorship" being moaned about is because brands would stop advertising on the platform if Twitter couldn't give reasonable guarantees that their ads would not run next to extremely toxic content.
This seems pretty self evident, since most of them left as soon as Musk took over with the promise to stop policing the platform.
If the U.S. was invaded I'd rather fascist racist nationalists be dying holding the enemy back than artists and scientists.
Regardless Azov iirc has shed it's 'nazi' roots to become an effective legitimate military unit. Turns out a lot of fascist apparently are cowards.
Anyways your attachment to Azov having nationist roots reveals your Russian bias. And they are fascist nationalist. They've been destroying, raping, and pillaging what they can for purely fascist racist reasons. That makes the Russians the side of the Nazis here fyi.
> now that it is known that it was essentially a disgusting totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool for one of the 2 political flavors in the US.
Everything we've seen from the Twitter threads suggests that they were working with both political parties, and that it's just reporting bias that we only got more details about their dealings with one of the parties. For example, the original data dumps mentioned in passing that there were similar requests coming from the Presidency (Trump, at the time), the "journalist" just chose to focus on the ones coming from Biden's campaign.
> I find it mind blowing that people refer to Twitter as "once great" now that it is known that it was essentially a disgusting totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool for one of the 2 political flavors in the US.
You're delusional. Twitter before the acquisition was extremely politically neutral and gave extremist right wing voices way more leeway than should be socially acceptable. Post-acquisition has turned it into the 'totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool' that you're describing, for Musk's personal and political interests, which at the time seem to be ultra-far right.
I said that Twitter is transphobic because Musk has made transphobic statements and has asserted that they are Twitter policy. And he owns Twitter, so they are Twitter policy. Ergo, Twitter is transphobic. This is not hyperbole; it is a simple statement of fact.
> You're delusional. Twitter before the acquisition was extremely politically neutral and gave extremist right wing voices way more leeway than should be socially acceptable.
LOL wow.. calling somebody else delusional is serious projection! Twitter was far from neutral. It was obvious to any objective skeptic in real-time then supporting evidence such as Twitter Files confirmed it. Twitter was far left of center and used constant censorship against opposing views.
> I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great
I mean, it's extremely clear that current Twitter leadership doesn't understand that either. They're not competing with Twitter at its prime (or at least its peak influence; personally I preferred it when it was a lot smaller in the early 10s) from a few years ago; they're competing with a website that just went completely dark to the public internet and appears to be barely usable even if you're logged in.
Twitter is monetized outrage. A lot had to fall into place for that to work. Of course they need a working website, but beyond that I believe they are way sticker than pundits claim. That unique combination of echo chamber plus the ability to reach across and mock, abuse, or become enraged by the other side, all while having a community, is not easily replicable.
I wonder, do you actually use it, or more to the point, did you pre-Musk? That's certainly a belief people have about the site, and it is certainly a facet of Twitter, but Twitter is (or was) only monetized outrage in the same way that Twitter is cat pictures or Twitter is porn or Twitter is celebrities. It was there, but unless you chose to engage with it you likely wouldn't see much of it (as the recommendation stuff started to break down under Musk, many people were surprised to see porn in the algorithmic feed; despite porn on Twitter being a huge deal, many users were surprised it was allowed because The Algorithm(TM) used to be good at hiding it from those who didn't engage with it).
I do think post-Musk that this effective auto-segmentation has become less of a thing, particularly for outrage/political stuff; the algorithmic stuff seems increasingly broken, and the auto-promotion of blueticks shoves all sorts of nonsense in your face. But for most of Twitter's lifespan, unless you were in that world, you didn't really see much of it.
I wonder if you used it, in order to think that it was not monetized outrage, Twitter for me was like the french revolution, one guillotine a day, without trial, where the population was judge jury and executor
In order to do this, you must assiduously avoid mainstream news as well. I think that’s the point where the two sides of this debate are talking past each other. There is the Twitter you see on Twitter (your customized feed) but there’s also the That that is reported on in the news, screencapped on Reddit, shared on WhatsApp and iMessage, etc. If the sense memory of those non-platform Twitter interactions is stronger than the on-platform ones, especially when it comes to negative senses like hate, it tarnishes the users’ experience with it.
What? No, I follow people tweeting in public. I almost never tweet, but when I do it’s public as well.
To be honest I don’t know what you meant on your comment. Was it a mix of tautology with true Scotsman? You have to follow outraged people to say you are properly on Twitter thus if you are properly on Twitter the outrage is unavoidable?
True, but at least the public perception is that the carefully curated non hate, non garbage consuming Twitter user is a person living comparatively in a very small village.
Most people live in a huge metropolis of suffering.
BTW, there are many UX studies showing people don't change defaults. What Twitter recommends to them is what they read.
It's not a feature exclusive for Twitter to be sure but the fact that herd behavior on background of social animosity is much more important driver than cat pictures is pretty much established. There are number of studies on this account
I’ve used it before and during Musk. Twitter has always been outrage by default (at least since ~2014 or so) with some crude controls that allow you to opt out (like blocking/muting people, using curated lists instead of the main feed, and for the love of all that is holy never ever visiting the “for you” or “trending” links). Most of the people I’ve heard claim (as you are) that you have to opt-in to outrage on Twitter are using third party apps that don’t show the same timeline or recommendations as the official app/site (or they otherwise don’t steer users toward the outrage content the same way as the official UIs did).
Agreed that Twitter has improved a bit post-Musk, but it has a decade of ossified outrage culture baked in and that doesn’t change easily. Some notable improvements though include: “for you” and “trending” pages are no longer exclusively showing the worst representations of viewpoints I disagree with (still plenty of disagreement and idiocy, but no longer exclusively the most idiotic representations of the views I disagree with), Community Notes seems genuinely helpful at identifying mis/disinformation that pre-Musk Twitter would have happily boosted (even endorsed via Blue Check), and honestly even the “Blue Check no longer means endorsement but rather access to paid features” seems like a marked improvement. Twitter seems quite a lot more content-neutral without going full anarchy.
The user base is exactly what's not easily replicable.
And trying to "migrate" a user base from Instagram seems like a shot in the foot in this context, even if the whole mechanic of the platform is pretty much the same as twitter, the user base is already completely different
Having that community and culture is the moat. Even like things like “ratio” and “subtweeting” are part of the moat if you’re trying to create a clone.
However, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a next big thing out of nowhere like TikTok.
Incidentally, I feel like Twitter has done more recently to pivot away from outrage (though there is still plenty of only because the culture of billions of users doesn’t change overnight)—when I go to the “For You” page, I no longer exclusively see the most idiotic representations of the views I disagree with, for example—instead it’s mostly just “big conversation topics”, often still controversial and with plenty of idiocy from all sides, but no longer seemingly designed for provocation. Community Notes is probably the most visible example, and something that kind of opened my mind about possibilities for non-censorious forms of moderation (for those who don’t know, Community Notes allows the Twitter Community to collectively identify and label mis/disinformation—it works by finding consensus among people who normally disagree with each other, which seems quite a lot saner than leaving it to the judgment of Twitter staff and has worked out pretty well in my experience).
Casual twitter user here and have heard about 'notes' but not actually seen it in the wild yet? It sounds moderately reasonable; one of my concerns is that there's so much other upheaval going on that whatever effectiveness it might have will be lost in the shuffle or essentially impossible to measure well.
Yeah, I don’t know how you could reasonably measure it and there’s lots of other stuff going on. I was initially pretty “meh” on notes, but a lot of the content that would have otherwise been boosted by algos and endorsed via blue checks now gets cooled off pretty quickly because Notes set the record straight.
Having seen this in action a few times, I wish it were around for the 2015-2020 timeline. I could easily see it being more effective than outright censorship at addressing Trump’s election fraud claims or the various claims about policing in America (particularly egregious information a la Michael Brown “hands up, don’t shoot” stuff). Probably could have reduced a lot rioting and cooled a lot of racial strife / election denialism. Of course, this is all hypothetical speculation and I can’t prove it.
Making a Twitter-like service profitable is difficult. To attempt it, you need
(1) Network effects
(2) Infrastructure competency
I think Facebook can provide these faster at a higher level than anyone else who is attempting it. For profit, things that would help include:
(1) No need for profitability
(2) Profit synergies with an existing business
Again, Facebook is a strong competitor here. They can start at #1 and integrate to achieve #2
To get people to switch from Twitter to your service it helps to have:
(1) Brand recognition
(2) Also be a social network
(3) A marketing budget
However, I think getting people to switch is the hardest part for any network; it's affected by many factors. There is also the consideration of getting them to switch, stay, and not be pulled away by a future competitor.
If only a small % of Meta's users start using the app, it'll quickly become an audience too big to ignore. Anyone with Twitter clout will have to maintain a presence there, and being there on Day 1 is an opportunity for them to possibly get more clout.
Facebook can provide network effects but by leveraging your existing social graph. To me it feels like there’s a risk they’ll just cannibalise social activity on their existing apps rather than create a lot of new activity.
Twitter with my Instagram friends won’t feel like Twitter.
I haven’t had any problem using Twitter recently (hardly “barely usable”). They had a technical hiccup that affected some users, but meh, Reddit serves 5XXs for up to an hour a couple of times a month and people don’t hyperventilate about its impending doom. The thing about social networks is that it doesn’t matter much if Twitter isn’t as great as it was in the early 10s, it still has the users and it’s obscenely difficult to pull users away en masse. Threads can probably carve out a big enough swatch to justify its own existence, but whether those users come from Twitter or other Meta properties (cannibalism) remains TBD and in any case I don’t think it will take enough users from Twitter to sink the latter. All of the doomsday prophesy about Twitter feels a lot like motivated reasoning, much like the smug certainty of the media running up to the 2016 election (and I say this as a someone with a “Trump for Prison 2024” yard sign). I’ve been hearing the same people saying (mostly on Twitter) for many months that it’s a sinking ship and they’re leaving and I’m still waiting for the big exodus.
I don't see any evidence Musk understands what made Twitter great, either.
At this point, someone just needs to stand up a Twitter clone that can handle the traffic because I think most regular Twitter users are having a much worse experience on there now -- from my own anecdotal experience as a semi-heavy twitter user.
The only thing they’re truly good at is copying features and using regulatory capture to outmuscle the competition.
Meta would have been absolutely toast right now if TikTok wasn’t banned in India. All of their user growth has come from that market lately, and that could only happen because Indian users have no option but to use Reels (TikTok was killing it here).
And the TikTok ban was also very suspiciously timed - right after Meta made massive billion dollar investments in India’s most powerful and politically connected business (Reliance/Jio). There have been no subsequent bans on anything Chinese.
You say this and in the next breath mention India banning TikTok, which indicates that you don’t know what you’re talking about. India banned TikTok and 57 other Chinese apps in June 2020 in response to clashes between the PLA and the Indian Army in the Himalayas.
How are you going to explain that? That Zuck picked up the phone and encouraged Xi to attack Ladakh so that Modi would ban TikTok? Be real.
It is definitely true that Meta has tangentially benefited from this, but let’s not pretend that Meta was the driving force behind this.
Of course not. That was just coincidental timing, and a popular move politically at that time.
Because if Chinese apps were so dangerous, why haven't other Chinese apps been banned since, or why have Chinese smartphones continued to prolifer in the Indian market since?
India's trade with China has only increased since then. Yet somehow, TikTok was the first casualty - and nothing since.
It was an Indian response to a Chinese provocation. But you’re not very familiar with Indian matters if you think there have been no further Indian responses.
Banning apps is one thing. Military exercises with America, Japan and Australia is another. A state visit by the Indian PM to America where defence deals were struck is yet another. All of these responses hurt China’s interests.
It’s quite simplistic to think that app banning is the only thing a country can do.
Also, you might not understand this but it’s easy to replace Chinese apps, so it only hurts the Chinese companies and not Indian consumers. It’s harder to replace physical goods overnight because that would increase prices and decrease choice for Indian consumers. That’s why it hasn’t happened.
There's "made in China", and there's "based out of China, headed by Chinese nationals, and owned by Chinese nationals". All of India's top selling brands (OPPO, OnePlus, Vivo) fit into the latter category.
I don't think you actually understand what makes Meta great and why they continue to win.
It is the fact that they run the most sophisticated, best-performing and well-run advertising platform of any website on the planet. And nothing comes close. Not Google. Not TikTok. And definitely not Twitter.
The fact they are going to bring that to Threads is going to utterly decimate Twitter's revenue.
For anyone confused by the same name on separate apps, this is the description of the previous Instagram Threads app:
> Threads was introduced in 2019 as a companion app to Instagram shortly after the company shut down its other standalone messaging app, Direct. Instead of focusing solely on the inbox experience, Threads was built as a “camera-first” mobile messager designed to be used for posting status updates and staying in touch with those you designated as your “Close Friends” on Instagram.
I was just sharing what I thought was a useful link, not editorializing (though I can see where it looks like I was). Amazing how that came and went and — I’m guessing — many people (even in a niche place like HN) probably don’t remember.
All they need to do is copy Twitter from like ten years ago, and they already have a killer product that's an order of magnitude better than what Twitter is now.
For me at least personally, the experience is better.
No more cult of personalities with "verified" badges and wondering who gets it and who does not.
No more censorship of certain people and shadow banning, which is one of the main issues Elon even bought Twitter I think, was to create a censorship free platform for discussion.
The feeds are better, I see less stupid likes like I did for example 1 year ago, when my feed would be full of likes from people I dont care about.
Also, there is the feature of community leaving feedback on the tweet, which can show immediately that okay, this tweet is just wrong.
10 years ago was a different time socially and politically, you cannot go back to that. Also ten years ago twitter had probably much less bots and users also.
Agreed. I only started using twitter after the changes musk made. I found it absolutely intolerable previously.
The search feature needs a complete overhaul though, and despite musk’s claims of cracking down on spam I still see far too many crypto spammers every day.
You mean like how Elon Musk has shadowbanned pro-Ukrainian talk, such as Kyiv Independent? All pro-Ukrainian sources do not trickle up the timelines anymore.
Twitter also puts Ukrainians soldiers petting-puppies and/or showing off their cats behind the age-restriction filters.
--------
Before, Twitter had a committee and moderators who you could talk to about these shadowbans and other such moderation decisions. Today, all those have been fired, and strangely pro-Russians are being boosted... while pro-Ukrainians are being shadowbanned.
Its pretty obvious too. Traffic to Ukrainian-meme accounts dropped significantly. Anyone following Ukrainian accounts saw traffic go from thousands+ into just single-digits when the deboosting / shadowbans started.
I am part of that crowd who visited Ukrainian memes and saw them disappear from Twitter. So consider _ME_ to be a source on this as well.
And it coincidentally matched all these Ukrainian videos being locked behind age-verification?
Again, Ukrainian memes include a bunch of soldiers petting cats or dogs, or helping kids. Its not all frontline war footage. In fact, the meme accounts tend to be more tailored towards the cat videos.
The frontline footage accounts absolutely should be age-verified. But the meme accounts getting age-locked proves that Twitter suddenly had a change of heart over Ukrainians.
I’ve hardly seen any age verification on war content, though to be fair I don’t follow a lot of the propaganda (“meme”) accounts you’re discussing.
Also, Twitter doesn’t have an age verification mechanism; it just sort of requires you to click through to see images that have been tagged as sensitive content.
They've basically moved onto https://nafo.uk / Mastodon instance now, if you wanna see what its mostly about. (I guess I see on Mastodon.world as well)
Twitter is obviously hostile to them, so they were basically forced to move. Given that Threads is likely going to be Mastodon/Fediverse compatible, that basically means that pro-Ukrainian side will be migrating off of Twitter and likely be compatible with Meta / Instagram Threads.
I also prefer OSINT stuff over propaganda memes. But I don't think that the propaganda memes should be deboosted / shadowbanned, especially if they are ya know? Honest memes / funnier stuff SFW?
The question is of Twitter and their shadowban policy. They're still clearly shadowbanning / deboosting / manipulating results. Its just switched politics, that's all.
Don't know about that, but before Musk the shadowbans were just a theory and I remember Jack Dorsey even denying existence of them.
The committee twitter had before was in close collaboration with FBI.
Currently twitter is one of the only of the bigger social medias, where you can even discuss controversial topics and see discussion around those.
Better to be in collaboration with FBI than the current set of Twitter executives who seem to be pushing pro-Russian talking points and shadow-banning Ukrainians.
They may be good at copying features, but they then destroy the gains by trying to push real name policy. The only difference between Fb, Ig, Oculus, Threads, and its counterparts is traceability to cardface information printed on your driver's license, and that alone is forcing them into positions they are in.
But making a copy is never enough. Users are only willing to migrate to a new platform for lower price, superior features, or when the original platform screws up big time. Otherwise it's just more of the same, and now instead of sending a tweet, you now would have to use multiple platforms to reach the same audience which probably already uses Twitter anyway.
If they really want people to move from Twitter like from Digg to Reddit or MySpace to Facebook they need a unique selling point. Having to use my real identity for a Twitter clone isn't one.
Stories was a massive success because they pivoted their massively successful app Instagram around it.
They’re never going to do that with a Twitter clone, the stakes aren’t high enough. It remains to be seen if they can actually launch a copy of another app without subsuming an existing one to do so.
Yahoo Search, MySpace Social Network, and Digg for link aggregation, amirite?
Blackberry smartphones, PalmOS to organize our contacts, Sony Walkmen to listen to music, Symbian Apps, Java ME phone applications. Flash internet content, Juno Email. UltraSPARC systems running SPARC probably won't be beaten by a scrappy open source startup...
How can Twitter be a Windows of anything? It is a tenth of Facebook's size, it's unprofitable and it can't bend any tech partners to its will, as shown by the Google Cloud situation.
I think in the OPs example Twitter is the Windows of being Twitter. If you want to use a Twitter like social network, Twitter is still king. Facebook is massive but it will still need to capture mindshare to unseat Twitter.
It won’t work just like that because those who you want to follow on Twitter have a big following and are invested in the current platform. You’ve got to get big accounts to switch. This Instagram approach may work.
I’m not a fan of Musk but Musk isn’t trying to make Twitter better…
He’s trying to make Twitter able to pay its own bills. Twitter has never made money (except once) in its 17 years of existence.
Twitter as it was should not exist. It’s like a bakery that sells loaves for bread for 20c at a loss. It’s going to eventually implode unless something changes.
> He’s trying to make Twitter able to pay its own bills.
He could've bought seats on the board to accomplish this through standard shareholder activism. By committing a leveraged buyout and saddling the company with an additional >1 billion a year in added debt payments, while simultaneously driving advertising revenue into the ground, he's basically sent the company on a beeline toward insolvency.
I agree that Twitter should pay it's own bills. But the causes for that are obvious from my POV:
* Their add platform is truly terrible. Ask anyone who deals in that area to compare it with Meta or Google's and they will laugh.
* They can't ship new products. Since 2008 they have increased the size of tweets from 140 characters to 280 characters, and that is the biggest change. Look how many things Facebook has tried in the same time. Some failed, but lots succeeded.
Also in the history of bad decisions, surely the decision to kill Vine is right up there? Occasionally people still find an old Vine video and share it. What could have been...
That’s not true about new products: since idk, 2018 or so, they’ve been constantly shipping new ML crap to ruin the main feed. This is why I closed my account in 2020. “Person you follow liked…” is the literal worst feature.
> Those features drive use but did they also increase profit, given that Facebook successfully enshitified their main product (the news feed)?
I don't have any insight into groups, but I do into Marketplace where yes it absolutely did.
I'd be astonished if Pages didn't have a measurable effect too since they are one of the main ways brands (which is a major source of FB revenue) interfaces with FB.
I see a lot of conspiracy theories like this one but zero explanation of motive.
WHY would Musk act as a stooge for the Saudis in this way, at a cost of $44 billion? He's the richest man in the world, he doesn't have to do errands for anyone.
"Parag hurt his feelings, so he impulsively and vengefully made a buyout offer. He almost immediately came to his senses, and unsuccessfully tried for months to wiggle out of the deal" fits the fact pattern. Once he realized he actually had to try and run the thing, he failed. It's a lot simpler than the Saudi thing.
He's the richest man in the world partially because he's desperate for money. Being bottomlessly greedy is a necessary prerequisite to being a multibillionaire, any normal person would retire before they get there. And although he's one of the wealthiest people in the world, his wealth is dwarfed by that of the Saudi state.
Technically the Saudi PIF and the Saudi ownership of Aramco, which runs into trillions, is all property of the Saudi royalty, and increasingly the personal property of the current rulers, father and son. So no, Musk isn't the richest man on the planet.
Musk has been accused of bringing anti-Muslim content to the attention of his millions of followers (like Amy Mek's tweets about the France riots and other things[0]) and I'm sure that wouldn't sit well with Saudi Arabia.
I understand worries of Musk supporting the right, but your interpretation is a unique one that seems highly unlikely.
Saudi Arabia doesn't care about Muslims and Yada Yada. If they did, where's the outcry over Uighurs and what not? Saudi Arabia just cares about one thing and that's securing the interests of the royal Al Saud family.
It's Musk we're talking about here, so Hanlon's Razor probably applies. Unlike his other companies he doesn't have handlers to mitigate his poor decision-making.
Is it really suppressing liberal discourse, or is the new Twitter balancing the sides by letting the conservative discourse run freely? It’s a common fallacy for folks to think that just because they are seeing tweets from the opposite side more that they think their side is being suppressed
Many have doubted Elon Musk during the early days of Tesla and SpaceX thinking he was incompetent in running those companies and the goals were lofty. People still doubt him with as much ferocity as his fans that adore him. It’s super fascinating IMO.
That being said, I do think Instagram will have some success with threads the same way Reels has been successful in fending off TikTok (as in not made completely irrelevant). People who share on TikTok also cross post on IG reels for more views and for eyeballs that are not on TikTok. I think the same thing will happen, where there will be some crossposting. Twitter still has a large audience - that will still make it relevant for some time.
From an Indian perspective, from the Twitter files, shadow banning 40k accounts 99 percent of them being conservative while all the while saying they aren’t doing anything like this was shady.
Add to that there was no prep to the accounts too, it was just provided without any evidence by an online only news publisher who recently posted fake news about Facebook and got caught.
I think this is a different situation to Tiktok. What Reels did was slow the growth of tiktok, by creating the same product that 18 year olds loved, but for the more mature 25-30+ demographic of instagram.
But twitter isn't growing. There isn't an audience for a new twitter for people who haven't used twitter before, because everyone who is a potential user for twitter has already tried it.
So I don't see where the growth will come from, unless meta can force lots of instagram users to actually START using text only. But then they aren't actually destroying twitter, just creating a parallel product for a different audience.
Why does conservative == hate speech? Hate speech isn’t allowed on Twitter - I have not seen that happen without swiftly being modded out. If anything, I am seeing both sides of arguments in topics. There has been more nsfw images and porn. Will be interesting to see how disinformation operates in the new Twitter and if Community Notes can mitigate that
I was asking. I was asking because that was the only way I could make good sense of your comment. Musk did not change Twitter to allow conservative voices: conservative voices were already perfectly welcome on Twitter. The big change to Twitter under Musk was that he allowed hate speech and targetted harassment. (Or, rather, allowed more hate speech: there was already quite a bit.)
> I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great
Well, Elon definitely doesn't.
> the fact that they're heavily branding it with Instagram, using Instagram logins etc suggests to me that they're just looking for another angle to vacuum up user data
They're using the most popular social network which they happen to own, which already has pre-built social connections for most people who might want to try Threads. Almost none of my real-life friends are on Twitter, most of them have active Instagram accounts.
> when was the last time Facebook successfully launched a new standalone social app
It doesn't really matter, what pays off is being able to run experiments faster. Also, despite all of this they don't have a reputation for killing working products. They either dead before this or become good. Applying the past experience doesn't necessarily provides a good estimate for Threads's future.
> They're using the most popular social network which they happen to own, which already has pre-built social connections for most people who might want to try Threads
For sure. And I’m not writing off Threads being a popular app, just the notion that it’ll displace Twitter. To me Twitter is in a different social space than Instagram: the town square rather than the pub with my friends. Even if I move all my pub friends to sit in the town square it won’t be the same thing.
Threads may be very popular among the existing Instagram user base, but the question is whether Twitter users are going to switch.
Elon’s understanding of Twitter is poor, but Zuck’s may be worse. After all, there’s a reason that Twitter users have been on Twitter and not on Facebook all this time. Facebook is a byword for a locked down, unpleasant social network experience.
Twitter gets all the headlines because it’s becoming shittier, but Facebook has been consistently shit for a very long time and Zuck hasn’t seen fit to do anything about that.
All my IRL friends are on both Twitter and Instagram, but use them for different things due to the differences in content, UI and algorithm. From where I stand I don't see people identifying as "Twitter users who have rejected Facebook" but rather just people who go whenever the action is
that totally depends of discoverability and engagement. Bluesky is close to Twitter but doesn't have Meta resources, Warpcast for now is more like Twitter for crypto and decentraland, Mastodon got a lot of traction but also a lot of people leave it bc of discoverability problems. If threads will be close to Twitter with it's own spin, maybe it'll succeed
Instagram itself was Twitter but for photos. It makes sense that they'd wedge Threads as Instagram but for text.
I believe, the primary catalyst for Meta to build Threads is competing with Google and Microsoft on LLMs. Google Groups and GMail have nice and clean conversational data, while Microsoft has that via LinkedIn (and to an extent, GitHub). Short of Facebook and Messenger, Meta has to license from Twitter and Reddit, but might as well try their luck with Threads instead.
I believe they will eventually change WhatsApp's privacy policy to mine the data in there, as well, with the help of "differential privacy" or something, like Apple. Mark is too smart to not to.
It’s hilarious to think of LinkedIn as useful conversational data for an LLM… LinkedIn content… The majority of direct messaging is recruiting spam and almost the entirety of the public posts and replies are so vapid, inane, fake and performative as to be borderline damaging to the mental health of anyone that doesn’t realise it’s all performative bullshit, a business positivism LARP or MUD wrapped in a kayfabe of having anything to do with real business people doing business things… the quality of a model trained on that dataset would be… horrific.
At least pre-Musk Twitter quick to adopt popular user-innovations as first-class features (RT, QT, threads & more); features filtered upwards from users. Musk-Twitter is very top-down in trying to incentivize specific monetizable/political behaviors.
Instagram is not a heavy political brand. This will attract the less controversial groups )like bird watchers) that generate great revenue while keeping out the controversial political ones that are massive money pits.
I think so to, which says a lot about Meta. They understand full well that the Facebook brand is tarnished, irrelevant, or at the very least "old hat". You couldn't launch a new product under the Facebook brand if you wanted to.
The brand under which they launch isn't relevant though, they aren't going to compete with Twitter. The users they'd need to lure over are well aware that Instagram is Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg and will not even try the platform on that basis alone. It's the same reason that their Metaverse doesn't stand a chance, none of the users who would normally be early adopters wants anything to do with them.
Unless they somehow roles Threads into Instagram I don't see this being a massively successful platform.
The users they need to lure over are athletes, musicians, artists, actors etc. They all are already on Instagram, so they can use Threads while maintaining all their followers.
That's not really who I associate with Twitter. If they want to compete with Twitter isn't it business people, politicians, journalists and "thought leaders" they need to move?
Yeah, this is an underrated point. The huge advantage that Instagram has over Mastodon and Bluesk is everyone is already on it. The bootstrap problem is already solved. By the world's least ethical company. It sucks but this is how we live in the Age of Scale.
> and the fact that they're heavily branding it with Instagram, using Instagram logins etc suggests to me that they're just looking for another angle to vacuum up user data
The same user data they already have from instagram?
I think you’re missing the real reason they are leveraging instagram. Network effects. Instead of building a social microblogging platform from the ground up they are jumpstarting it by taking the existing userbase and their relations.
> I think you’re missing the real reason they are leveraging instagram. Network effects.
I’m not missing it, I’m saying this is the exact problem. My social graph on Twitter is totally different than my one on Instagram. So Threads will be “text posts with my Instagram friends”, which may be or may not be compelling. But it won’t replace Twitter.
It's easy for random people on HN and elsewhere to armchair quarterback, and act as if they know for sure what makes Twitter tick. But they don't have access to the data, and they have no experience building or running a massive social network. (The same goes for me. Take all I say with a grain of salt.)
My guess is there is no single answer to what makes Twitter great. It has so many niches and sub-niches that it's completely different for most people. It's a bit like Reddit, but without formal or visible boundaries between communities.
And the network effects are so strong at this point that it's hard to unravel. Musk can make a million mistakes, and Zuck can launch a million alternatives but they aren't going to succeed in convincing the most powerful Twitter users in each community from abandoning the audiences they've cultivated. And as long as they're there, everyone else will be, too.
Twitter got great by serving their users. They observed behaviors and canonized them. Using @mentions, the word “tweet”, hashtags, re-tweets, quote-tweets were all emergent user behavior that twitter codified and amplified. All without getting in the way of the interactions.
`I actually don't think there is. Twitter always had a relatively low number of users compared to other networks. The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it being where journalists and celebrities break news. ` It's that and a very special kind of controlled chaos that's incredibly addicting.
I work in the public sector in the UK in comms - and our department uses Twitter heavily - as well as Instagram. I've no doubt we will be exploring it. f Threads gets good engagement figures and id supported by Hootsuite, I've no doubt we will be all over this.
It doesn't have to be great. Users are already on instagram. Instagram reels were not better than snapchat stories, yet they still basically killed snapchat, because if people are already on Instagram, and so are their friends, that's all that matters.
Instagram Reels is Instagram's TikTok competitor. Instagram called their stories product "Stories." Also, in a lot of ways, Instagram stories were better than Snapchat stories. For one, you have a wider network on Instagram compared to Snapchat, so there is more content to consume. Instagram also added a bunch of nice features, like various stickers you can interact with. The stickers were also tappable like buttons, which took Snapchat a very long time to add.
As a counterpoint: I don’t use Twitter. I don’t tweet, but I care about reading other people’s tweets. But I never made an account on Twitter, because I would have to curate feeds and create an account, and it’s friction for something that’s ultimately not worth that much to me.
But: I’ve already curated Instagram. My alderman posts things there, the sports teams I care about announce things there, local businesses have accounts there. If they suddenly gain the ability to tweet, great! I’m a new customer that Twitter couldn’t convert before. I’ll check it, and they can serve me ads.
When journalists realize that a broader audience of people are reading stuff there, they will follow the eyeballs. The fact that they are on Twitter will cease to matter.
Serious question: for all of you “Musk / Zuck doesn’t get it” folks, what made Twitter great? I’ve never understood the appeal of it. Count me in the camp of those who don’t understand what made Twitter great.
Twitter is a hard platform to get into I think, I used to think for a long time that what good is this thing for. Then it kinda clicked, at least for me it's not about tweeting stuff, but it's more about finding the people who are interesting and participating in discussions.
It takes time to find people to follow who share information that you are interested in. It also takes constant teaching and hiding the info you don't want to see, but once you build a good following of people (for me personally sw dev and tech and so on), the value you can find out from just seeing what people are working on and sharing their findings, can be very valuable and entertaining.
Of course they're looking for new angles to hoover up user data, that's their entire business model.
I see the Instagram login thing purely as a development convenience- I imagine they scrambled to put this together shortly after the initial Musk-Twitter debacle. Easy to see why Meta executives could have smelled blood in the water. Why not get this thing to market faster by piggybacking off existing infrastructure?
- this comment adds value to the discussion (the original intended meaning) for upvote/downvote
- humor is the lubricant that keeps society and discussion flowing smoothly, +1 for funny (though of limited value)
- queue popcorn for the ensuing debate (I have no value to add to the following discussion and don't actually have any sides to throw chips to, but I vote this up as a hot--if not somewhat redundant--debate)
Whatever Twitter is now, it's hardly a social network. Zuck sucks for many reasons but if anyone can beat Musk to replace Twitter it'd be Meta... this is their core focus area. I doubt they'll ever become the metaverse apple/unicorn they want to be.
FB recently has been gaining some good will in dev communities if only for open sourcing llama and some other ai models.
My point is, the paywall will kill Twitter, with or without a competitor to step in and replace them.
The key thing for me is whether it's really a text focused app or they ruin it by trying to cross promote Instagram/Reels and turn it into a mindless time suck.
If they get the little details right, I see this as the only real competition to Twitter right now. After trying Mastodon for a few months, it's certainly not it.
Agreed. I think this succeeds or fails based on the ability to follow different kinds of things from users separately. If I can follow someone's Threads and not their Reels, I'd be glad to have such an easy migration path off of Twitter (I'm having a lot of fun on bluesky, but it's not ready). I'm not optimistic about that though, because you already can't choose to not follow reels separately from pictures.
I never got a Bluesky invite and I've seen a couple comments mentioning "it's not ready" so I'm wondering why people keep saying that? It has been in development for a while, so I would assume it is ready at this point in time.
It's not. Bluesky is still quite primitive. I wouldn't even call it a "beta", more like an alpha.
They gave invite codes to some "influencers", and it got a lot of hype and media attention, but after the hype died down somewhat, it's become basically a nothing burger. I've stopped giving out the invite codes that I'm accumulating, because my feed is pretty boring and dead. Bluesky is far more "promise" than reality.
Meta has 1000x the engineering resources of Bluesky.
You should post any codes you have here, I imagine the HN userbase is more likely than most to be interested in trying a project like that out (or maybe it's just me :))
> diversify the user base to generate more content
That's an incorrect assumption. I've given out codes before. It didn't generate more content, because people quickly lose interest.
The grass is not greener on the other side. It's a dead party. Inviting a few more people isn't going to help. If they open up the gates to everyone, that's a different story, but they're not nearly ready to do that.
It's not a large team, and it's very barebones in terms of features, like DMs. They also weren't ready for the small boom in users trying to sign up the other day, so networking is still a concern for them. Also they haven't been working directly on the app itself this entire time, they also created a new protocol due to Jack's desire to re-evaluate everything rather than "create a twitter clone".
Bluesky feels like a beta. It's missing: DMs, private accounts, gif/video embeds, and any sort of advanced notification controls. They don't have a trust and safety team, and they're using the invite system to slow down their growth because they can't keep up with demand. It's fun at its current small scale, but they aren't ready to be a Twitter replacement yet.
The invite system just really gives off Google+ vibes and I'm wondering if we end up in the same place after Threads launches. Facebook/Meta seems really poised to eat Bluesky's lunch in a few days.
Gmail also had invites to start, back in the day, and that's the de facto email service now.
But that had a compelling day-1 offering that was clearly better - massive free storage allocation. Bluesky doesn't have a compelling reason to sign up like that, so the invite system feels flawed.
GMail's invite system worked because you could use GMail to talk to your non-GMail friends. G+ failed for many reasons, but one of them is that if you got in before all your friends there was just nothing you could actually do there.
> Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN?
I see a bunch of people talking about it on Twitter in the context of "I'm on Bluesky, follow me there in case this implodes". But yeah, >90% of the Bluesky mentions I see are on HN.
I'd expect that Bluesky would launch invites in next few days or so, to those who left their emails. I mean, their competitor is up so why not sent these invites or even open registration for anyone
Unless of course they first want to see how much interest it gains
Well sure, but to be fair they let a lot of "influencers" on some sort of working platform and it got a lot of hype, but since then... You don't hear much anymore. I was just wondering what was going on, they've been working on it for a while now.
My experience with mastodon was the same for a while until Elon took over twitter. Now I do see discussions on stuff I care about although I am starting to see discussions regarding the threat of Meta federating with some big instances of mastodon.
Yeah, seemed like a lot of chatter from people onboarding Mastodon was 'how does this work' or 'how do I use it to build and find community or news' or 'why this is better than other options'.
That seemed to fade fast on an individual basis once there was critical mass to support conversation on other shared interests between users but flares up again from time to time when a new 'wave' of people join. Maybe bluesky just lacks critical mass for user interest overlap other than 'being on bluesky'.
I think this right here is what makes me curious about Bluesky in the first place, the meta discussion on HN about it is weird and I want to see it for myself.
I think it's too barebones and they are still working out the moderation and safety problem. Besides, it looks like it scales like shit. It's not ready for wide adoption, I have to agree about this one.
Social media is definitely not socialization. In a Venn diagram, the cross section of social media and socialization is tiny.
- A very, very small part of socialization may very, very occasionally happen on social media.
- Social media allows for multiple phenomena to happen, but the overwhelming majority of it won't be socializing.
The issue here is the redefinition of "socialization" intrinsically made by the "social media" marketing campaigns. The solution is a better understanding of what human socialization actually is.
This is not a critique of social media. I like and use it, even though I'd like more diversity. But stop mixing it up with "socialization" because it is not, even if the marketing of social media relies on trying to mix them up.
I have a feeling it'll have the intellectual quality of the Instagram comment section, which is worse than the Facebook comment section, which is 10x worse than Twitter.
But I agree if there is heavy integration with the rest of Meta's products I'll be less happy.
Surely this is about who or what you are following though.
Personally there is very little crossover between what I follow on instagram and twitter. So the quality of the discussions vary greatly.
On Twitter I follow developers and product people. The quality is better on Twitter, but it's definitely declined because of engagement seeking over the last few years.
From my experience:
- Feed was purely chronological (no algorithmic feed) so I missed a lot of content
- Sign-up process isn't obvious due to decentralization
- Likes, profiles sometimes had bugs or required extra clicks if from other servers
- Few people I follow migrated from Twitter, and most have since stopped posting due to lack of engagement
People (tech inclined and looking for a forum platform) want chronological feed, yes. But they want it usable too. Mastodon doesn't have any categorization/classification/tags tools, everyting is dumped into a single gigantic realtime thread, and if you blink you miss the post and its gone forever. I tried Mastodon once, when it was just starting out and abandoned after playing around for a while. It's simply unusable, compared to any forum or reddit. Or even to a Facebook, with it's horrible UI. At least FB has groups and pages which kinda work like a bad crutch for categorization. Mastodon is lacking any of that.
> Mastodon doesn't have any categorization/classification/tags tools, everyting is dumped into a single gigantic realtime thread
I don't know whether it helps your use case, but Mastodon has a "Lists" feature, which allows you to group the accounts you follow into separate realtime threads. For instance, one list could be for small accounts from which you don't want to miss any post, while another list might be for high-volume daily news accounts (and IIRC, there's even an option to "hide accounts on this list from your home timeline", so you could use lists for the noisy accounts and have everything else in the home timeline).
> Mastodon doesn't have any categorization/classification/tags tools
Huh? Mastodon certainly has hashtags. Likewise, there are posting groups. More implicitly, different social groups tend to cluster together and re-boost interesting things.
Like, to be clear, fedi isn't going to be the right solution for everybody (or necessarily even for most people), and it's totally valid to dislike it or prefer something else. But it certainly does have organizational tools; they are just differently shaped.
The twitter I used was way more text than media, I had Tweetbot set to small thumbnails as well. For me at least, Twitter started as text only and ended as text mostly.
I hope Threads won't exhibit the same hostility towards the users as IG does.
(What's up with IG and its hostile UX? Videos can't be fast forwarded or tracked at all, profile pictures can't be zoomed, clicking on it brings you to stories, images can't be copied easily, etc.)
Videos not being trackable is such a perplexing one. Is it intended to keep the user watching longer by forcing them to re-watch the whole video if they want to see something again?
It's also there to force the user to watch the full video to see if the build up to some final product was actually worth seeing. Both reasons are there to take seconds off your life to juice their engagement stats.
That's them trying to rate-limit the use by sex workers. Entire sites have sprung up to turn your single allowed Insta link into a number of other links.
I've not seen anyone mention this yet, but: UK twitter is laughing at "Threads" because it's also the title of a notorious made-for-TV horror film about nuclear war https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative
I'm not quite convinced by this; I think there's demand for things to go back how they were, but that's unsmashing the glass and is fundamentally impossible. Everyone seems to be resentfully clinging to the sinking platform until they hit a "f you I quit" moment, such as being rate-limited or their favourite account being deleted without warning.
Also came to see if anyone mentioned Threads, the film. Really great film, but certainly leaves an impact on the viewer. Slack has a feature called 'Threads' and for a long time after they introduced it, every time I opened the app I got a shiver of fear down my spine. This is one of quite a number of reasons I don't imagine I will be using Meta's offering.
> but that's unsmashing the glass and is fundamentally impossible
I think it's the exact opposite. Musk could roll back most of his hated changes and most users would be happy with that. Staff up a bit to deal with stability and legal problems, and all along the way advertisers would slowly but surely return to previous or greater heights. Twitter still has its network effects and would have its benefits that reduce churn/attrition. As a tool and social space it would still be just as valuable to users as it was a few years ago.
Some of the alternatives look better for now, but they haven't yet had the influx of crypto bots, hustlebros and annoying legions of sycophants that Twitter has been purposely changed to magnify. Reversing course and even making some of those things better (e.g. bots) could even be a net gain for Twitter and its users.
But the thing is, users would still dunk on Elon mercilessly for his buffoonery, and for backing down. And he sees those kinds of personal slights as far more important than Twitter's success (or lack thereof). So yeah, from his perspective and his alone, you can never unsmash the glass. Much of the changes so far have become ride-or-die because they are a matter of Ego.
> I've not seen anyone mention this yet, but: UK twitter is laughing at "Threads" because it's also the title of a notorious made-for-TV horror film about nuclear war https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
I feel like Twitter could have launched “Nests” (flocks?) to replace subreddits in the face of a Reddit exodus and pretty much just reskinned twitter for the specific use case. Hashtags as top level organizing taxonomy (to replace subreddit). Then tweets as your “posts” with nested replies. Twitter had the infrastructure to just hit the ground running too.
Lol, I built this exact thing as a 120% project at Twitter in 2011.
It was called “Flocks”. It even had transient/temporal flocks based on geo check-in and sound-fingerprint flocks for movies, tv shows, and events. We implemented the Shazam audio signature algo from a research paper we found.
The thesis was: it’s more natural for people to have conversations when there’s a shared context.
It became a widely known project within the company back then, but ultimately, like most things at Twitter, never shipped.
Hah! Working backwards would yield some hits for sure.
“Feather” (a play off a quill) was my prototype (I built a lot of prototypes there in my “spare” time :)) for a richer, write/tweet only app. You could author long-form content, quickly jump into the camera for recording video or taking a picture (goal: frictionless citizen journalism), and other stuff. I wanted to build a delightful tweeting experience and at the time, it felt like the mobile implementation was just yanked wholesale from Web.
This is the sort of comment that keeps me coming back to HN - incredible. You were absolutely right that livetweeting TV is one of the great uses of Twitter, and it's a real shame this never got a wider rollout.
During the pandemic we started a sort of "virtual mst3k": cue up a film, everyone presses play at a particular time, and tweet along with jokes and the occasional screenshot. We're now up to film #300 and still haven't run out of "bad" movies. An endless source of cinematic surprises.
("bad" is very loosely defined, but if it's a critical success or made a lot of money, that's probably not it. We've seen a lot of Roger Corman, Shawscope, Hammer, Amicus, Cannon Films, Dino de Laurentiis etc)
> ultimately, like most things at Twitter, never shipped.
This is why the "Twitter will die instantly when 80% of the engineers are sacked" takes were wrong, isn't it? 80% of the engineers were working on products that would never see the light of day, instead.
Yeah! Wanted a really fast/frictionless way for people to jump into a context based on signals in their environment. This was also around the time of Color (the photo app which raised 40m or something off just a pitch deck) — “ambient computing” was becoming part of the zeitgeist.
They are rate limiting the viewing of tweets now. No way they have the capacity to handle Reddit’s content.
Maybe Google can try replicating Reddit in YouTube - it would just be serving text instead of video; discovery would be via their recommendation algorithm, i.e. no subreddits. Frankly, they can kind of already do this, you can post community messages on YouTube. They just need to tweak the algorithm to recommend such messages.
> Maybe Google can try replicating Reddit in YouTube
They can't. Google as an organization just doesn't understand social networking.
They've had comments and forums (community?) for ages. Do you know how to engage in that community? Do you know how to even track your own comments? Etc.
And on the web IIRC it doesn't show any replies to your comments. And if you click on your comment, there's a 50/50 chance Youtube will not show it to you under the video :)
I prefer using lists or trustworthy OSINT accounts for that.
My impression is Twitter search 1. is now smart enough it doesn't need hashtags to assist it but 2. due to policy choices doesn't work.
Namely, searching for term X returns both "posts containing X" but also "every single thing an account with X in their name" said, meaning any search doesn't work unless you block all those accounts.
And then sometimes it includes porn spammers, who are the main users of hashtags.
I didn't know. I suppose this speaks to Instagram/Meta’s differing strategy: build a product as a separate app and then fold its successful features into its main offering. (Eg., Direct, Layout, Boomerang, Hyperlapse).
Let's hope people will move on from OnlyFans. Truth Social was a joke, but I think Twitter will still be as central as Facebook and Instagram and perhaps we never will see a platform that harbors that many users.
TikTok is another beast. It is used by almost everyone but I never met one that had meaningful interactions on it. It is the laziest form of entertainment. Successful, but lazy.
A bit premature. If you recall on instagram trying to kill tik tok, has not worked. I think your schadenfreude is potentially blurring your vision. I couldnt care less for either of these companies - but the demise of twitter is one of the most popular things to prognosticate about and i think its overhyped.
It's a 50/50 bet, if they lose no one is likely to bring it up here in future (unlike on Twitter where "receipts" are kept), if they win then they get to crow about their prescience. Pound shop Nostradamus stuff.
Time will tell. The issue is not scalability. The main issue is conflict. Twitter has both sides there. Truth social is not mainstream even if the main actor is posting every day. Same goes for the other side. There's also social media fatigue. Tiktok came with something "new" and it's growing because of that. Twitter is trying to move into yt space. Fb is trying to stay relevant in anything related to their core business (aka, ads).
I think political content has run its course as a source of eyeballs. Politicians engaging with people was novel in the 2008-12 " hope and change/Arab Spring" era.
It's since been gamified and weaponized for electoral gain. The algorithms pushed it too hard and monetized division to the point where all but the most addicted people have tuned out.
If you're downvoting this because you haven't tuned out yet don't consider yourself addicted, I'm really curious why you still engage with politics on platforms like Twitter? The friends of mine that still do it talk about it like it's something they really wish they could quit, hence I think "addiction" is a fair label, though some genuinely believe it's important to have voices on the platform countering some of the more heinous things being posted.
And just because it makes $2B/yr vs $4b/yr or whatever doesn't mean it cant sustain as a business indefinitely. The bulk of the critique of Twitter these days is whether Musk can make a profit on $40B as if that's what will determine Twitter's survival long term.
Musk losing billions of dollars in the short term is a private loss for bankers and his own vast ever growing wealth. It's not exactly something that kills a business in the timeline people are hoping for. If anything there's probably a long line of B-tier investors willing to prop it up long enough for the dividends to pay off.
Far shittier companies have survived for much longer on much less.
Every Twitter alternative seems to be worse somehow. I wouldn’t mind if Twitter died, I think it gives people brainworms, but I see comments like this and I just see it as wishful thinking.
> but I see comments like this and I just see it as wishful thinking.
Usually with black/white motivations as to why they want it to die while disregarding the realities of social media markets and network effects. See: the countless threads about HN users deleting FB 6-7yrs ago. Meanwhile Meta is doing just fine.
Someone should make a chart of all the times HN claimed FB will die because [x] and overlay it on their stock price: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/quote/meta
I want to see a social media site poach key users onto their platforms. NBA Twitter (over a million people easily) would switch overnight if Shams Charania and Adrian Wojnarowski suddenly switched platforms.
I think with the right UI/UX, Threads could do it. But we'll see.
I don't think so. No Twitter clone, or Twitter consept is going to replace Twitter.
What made Twitter big, what made Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, big is that they all brought something new on the table. Blueskye, mastodon etc. don't. It's just the same.
People that are active on Twitter have spent years to make a following, and there are no reason to go over to another app and create that same following again. Why spend the time and effort when Twitter still is a thing.
Plus people have been talking about leaving Twitter for a year now, but few people actually have.
Mastodon/fedi certainly brought something new to the table (microblogging with close-knit communities), it just isn't a technical feature nor something that's meant to "scale".
I am completely ok with this. Let the mainstream have their thing and keep mastodon weird. Right now it’s got a usenet/bbs vibe and I love it. That goes away as the mainstream/tide comes in.
Latter refers to the item at the end of the list, i.e. that HN is the one you're done with. Prior is one of the words that's acceptable to refer to the start of the list.
I am/was a twitter doomer, and jumped ship to mastodon ages ago. I'm not convinced Threads will manage to capture the people that used Twitter (which was significantly media & politics types) and kill Twitter.
Personally, I don't have faith Meta will remain comitted to Threads. We spurn Google for killing of projects, but Meta/Facebook has a history of spinning up side projects especially for Instagram and killing them not too long after. Threads has already been killed! https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
Mastodon ain’t it because the exact minute a minimum wage Geek Squad tech has to explain to a sorority group the reason they can’t follow each other is because they are using different federated instances is the exact minute mastodon fails to gain any mainstream appeal. It will likely always captivate some niche of users looking for a slice of the nostalgic, techie internet (Mastodon will remain an HN darling no doubt), but a Twitter drop in, it is not.
I wish you were right. People talk about it "failing" because it fails to meet the expectations set by capitalist platforms, and you are exactly correct - Mastodon is a throwback to the time before these beasts inundated the earth with their tidal wave enshittification.
But I just closed my account this morning cause there is a large mob now who are quite determined that this will be twitter 2.0, and they are already bullying the culture in that direction.
There’s a big graveyard of products/companies that have tried to kill Larry over the years.
Meta has been trying since 2009. Back then, a former, well-known Facebook employee once told me not to join Twitter (thankfully, I didn’t listen). He said they, “have a wall at the office with a list of all the things Twitter does well. Every week someone checks another item off. We’re going to kill Twitter.”
This moment is probably Meta’s best chance. I’d say, if it doesn’t happen this try, it probably never will.
I could not disagree more. I really don't think people are going to trust Meta that much more over Twitter. I'm a pretty avid Twitter lurker and I don't even plan on trying out the app.
I'm also a very happy Lemmy and Mastodon user, but going from Twitter to Threads is just trading Elon for Zuckerberg - a useless lateral move.
This is thing I don't understand. I admit, I never used Twitter, but out of curiosity I created mastodon account yesterday and honestly I don't have any difficulty using it, it is very straight forward. Patent poster mentioned scaling issues, I don't observe any delays and apparently mastodon grew a lot yesterday.
Mastodon has short-lived slowdowns on the biggest servers when it’s going through explosive growth, and somehow people spin this into general scalability issues. It’s not a problem in reality.
Twitter went down completely all the time in the early days.
I share your sentiment. I use Twitter for business and Instagram (before I deleted it) for friends. I follow very different accounts on each. I'm not going to mix business and pleasure so to speak, especially with Meta's poor privacy reputation.
And for people who have strong negative opinions on Musk, most of them hate Zuckerberg too. For them, Threads might have a better chance if it was a non-Meta product.
The AI mania has been great for Meta. The android, Zuckerberg is ideally suited to take advantage of it. All year, Meta has been publishing a steady stream of fun, almost-open-source AI models. They have, no doubt, gained a huge amount of kudos, in a short time, from all the AI bros who have taken over twitter. Credit where it's due, the 2023 firmware and model updates to Zuckerberg have been quite impressive.
I agree, but I really wish I could've seen the spectacle if they had been able to launch this past weekend. Twitter is still in rough shape, but it was flat out non-functional on Saturday, which is one of its busiest days of the year (the start of NBA Free Agency).
Agreed. When Instagram added stories, my entire Snapchat friendlist disappeared within a month and they were all posting to Instagram instead. I think the same will happen here. But it will be lopsided toward people who are already more popular on Instagram than they are on Twitter, which is a lot of social/non-professional audiences. I expect that Twitter accounts with large followings will continue posting there, and Twitter will continue to dominate the professional niches (coding twitter, medical twitter etc.) while the more general shitposting and possibly even politics will move to Threads.
> Twitter will continue to dominate the professional niches (coding twitter, medical twitter etc.)
I couldn't speak about "coding twitter" in general, but Apple developer Twitter in specific has almost entirely migrated to Mastodon (as well as a large contingent of the Apple news media). I see a lot of non-Apple devs there too.
I think this is a biased view held by people who migrated to Mastodon. In my experience on Twitter, the coding topics are as lively as ever, particularly around Web development. Personally, the introduction of the "For You" page has triggered me (very low following, previously inactive) to interact with accounts just because the algorithm does such a good job of surfacing relevant niche technical content for me.
I don't know about Apple Twitter myself, but Web Dev Twitter seems more active. Infosec Twitter was a notable niche that loudly proclaimed they were moving to Mastodon but in fact many of them are still quite active on Twitter.
Yes and that might actually be a better outcome. Keep the narrow lines of shared concentration spheres bumping state of the art who did what releases on Twitter and have the more social social media noise join on Insta where thats already happening. Not even sure I would notice a change if that was the way it played out.
I do wonder how much stickiness Twitter has for professional niche communities. Don't they also enjoy shitposting? Isn't what makes it kinda work -- the interconnectedness of the platform?
> I expect that Twitter accounts with large followings will continue posting there, and Twitter will continue to dominate the professional niches (coding twitter, medical twitter etc.)
Coding maybe, but I think Musk's perceived hostility towards the trans community is going to drive medical and educational Twitter to the first viable alternative, and they will serve as catalysts to peel off other professional groups.
The big obstacle is that people worked really hard to get their followers and some of Twitter's best accounts only have 1k-50k followers, which will be hard for them to get back on Threads. Elon will no doubt make it extremely difficult for people to share their Thread's handles on Twitter. Celebrities can build followings immediately and won't care.
Your point must ellude me then, unless by point you just mean you were being ironic, which wouldn't change my reply since it was a little tongue in cheek itself.
Just because there is porn on Twitter doesn't invalidate the fact it is the app for spreading ideas in public. The most popular people on Twitter post their thoughts and opinions, Instagram's most popular users are people who like showing off things visually. In many cases this is images of themselves.
I didn't miss your point then. You've unfairly summarized one app as a thirst trap in spite of it's myriad other users, while underplaying the role of porn on another. Twitter is an app for thought in the same way Instagram is an app for photography. They both have cohorts of cheap thrill users and users who are being more thoughtful.
Surprised I haven't seen this response, but I have a suspicion that Threads will be a referendum on Elon, and most of Twitter's left leaning users (which are most of its users, or at least most of its power users) will flock to Threads, which will start the death spiral. That's my forecast, anyway.
The blue bird is going to die soon with Musk at the helm. He only seems to make decisions in the dumbest and most haphazard ways possible.
That's not to say that something else will kill it. It's more likely that for most folks, they'll just stop or shift to something different that's not like Twitter (e.g., Instagram).
I'm not exactly bullish on Twitter, nor a fan of Musk, but I don't think it'll happen quite that way. I suspect Twitter will lose in the long run but it won't be this sudden or as soon.
I feel like this has been being said repeatedly (remember the "Twitter will irrecoverably go down any day this week!" craze from late last year after the layoffs?) and yet hasn't really materialized in a meaningful sense.
Sure, the fediverse has been growing, but most users haven't left Twitter, they've just also made an account on the fediverse. I don't see how this will be any different. It's already normal for people to have both a Twitter and an Instagram account, or even stuff like both a TikTok account and posting shorts on YouTube.
> It's already normal for people to have both a Twitter and an Instagram account.
This is the key! Because now if Twitter or Elon annoys you, you just delete Twitter and are already on an identical service with all your followers essentially.
It's not so much how many users have abruptly left, it's how much people are actively using Twitter and posting on it. How many people are just ghosting the site?
I thought many here were saying Meta was 'dying' a year ago because of Zuckerberg, layoffs, etc. Now they are changing their opinions and predictions like the weather, based on emotion and supporting the further monopolization of social networks?
> I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer.
More like it destroys Substack Notes, Post, T2, Hive.social and all the other so-called 'alternatives'.
The same people who incorrectly predicted Twitter's immediate collapse are now furious that didn't happen. Now we see them hastefully predicting the end of Twitter again. It is quite hilarious and this will age extremely poorly.
This actually also destroys and corrupts Mastodon from the inside out as they are split in federating or de-federating with Meta already as many admins signed NDAs with Meta to have no choice but to federate.
It seems HNers here really don't understand what network effects are. Quite very fixated and emotional about Twitter's immediate collapse (that didn't happen) and constantly don't learn from history and just continue to make up fantasies on the spot and blinded by schadenfreude.
HNers obsessed with Twitter remind of westerners who obsess over the Ukraine war who have said that Russia has lost and run out of missiles, tanks (insert item) 20 different times now. Only for Russia to prove them wrong over and over again. And with complete lack of shame or self awareness, they continue to make terrible predictions which continue to be wrong, and pretend that the past predictions never happened.
The stickiness of Twitter isn't just about reliability and handling scale, but also (and in fact mostly) the network effects.
You can't transfer over your content, likes, replies, followers. So even in the best case scenario where Threads picks up and outshines Twitter in the long term, do expect that to be a long term. At least few years.
That is, unless Elon continues on his steady path of catastrophic degradation of the service, which is also possible.
We've seemingly had consensus Twitter is dead since October. Even earlier maybe. And yet people are staying on it. Even all those people who are constantly "quitting it" or tweeting all day that's it's dead.
Therefore beyond the facade of the public discourse, people will keep using Twitter while it works. Anything else they will do to have plan B will be in addition to Twitter, not instead of.
Meaning few did and will abandon their accounts outright, but they will have the link to this and that in their bio.
Do you have an example of that happening before? Every exodus I've seen is just the most vocal bubbles jumping ship for political reasons, but once the dust settles ends up being just a rounding error.
Companies can and do die, but rarely (if ever) because a niche on one end of the political spectrum has a tantrum. Have you considered that what you call consensus might just be within your bubble? I don't know anyone who cares.
should. I hope it does. Treating users like they are deserves much worse.
> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative
Nope.
If there was, we'd already have seen more attempts with some strong competition.
Twitter has always struggled to make more money. Founding team and CEO are gone. Musk tried all he could to get himself out of buying it. Twitter board was desperate to sell it.
Twitter's power users were happy with 140 chars and a textbox. They got there years ago. They're still there not because of what Twitter has become, but despite of it. Not many, not a growing community and they're not leaving.
What kept it alive en-masse was celebs and politicians. They're seemingly not missing Twitter.
Threads is about Ego. Musk burned $400 billion and Zuck $650 billion on shit ideas. This is them dueling, burning more money just to prove they know how to make popular products. In reality neither has a
a fking clue about what people actually want.
Interactions on Meta follow “proximity”-based neighborhood customs (birthdays, pictures of kids, social flexing, vacations). Polite society dinner talk.
You do not need to be followed on Meta, only liked.
Interactions on Twitter follow “rules” of interest-based disputes and discussion (sports, finance, AI dooming, technology predictions).
You do not need to be liked on Twitter, only followed.
So basically like predicting Instagram will destroy Snap/Tiktok by cloning features like stories?
One of those HN threads you see people bookmark and bring up years later to show HN's competence at prediction using only the current day market players which they glibly generalize as generic pools of social media users going to these sites for their feature sets, like buying CDs of software by looking at the back cover at a store in 1998.
Agreed. Everybody here is thinking about how they as technical users have used twitter and use mastodon/bluesky. The general public doesn’t care. Twitter has more friction now and this threads thing seems like it won’t. If Facebook got the permissions/privacy right, this could be their next big thing
I have Facebook and Instagram DNS-blocked on my network and have negative feelings towards Meta.
But I wouldn't feel bad if Threads took over Twitter's most important data generators (politicians, journalists, newssites). I dislike what Twitter has been turned into, it's close to nothing else but a megaphone for the owner to mostly troll the world.
If Threads would be usable on a desktop via a website, I'd gladly register, but I won't install social media apps on my phone except for HN and Reddit via a 3rd party apps of good reputation.
Hmm, corporate crystal-balling coupled with remnants of activism... In my book, twitter was never useful and always a waste of time for non-journalist, however, people are still using it :-)
Why is there a demand for a alternative? I dont see any signs. All channels I follow. I mean large channels like brands, politicians etc are still using twitter. Nothing changed there.
And what is the parallel between instagram and twitter? Indeed. Nothing. Meta completely lost his mind here
Talking about young people. Snapchat and Tiktok is what they use. Noone uses meta anymore. Most people before 16 dont even have a Meta account.
Meta the new Yahoo.
Here's why this is an uphill battle, which no-one seems to understand. Everyone who actively participates in twitter, and even has a modest following, is tied to twitter.
You cannot move a 100k followers from twitter to thread. All the influential people HAVE to keep using twitter to serve their followers. Even if they build a following on thread, it will take years to build what they have on twitter.
The problem with this is that that following is only worth something if they actually see your posts, and stats on twitter makes it clear how small a proportion of your following will see any given of your tweets. Other interaction drives that home as well. Typically people seem to largely get far more engagement with a far smaller number of followers on Mastodon, and the same will be true on other new platforms for two simple reasons: Attrition and the algorithmic feed. Most long lived accounts will have a huge number of followers that have simply stopped using twitter, and secondly the default being the "for you" tab means that people have a habit of following accounts they never engage with or ever even see a tweet from, and so the follower numbers on Twitter are vastly overestimating how many people are actually meaningfully "following" you in the sense that they're still logging in and seeing what you tweet.
Doesn't mean you won't still have a challenge building up a presence again on a new platform, but getting to the point of equal engagement in a new platform where users are motivated and active only takes a tiny proportion of your followers to make the move.
I addressed that in the sentences immediately following what you quoted, but to clarify the point on algorithmic feeds:
I think it is relevant to any new social media, because even with an algorithmic feed, unless it's really badly done, you'll first start to swamp out an increasing number of those you follow once you follow a large number and/or have given a strong signal about which of them you actually engage with, so you're likely to get a "honeymoon period" even with one where the need for a huge following seems less important because your followers are in that situation too.
I was about to agree with you, until I noticed they called it a "text-based conversation app". I just scrolled through my Twitter feed, and out of the first 50 posts in my feed, 46 of them were accompanied by either an image or a video. If Threads truly is a text-only platform, then the communities I'm a part of won't have any use for it.
I'm not sure I'm actually going to use Threads. My Instagram and Twitter worlds are wildly different, and by using Instagram for login I'm reluctant to conflate the two.
This just seems like they want another vertical to vacuum user data and cram advertising.
I'm not against it, I'd just rather it was its own platform.
I doubt that Threads will be free from the political flamewars that engulfed Twitter.
It's inherent in the content type.
It's just hard to argue with photos, but it's the default with text, especially given the propensity for some people to interpret everything in the worst possible light.
HN disables answers after some period of time, which appears to be a couple of weeks.
I think Twitter won't go in a couple of weeks. I also think that in case of Twitter not going anywhere in a year or so, we won't be able to call your call, due to HN comments disabled.
What do you propose to resolve that?
Regarding the core of your proposal, these who use Twitter and these who use Instagram, are different people. Twitter is primarily text based, Instagram is primarily picture and video based.
My prediction is that there will not be huge (dozens of percents) outflow from Twitter to Threads. I also think that there won't be noticeable (dozens of percents) use of Threads by Instagram users.
Instagram is already a social network of people with needs different from social network like Twitter.
It’s been nearly two decades since Meta last made an original new product that was successful. People on Instagram have close to nothing to say. Good luck to Meta trying to become relevant again.
Talking about Mastodon is talking about the wrong level. Whether or not the Fediverse succeeds does not depend on Mastodon alone, but also e.g. Pleroma, Misskey, Akkoma, Pixelfed, Peertube, Bookwyrm, Lemmy, and many more, all of which federate.
It's very possible we've not yet even seen the killer app for the Fediverse yet, but it can survive even if none of them individually get "big enough" in a way that many of the other Twitter competitors won't, not least because they're viable even as small self-contained communities.
As such, they don't need to "have a shot", and in the long run, ironically, that gives both the network as a whole and individual apps a shot. E.g. you can launch w/ActivityPub compatibility and instantly have some degree of network effect that helps levelling the playing field.
This would be about the tenth death of Twitter proclaimed loudly and confidently on this very site. Meanwhile Twitter’s popularity continues to grow. Good luck with this one.
> I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion.
No matter how hard I try to keep my Twitter timeline clean of politics, the algorithm fills my timeline.
If Threads doesn't do that, I'm in.
Except it won't, because two decades of social media have taught those companies that 'engagement' is key, so they'll shovel the same *.
> I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion.
Good, but I expect the first movers are going to be the anti-Musk types that tried to go to Mastodon, which means half that "political discourse" will move to a different app. So there will be two echo chambers.
Sort of. It's clear yet to what degree they'll federate or be able to federate given the animosity towards Meta and the seeming back room negotiations they've been alleged to be engaged in.
Same with news outlets, government accounts, agency and municipality accounts etc. Forcing login was such a tonedeaf move. Twitter was a broadcast platform, the internet soapbox, now it can't be and there's no reason for those accounts to stick around. Previously those entities could assume Twitter was essentially the internet's town centre, now they can't.
I wonder if it was an attempt to cater to advertisers concerns over bot traffic inflating ad numbers.
Journalists are not that critical to it. They actually get paid for contributing to other sites, some of which Musk has now banned like Substack, and they specifically don't get paid to tweet.
There are other large communities on Twitter. These include sports, semipro artists, the nation of Japan, people in politics, and a variety of assorted insane people and scammers like crypto, VCs and vaccine skeptics.
The reason it's failing is that the last group now owns the site.
Your comment makes no sense. Why would a vaccine skeptic be in the same group as a venture capitalist and why would they be in the same group as a scammer. And why do you think two people have something in common because one of them is Japanese and the other is a sport athlete?
This seems like some contrived way for you to just state your hatred towards certain people, and not much more. Keep on hating I guess, but that doesn't say anything about Twitter.
That said, the Twitter-owning VCs are trying to become political kingmakers by promoting scammer presidential candidates who are all antivaxxers and going to lose.
I am referring to them, yes. After all, nobody else exists, so there's no one else to refer to really.
Although Marianne Williamson (maybe the distant #3 alternative candidate) is generally antivax since she's from the older group of naturalistic-fallacy hippie women where the idea originally caught on.
RFK and Desantis are doing it because the vaccine was a major policy accomplishment of both the last two presidents, ie the party leaders they're running against. It may seem like a natural political opportunity but it's a bad move since normal voters don't like crazy people.
RFK is doing it because he's thought vaccines were bad for literally his entire adult life, here's an article from 2011 where Salon had to retract a thing they let him publish in 2005 on the subject:
You're not required to bring everything you've believed your entire life to your political campaign though. In fact, it's better not to. You're there to do a job, not get a prize for believing things.
I have no side in this debate because I don't support any of the potential candidates, but since US politicians are not effectively disciplined by their base but rather by their donors, it's quite reasonable for the base to seek evidence of past commitment to issues they prioritize. It's a very poor heuristic, but it's all they've got. As you said, the politicians are doing a job, but they don't take their orders from the voters. The system is utterly ruined.
Twitter doesn't have "free speech rules". There is no connection between something Elon said once and the actual moderation system. This is true even though he owns it.
(The mods seem to ban accounts that get enough reports without really reading them. If I report an account it does tend to get banned 3-4 months later even though they've already sent me an email saying they ignored my report.)
Hate to break it to you but when Professor Skullmeasurement went to an African country in 1920 and gave people IQ tests in a language they didn't speak then wrote a paper about it, that data is in fact racist.
Or more recently, Harvard's algorithms that mathematically demonstrate Asians don't have interesting personalities.
No, it's less safe for it because he fired all the lawyers protecting you from governmental consequences of speech.
The moderation didn't actually change either though. They unbanned a bunch of people once, but as I said I've gotten a fair number banned again since they can't stop themselves.
Why does everyone have to disclaim that they would be a fan Meta/FB? We already know that everyone hates Meta on HN; gets kind of old, just express your unbiased opinions.
You are 1000% right. Facebook’s value prop since instagram started doing stories has been ripping off successful social media apps. Snapchat but it’s done in instagram. TikTok but it’s done (less well) in instagram. Twitter paved over their moat, and their lunch is going to be eaten by this.
I won’t be using it, but it will probably absorb a lot of the dopamine scrollers from Twitter and those are the people advertisers most want. So yes it probably will hasten Twitter’s demise.
I don’t think original Twitter is coming back in any form. Tech people and a few lefties go to Mastodon. Cryptobros go to Nostr. Scrollers go to Threads if they aren’t already on TikTok. Not sure who is going to Bluesky.
Twitter will be left with culture war trolls screaming at each other and outrage porn. That’s not going to attract a lot of ads.
Twitter is done. There's no question about it. BREAKING NEWS: a bombshell. Today is a turning point, today was historically bad for Twitter. A turning point. We're at a turning point here. The beginning of the end for the Twitter administration. The beginning of the end! Breaking news: we have ANOTHER bombshell! Mike Zuckerberg might have to assume the office of the Twitter. The call for impeachment. Rumblings of the word impeachment"". Breaking news, another bombshell out of the Twitter HQ. I believe this is the beginning of the end. It's really the beginning of the end. The beginning of the end. He may be feeling the walls closing in on him. All the walls closing in on him. The walls closing in. Breaking news: a new bombshell. One astrologer says says this means the beginning of the end for Twitter. The beginning of the end of the Twitter presidency. Twitter will resign. Is this the tipping point? I know we've said it over and over... you think this is the tipping point? ... and over and over... this is a tipping point... and over and over. Breaking news: Twitter off the rails. This was the beginning of the end today. The beginning of the end... Reminds me a lot of the last days of Nixon. Breaking news tonight: new bombshell. This is the beginning of the end....
You can play with the `gl` query parameter in the URL. Yours is for Italy ("it").
It's available in other continental Europe locations like: de, fr, be, es, pt, at, cz, pl. While not yet released for majority English speaking countries (us, ca, uk, au, nz) with the exception of Ireland (ie).
I don't have any insider information even though my employer is Meta. I learned about this release from HN.
I'm guessing that the territories served by Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd have had the publication approved but the ones served by Meta Platforms, Inc haven't...
- Monopolistic apps are problematic and unreliable for users
- Need for an open standard for communication on these apps, similar to UPI in India for transactions
- These apps are used like utilities but governed as services. It is effectively impossible to exist without big tech products right now, as an individual and as a business. We need to fight for digital rights.
- Communication should be as essential a utility, like water and electricity.
- Centralized apps have too much power over the internet
- Google was useless when Reddit went down
- one clown (Musk) should not have an outsized control on the means of communication. He can't cut my water, and he shouldn't be allowed to cut my communication.
- alternatives are impractical and small and as long as big tech is allowed to throw money and kill/acquire/impede smaller apps we have a problem
- A democratised communication standard would eliminate the need to use specific apps like WhatsApp or Twitter for communication and information.
- this will allow the web to fulfill one of its most important functions, which is, being searchable and archivable.
- profit incentives do not align for big tech to make the internet we want. Small tech will make the internet we deserve.
That's certainly not true. Interoperability for basic features such as text, photos, videos, posts and comments doesn't mean apps are not free to add more features. Also, having an extendable framework will easily account for this
some form of interoperability is already happening for some of those data types (or at least starting with portability). See the Data Transfer Initiative (dti.org)
The issue is that forced interoperability will lead to platforms creating an interoperable (and less fully-featured) version of their app to suit the regulations.
I do think that interop is important, but I think it is a harder problem than most people think.
The privacy listing is once again atrocious and a deal breaker for me. Health data? Browsing history? Financial Info? Purchases? Location? Sensitive info? Hell no!!!
I'm not too familiar with mobile app dev but why is the app 254 MB? I just compiled a 3rd-party Android Reddit app with a different oauth client_id and the apk was 18 MB. What are they packing in there?!
Assets and Libraries. I remember including the Firebase Libraries in your react native app more than double its size because of gRPC or something. Not a lot of places care about size optimization anymore (looking at MW Warzone and every electron apps)
I won't be using this unless it has a web app, and without an Android app, they're freezing out a lot of people who could contribute. This won't go anywhere. BlueSky is just fine.
"Keep your username" already sold me. Exhausted with every new namespace landrush. Lemon8 made a terrible mistake not piggybacking off TikTok's, alienating everyone who didn't want to battle anew, and no one is happy with Discord's disastrous rollout.
That's literally the extent though. And a little bit for groups. But other than that, I don't know the last time myself or any of my friends have posted a status update. Maybe the occasional wedding announcement or baby photos, but it has to be that big of an event. And then the women get more active when they become moms, cause seemingly the family who skews older wants to see the babies.
Not that interesting, the app is mostly relying on Instagram infra to operate. Hence, log in with Insta and keeping your username being the primary selling point.
I’m guessing they’re going to try to meld the two together sometime down the road. Branding it as connected to Instagram now will make the transition less jarring.
I’d really love to see some actual creativity out of the biggest names in the industry, instead of this endless regurgitation of whatever idea got the tiniest bit of traction most recently.
Creativity is for startups. If you run the 8th or so most valuable company on the planet, your competitive advantage is mostly your scale. You should mostly be using that to maximize return on proven stuff (either by buying or copying proven things), not pissing away billions of dollars on stuff that a startup can iterate on for a tiny fraction of that price.
Doing something interesting comes with risk. That billion dollars is likely cash from investors who want a return. They won't be happy if the interesting thing you want to do isn't going to return a profit, hence they stick with what they know best and is least risky.
If you have a billion dollars and want to do something creative, invest it in 100 startups. But if you want to spend a billion dollars through a big corporation, you should use that corporation's comparative advantage -- which is generally scale, not creativity.
Why would it be bad that all risky initiatives start small instead of eg accidentally ruining the whole healthcare, education or policing system with a single decision?
Metaverse is exactly my point -- they've incinerated vast amounts of investor money with nothing to show for it. They could've and should've just plowed that money into hundreds of startups.
LLAMA is also exactly my point -- LLMs are pretty well-proven at this point. If you spend $X on machine learning researchers, you can get an LLM with Y parameters that is useful for various tasks like sentiment analysis, machine translation, etc. Facebook should be spending money on that because they have lots of cash, data centers, and ML researchers so they can do this at scale that only a few others can (Google, Microsoft/OpenAI and maybe Amazon).
It's really about whether you can incrementally assess P&L.
Facebook has epic amounts of user-generated imagery and text, and incremental improvements in NLP and computer vision generate incremental revenue (and profit) because you can put up better ads and introduce new features like translation. As an investor, that is very appealing.
There's no incremental revenue from Metaverse. It's a huge money pit, with no obvious end date for when enough billions have been wasted to call it quits. It could well work out, but if I'm an investor why would I want to invest in this through Facebook rather than through a bunch of startups pursuing a diverse set of strategies.
In this case, I think there was more than a little traction for a specific kind of social site, which turned into a crater, so it's not surprising somebody would build exactly what existed before.
The number of people who have even heard of "federation" or "Mastodon" is a vanishingly small fraction of the target audience for this app. Why waste precious page space on it?
Even if barely anyone even considered using it, social media users will have heard the name "Mastodon" in the news. Even normal people news covered it during the start of Twitter's slow collapse.
To be honest, I fail to see the value of Threads considering both Facebook and Instagram already exist. Is this just "Instagram but the image posts are optional"?
Some kind of "explore not just Instagram but also the rest of the world" take could work to advertise their new network, maybe painting their shitty company in a better light.
I can definitely see a gap in the market for this now.
The present Twitter alternatives (Mastodon, Bluesky, Spoutible) are just too hobbyist or finicky.
Meta will presumably bring an ease-of-use to this service and, crucially, scale from minute 1. They're the building blocks of Twitter's current incumbency position, and Meta/Threads can replicate them straight out the gate.
That is a huge advantage.
On the other side of the ledger, the utility of Twitter keeps sliding. Not sure how many Hacker News users are Twitter users or what the crossover is, but the whole blue tick 'thing' has reduced the utility in one key surprising way: high quality replies under popular accounts are impossible to find. It's like if you could buy upvotes on Hacker News to get to the top almost. Secondarily to that is the stuff over the last few days with very low rate limits on how many tweets you can view - if you can't use a social network, it tends to stop being useful.
While I wouldn't say Threads is a slam dunk guaranteed success, I would say it's the most probable contender of all the ones out there.
This _could_ be a twitter competitor. But the instance of bundling it with Instagram is what will ensure it fails. Meta have absolutely no common sense when it comes to understanding their audience.
If you're going to take on Twitter why on earth would you make Instagram a part of that when the two share nothing in common.
Could it be that you don’t understand Instagram? My circle of friends all rely on Instagram for announcements (mostly local) in addition to seeing updates/photos/etc. Twitter just underserved this market, and Meta realized that Instagram does serve this market, badly. Right now my local politicians have to put their text posts in a square image on a story, but it would be more convenient for them and me if they could post in a text format to their existing Instagram audience.
What I expect to happen is for Instagram to expose how bad Twitter was at converting potential users, rather than for Twitter to expose that Instagram users have no overlap with their use case.
I think the real longcon of this is to seed people into a TikTok competitor using the existing meta user base who will gladly give it a try initially. It will catch plenty of the Twitter crowd and even reddit crowd but that's just a coincidence of the state of those platforms. Long term I think it will be to agrigate their more active users away from Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat into something that provides the lowest common denominator of all of them so they can slowly erode them as part of the Embrace Extend Extinguish playbook taking a cue from M$
They took the best engineers and lessons learned from the platforms they bought but ideally they don't want to maintain products that do 80% of the same functions
This is just an initial version. Their primary focus is to link the Instagram user graph with threads to build a solid use base. The decoupling should emerge in later versions
There was a Mastodon thread by someone who had decompiled the leaked Android APK for Threads the other day. There were a few strings in there talking about the fediverse and federation with other servers, so it seems like they at least planned to add it at some point.
Well, it was announced that naughty old mr car would be buying twitter in about April last year. From then, there was enough chance it might all go horribly wrong that maybe they could justify this project.
The App Privacy Label on this is crazy It says it will collect and link health, fitness, financial, browsing history, usage data, purchases, search history, sensitive information etc Instagram doesn’t track that much, but Facebook does
From the very limited screenshots, it looks like the IG team have done a great job with the UX. If they stay true to this and keep it focused, I think this will be the winner.
Focused UX is something I feel has been really lost by many apps coming out today.
Not to mention this new Slack competitor: https://threads.com. If Instagram Threads takes off I fully expect this app will be forced to change its name by Meta.
As others have said, I’m sure this will do really well and is probably close to the final straw for Twitter. I just wish it wasn’t being produced by meta. I really hope that a non-meta competitor is able to gain significant market share.
As others here pointed out, Meta does not have a good history of launching completely new products separately and succeeding in it (except FB ofc). So it’s a wait and see.
If they’re going to ride on the coattails of the existing influencers, might make more sense to keep it a feature than a brand new app. The existing influencers would have no extra incentive to spend efforts on a whole new app if they’re addressing the same audience and won’t be gaining new set of audience.
Or keep it completely new to excite new wannabe influencers and they will put in the extra effort and drive activity at the beginning.
There's an enormous advantage here in getting people to pivot to this new app in that so many already have an instagram id.
If fbook can somehow persuade a few important influencers to switch over on launch day that could get a bunch of instagram using twitter users to download.
I'd love to see Blue Sky get traction, but I have to imagine that various government agencies that are looking for a new service to use for their communications are going to be more comfortable pivoting to a Meta product than some new startup.
I have used the threads from meta interface is slicky and smoothy in the first version but it felt down in some features like hashtags,usage limits,editable posts,direct messages,desktop options,NSFW content etc..,.I think they will fix this in future
I feel like the people who are concerned enough to leave twitter over the direction it's going will not jump straight into another app completely controlled by a single person.
My guess is they will possibly see some growth from instagram power users who are convinced to try it, but I don't anticipate a mass diaspora from twitter to threads.
EDIT: others in this thread are claiming that it may be compatible with activity pub. If that is the case then it may look a little more interesting to those leaving twitter.
Twitter’s gonna be a ghost town soon the way it’s trending. Instagram is providing a lifeboat, and it’s a known quantity of “evil”. Compared to whatever the heck Musk is doing.
So, on one side we have twitter with its crazy policies and on the other side we have fb with its "content moderation guidelines". I don't think you'll see much change since Twitter is twitter because of conflict. That's the reason twitter "replacements" aren't successful: Echo chambers for each faction.
I do wonder if Threads will allow rather graphic videos like Twitter does. If it doesn't it will not do well. War videos from Ukraine have been extremely important, and Facebook will need to allow much raunchier and sometimes downright NSFL content to truly be a replacement especially to be relevant to current events which is the main selling point of Twitter for most people.
yep. The same it became a "ghost town" after everyone migrated to mastadon, hive, tumblr, truth social, bluesky, post and the rest of the other meme "twitter killers"
Completely anecdotal but: “views” as reported by Twitter of tweets on my private account are down roughly 80% YOY. My follower count has dropped slightly. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007. It’s been a roller coaster of fun, annoying, vaguely threatening and the company’s love/hate/begging/hate relationship with API developers has been maddening. It has the feel of every private equity takeover of a previously popular business, except that Musk and Co. failed to extract any value from the company before saddling it with untenable debt.
> I feel like the people who are concerned enough to leave twitter over the direction it's going will not jump straight into another app completely controlled by a single person.
The average Instagram user doesn’t know or care that zuckerberg runs the show. They know it works all the time and isn’t constantly making changes that are annoying to deal with.
But Twitter is just so much objectively worse than it used to be, the user experience is mostly a nightmare for the very people who made Twitter so fun to begin with. The posters have to go somewhere.
Its not that anybody likes Zuck, but they also don't think Zuck will cozy up with Nazis quite so... obviously?
We all make choices every day about choosing the lesser of two evils. That's all this is.
I suspect after some time this will fail and will get merged back to Instagram.
Instagram is already a "twitter" app they have. I think IG idea is even better: tweet with image. Of course, they messed it up big time with various anti-consumer measures. Why would this be any different?
I am also wondering, if Threads fail – what do they lose?
Its the same with Notes of Substack. If Notes fail in 2 years – can they continue? I imagine they already felt negative effect of their move.
My question is, after the twitter fiasco, there is a number of competitors, like skyblue or this threads that have been created to remplace it (I dont count Mastodon, because it was not created to remplaced, but as an open alternative).
Why absolutely no big company (MS, facebook, google, amazon, etc...) is attempting the same with Reddit? Not even discord has done any single change to try to steal any userbase from it.
Probably the same reason there wasn't a twitter clone until now. Big tech sees that reddit is inherently a bad business that causes political headaches and is hard, if not impossible, to monetize.
Kind of, but you need to identify yourself with a facebook account that is linked to your name. Probably not the best idea if you are trying to form a community like r/piracy or r/watches where you could remain unidentified
Do you mind to prove some example of communities popular? Sorry but I haven't had facebook since 2016 and I literally have no idea what is going on with it.
I don't live in the US. We have groups for uni, the tech sector (in general, kind of like /r/programming in a way), ML&DL, dating, sales (alongside Facebook Marketplace). We also have groups for towns and neighborhoods as the prime way for the locals to communicate. It is de-facto reddit here
Twitter will take a big hit from this.. given the current situation, will reddit take a big hit as well? it's definitely an interesting time where both blue bird and reddit users are looking for alternatives. Meta has a good track record of running social app, this can be a really successful product with the launch timing if the app fulfil the mass requirements from both sides
Reddit will continue to take several hits from their own weird decisions, I don't see how Threads will have much of an impact there. Not unless they start repurposing Facebook Groups features to encourage that same sort of community aspect to topics.
Purely from self interest, I hope this wins over Twitter. So I installed it and made an account.
When Elon Musk laid off more than 80% of Twitter's workforce (or maybe 90%, the number is quickly increasing), many people said this would prove that a company needed only a handle of software engineers to be successful. If they are correct, it paints a bleak future where software engineer jobs will be forever cut down. I hope Twitter falls so it proves the reverse: a software company cannot survive without enough engineers.
While Facebook also laid people off, the percentage is much lower than Twitter. It will be even better if Facebook has to recruit people to win this battle.
Interestingly, it seems to me Elon was mostly right. Overall, twitter is doing just fine, everything runs for me, influencers from the fields I follow like AI or software engineering are still there, still posting regularly. From people I follow, I didn't notice anyone leaving.
If this new app support Web platform perfectly as well like twitter, It could be a bomb. Can't deny that, Previous Twitter devs built the Twitter Web app at a really high level in some way (eg. whatever the PWA tech or UX/UI details). But backwards to today, this previous creature is dying for some reason or someone's reason.
Reminds me of the times when Facebook acquired Friendfeed, a brilliant micro-blogging platform with real-time feed and "like" features before others. Back then, Twitter favs were anonymous while Friendfeed used usernames. It was innovative but it's left abandoned after acquisition until shutting off.
The problem with Facebook's products always comes down to one overriding fact, Zuckerberg's desire to win over everybody else; he's constantly been accused of stealing from people, it's not a surprise everything he owns is either extremely coercive or broken from a technical standpoint
Maybe I missed something, but what's the equivalent of subreddits on Threads? I can see how I might discover posts from users that I follow or like -- but I actually don't ever do that on reddit. I just occasionally visit subreddits of topics that interest me, and that's a loose collection of users/content based on geography or interest or otherwise.
I feel like hashtags (where you can put them on any message you want) aren't quite the same thing, but maybe that's just because it makes cross-posting more of a blended experience, where I can't tell if replies are linked to the #localcitynearme or the #coffee tag. Their example post about the coffee shop is a great example -- I might be interested in the discussion if it was near me, in which case comments of other coffee shops around the corner might be fantastic. But if I was reading the post because I follow that user for their singing in a jazz band that I listen to, and I live in a different country, it's just total noise that I wouldn't want to read.
I've only viewed the 'web app store' page and not the real app store page, maybe there are more details there.
How silly of me! I guess I was hoping for both, somehow. A kind of fever dream where adding site:threads.fediverse.instagram.com to searches works for finding useful human generated content..
FWIW, I feel like that's the next step: there is a natural mapping from Twitter's data model to reddit's and Meta already has experience handing over the moderation keys to sub-communities from Groups on Facebook; that will also make the existence of this separate app really become powerful.
I like that there's some competition in this space. I wish it was someone else because I will never have a Facebook-controlled app on any of my devices again. I simply don't trust them. If it's available on the web and it gains traction, maybe I will use it.
Instagram booted my account for looking too suspicious. To reactivate the account they wanted me to send a 3D video selfie to verify myself, but that company doesn’t need those sorts of head scans on me. Nope. Account is gone & I’ll never return.
Maybe it’s me, but I would have just made this a core expansion of Instagram and had a photo feed and a thread feed that you can easily change between. Pick your default. Seems dumb to have two different apps, both branded “Instagram”.
Eh I prefer their approach. Instagram already has too much crap in it, so adding a twitter clone into it would just be one more thing to bulk up Instagram, and from the Threads point of view, I'd like a new Twitter clone to be simple and dedicated, not a feature slapped onto the side of the Instagram app.
It seems this thing's only real association to Instagram is that you use your IG account to login, and they already have your social graph to import if you want to.
Will be interesting to see how much this is a genuine business for Facebook vs just an opportunistic dig at Twitter/Musk. It's actually been kind of weird watching all the big tech just stand to the side while Twitter implodes.
The way I like to see it, Facebook think of itself as a humanitarian company working mostly in the developing an underdeveloped countries providing them internet communication services.
Never seen a more idiotic response lol. Twitter was there during fb highest time ...people have moved away from meta cra* because of values difference.
I think in order for Threads to be successful and compete with Twitter, they will need to stop policing information so heavily as they do on Facebook. Most of my immediate circles left Facebook because of all the tyrannical fact checking notices, suspensions, and "misinfo" policing going on.
Whereas Twitter now prides itself in being the free speech absolutist social media app, and information flows freely there. While they do have Community Notes to add context to potential (real) misinformation, at least it's guided by Twitter users and doesn't prevent people from seeing the original post without jumping through hoops, and there's no risk of being suspended for angering the Ministry of Truth, brought to you by government officials looking to cover-up inconvenient facts.
I worked at Meta. Maybe I worked at the slowest department, but based on what I saw, if they really built this in half a year, then I'm absolutely positive that a nimble team of four can replicate it in a few weeks at most.
From the bottom of my heart, I hope as many of us as possible will, someday, get a chance to replace the time spent either "on" or "thinking about" the Twitter kind of "addictive, adverstisement supported, high-engagement requiring, tribe re-inforcing, data-siphoning, public discourse worsening" kind of social media.
(To be clear: I'm 100% expecting "Threads" to become that in the short-to-medium term, unless they have some specific moderation techniques in place.)
This won't make your life "great", mind me. I'm pretty sure it will make it better.
I'm so tired of chat apps. Every chat app is the same crap done over and over again... But apparently its 'new' and you need to download it because its the only one X uses, yayyyy. It's like scheduling: the problem was solved already but everyones obsessed with redoing them.
Does anyone who works on apps / software / whatever ever consider how tiring it is to have to adopt all this sheet? It's like the digital equivalent of fashion. Literally just waxes and wanes between apps that are all functionally the same based on trends.
2. It's impossible to look this info up. Their internal search functions feel like their optimized for finding distracting shit rather than finding what you were actually looking for.
I hate it with a burning passion, and I secretly wish for all of these companies to be nationalized and have like 90% of their features deprecated. I hate having my attention abused like that. It's too much hassle and FOMO to uninstall these apps, and I need like 3 external tools to limit my usage to sane volumes.
This is not a top-priotity problem at all, nor one that I think of frequently (just an hour a day), yet I can't fathom how some higher-ups waste their lives thinking of these shticks
a replacement for X, signals a Temp/emergency solution, not a new market, if that's the driver with Threads, they've lost it already.
tech-giants are so powerful, they don't have to move-fast-to-break-things, a small tantrum/jitter (e.g Musk-twitter, or rush-to-replace) can mess-up a considerable part of the ecosystem around them; including their own finances.
I don't get this at all. To me it seems like it will obviously fail.
1. Twitter is all about who is there. How will they make people start posting on this?
2. New platforms take off because they innovate, not because they do what others do but slightly tweaked.
3. I have a really hard time seeing people mass escaping twitter to this du to morals. Facebook/Zuck is just as reviled as Twitter/Musk. If not more reviled. Mastodon has the moral high ground, but still can't take off.
1. Facebook has more than 10 times as many users as Twitter. They don't need to add new users, they just need to make it easy for FB users to also use Threads.
2. But the whole point here is that others aren't doing this any more. Threads isn't supposed to be an innovation, just a Twitter replacement. Twitter is dying, Mastodon is too complicated for non-geeks, BlueSky could have been a contender but they didn't get their act together quickly enough.
3. You're in a geek information bubble here. On the scale of social media, almost nobody cares about that sort of thing. I'd bet money that the overwhelming majority of FB users have never even heard of Zuckerberg.
1. The people who are possible users of something like this are already on Twitter. The target audience is not all of Facebook, so not 10x.
2. I have seen data that can be used to argue Twitter is slipping. But to claim Twitter is dying is a great exaggeration, based on data. There are perhaps cases where a company will totally mess up something and a replacement can take over, but this doesn't seem to be it.
3. Well, hard to tell. To me the geek information bubble is the conviction that Twitter is dying. Also, I think Zuckerberg is a lot more famous that you account for. But I could not find data on it.
This is going to be very interesting to watch, and I honestly... For all I think about Meta as a company, I have to congratulate them on the timing. They probably pushed hard to meet this deadline the past few weeks in order to coincide with the controversial Twitter decisions lately. Elon Musk is rolling out the red mat for Zuckerberg. It's fun to see tech giants fight it out like this! Reminds me of the Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs days!
Having said that, the cultures on Instagram and Twitter are no doubt different. So it's hard for me to tell what will transpire here. However, how much of these cultural differences are due to Instagram not having had a live text feed for breaking news etc. before? And how malleable is social network culture?
Threads will also move Instagram closer to Twitter with this. I think how well Meta suceeeds at this is vital to how much of a threat to Twitter this is going to be. Not only this app itself needs to find users; for a real threat they also need to use it for similar things as on Twitter, e.g. politics, a controversial celebrity post here and there, breaking news on the Ukrainian war, earthquakes, imploding submarines...
Finally, I wonder how this will affect Facebook! With both a photo feed, a TikTok-style reels feed, Snapchat-like stories, and Twitter-like Threads... This app that is NOT Facebook is certainly starting to look very complete indeed. Facebook is big where I live so I "need" to be on it to stay in touch, but I can see myself residing more and more on Messages and Marketplace alone, now more than ever.
I’m calling it, network effects are very hard to overcome. Users with thousands of follows will have to wait a loooong time to have Threads side to catch up. In the mean time they will absolutely use Twitter along with Threads and the one likely getting abandoned is Threads.
New users will find empty content, mostly discussions that are already on twitter but at a small scale and reach
1.) Instagram brand is much stronger than Facebooks
2.) Instagram follows some similar design and user experience patterns to twitter, i.e. username based account, people using stories a lot of times as mostly a text based posting platform, etc
3.) Celebrities and newspeople already use instagram for updates, so the transition would be natural
4.) Twitter has never been in a weaker position with the site being limited
I actually have a feeling not that many people around the world will be confused between this and an IPv6 based low-power mesh networking protocol for IoT devices.
If this gains traction, how long will it take for Meta to enshittify Threads?
Facebook and Instagram have been stable, if nothing else... But I feel like Meta is under immense pressure to monetize users as more and more see the "Facebook is for old people and TikTok is draining Instagram" writing on the wall.
im there. Twitter just announced that they are going to force people to pay for a disgusting "im an idiot" blue checkmark to use tweetdeck, and that is it, we all hate Facebook and Meta but after what Twitter has become, a total cesspool of right wing hatebot accounts and Elon-fellating, Zuck is like a welcome sight.
So, the ending of twitter is to switch to Threads with FB's content moderation guidelines? I don't think so. We have social media fatigue rn. Twitter is is ok to get info really fast, rarely goes down, you have access to all kind of views (from extreme left to extreme right). This is the main reason gab, truth social, etc... won't be mainstream.
Fb hasn't been original from a long time. From trying to launch a substack competitor, stealing snapchat features, creating reels, etc. Now, developer wise, is a different game. React, Pytorch, Prophet, etc... hit after hit.
Twitter can be a "cesspool" but I don't trust fb at all.
> Twitter is is ok to get info really fast, rarely goes down, you have access to all kind of views (from extreme left to extreme right).
Twitter was ok to get (and, equally important in my opinion, share) info really fast; now you need to have an account, be logged in, and be under your meager daily quota to even be allowed to see anything. And everyone you want to share info with needs to do the same. The recent changes have pretty severely undermined what made Twitter stand out among its larger competitors.
The quota is temporary. I agree with you that latest changes have been crazy,but it 's not the end of the world. I much rather prefer Twitter than give Zuckerberg more power.
Now, I see them winning if they go Twitter's route and nuke their content moderation guidelines but since that won't happen, I doubt you'll see mass migration from the freedom fighters, hehe.
Reality is they need each other. Conflict is what gets Twitter going. That and memes.
The only "extreme left" account I followed on Twitter (Chad Loder) was personally banned by Elon because his #1 priority post-Grimes breakup has been trying to become a made man so the internet fascists will let him into their gang.
There are certainly tankies on there, which is a kind of person that claims to be left but is actually a reactionary.
I think the vast majority of people don’t care much about what happens at the outer bounds of content moderation. Most people go to Twitter for pretty normal internet conversations, which are increasingly difficult to have there: the Blue buffoons being at the top of every thread with nothing worthwhile to say, the constant spotlight on Elon drama, rate limiting, huge jump in bugginess, etc.
FB allows a sufficiently diverse, extreme, and even toxic political environment on FB for most everyone. What kind of content would Threads forbid that is more crucial to Twitter users than a functional service?
Putting the content of people who have to pay for engagement above everyone else was one of the most heroically dumb product decisions I’ve ever heard. I was fine putting up with everything else but then the service just became legitimately not compelling because of that.
The metaverse revolutionized how we work and live. It completely transformed society as we know it, with the largest adoption of any software product known to humanity. People use it for multiple hours daily, and some even started working in it. Integrated with Facebook's metacurrency based on blockchain, the economy shifted towards decentraland, where the best memes and bored apes are exchanged on the marketplace in Dollzucks. The game changer was the integration with Meta's time machine, which allows me to comment in this thread. They're even talking of adding legs to avatars!
It's only logical that meta now sets to take over Twitter, which will happen in a matter of months. Their product is superior and contains very few backdoors on its encryption.
All hail Mark!
edit: I now realize that the time transportation function might also take you to an alternate time branch, disregard my comment if it's irrelevant
Disappointing that competitors are bootstrapping new social networks by mass-scraping Twitter data. This is almost certainly what Elon was referring to earlier this week; the same thing happened with Substack Notes. Hope Twitter pursues legal action against Meta for this.
> What Twitter data is being used to bootstrap Threads?
I have no proof of this. It's just speculation. I also don't have an iDevice so I can't install the app and look for myself.
But the timing of Twitter's rate limiting this week, combined with Elon's clarification that Twitter data is being mass-scraped, combined with the launch of Threads this week...can't be a coincidence, can it?
Friend, I am a fan of, and highly recommend use your critical thinking skills to evaluate statements that others make before parroting them. I don't repeat things that make no sense on their face, like "Substack is scraping Twitter" or "Threads is bootstrapping off Twitter data".
Like, what would that even mean? Do you really think Meta is going to launch a Twitter competitor and just wholesale impersonate accounts and their content? If not, what even are you implying?
(from the "proof" link where Elon was accusing Substack of scraping:)
>2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
lol, reading that still makes me chuckle. I can't believe people eat his crap up even when the circumstances make it clear that he's backpeddaling and desperately trying to save face.
I can't read this tweet to find out what Elon is claiming because... gestures wildly around at the state of Twitter.
But linking to an Elon Musk tweet does not on its face change anything about my prior that this is not a real thing and that you're using all of these words incorrectly. Elon thinks everything that is personally inconvenient to him is illegal. He's threatened legal action in the past over advertisers just not buying ads from him.
He just says stuff. But you have to apply some critical thinking here -- what would it even look like to "bootstrap" Threads with Twitter data? These words mean things, if Threads is being bootstrapped with stolen data, there should be Twitter data on Threads -- accounts should be mirrored, content should be mirrored, there should be something. Is there?
> But the timing of Twitter's rate limiting this week, combined with Elon's clarification that Twitter data is being mass-scraped, combined with the launch of Threads this week...can't be a coincidence, can it?
The timing of Threads launching this week is probably a direct response to gestures wildly around at the state of Twitter right now. I find it incredibly unlikely that Instagram launching Threads crippled Twitter's infrastructure.
Particularly given that Elon Musk himself claimed (also likely incorrectly) that it was AI companies crippling the site, not rival social networks.
actually it can, because threads has probably been in development for months? I doubt Zuck put it together since Friday. Most likely he knew Elon musk is an idiot who doesn't know the first thing about social media companies and has created a power vacuum for a Twitter like app, and now there's one for a Reddit like app..
If someone could marry the two, in a non profit Wikipedia sort of way, with decent Democratic way to moderate and vote on new features etc, we could kill two birds with one stone and replace both Twitter and Reddit.
As respectfully as possible: can you define what you mean by scraping? Because it seems very much like you don't understand what that word means or are using it very idiosyncratically.
b) It is legal and ethical to scrape public data. Especially when that data is owned by its users and not by Twitter.
c) The more likely explanation for Twitter's rate limiting is that they didn't pay their AWS/Google bill and rather than cut the service off they limited its bandwidth and/or compute capacity.
Meta is extremely hypocritical about scraping. They continuously send their legal team to threaten third parties on scraping of their platforms yet time and again are caught red-handed
- Interesting that they went with a stand-alone app instead of baking this into IG like they did with Stories (which killed Snap overnight). I wonder how much they’ll advertise the download inside of IG.
- Can’t say I like the name. Doesn’t evoke much emotion in me. The term “thread” is rarely used by normies without the word “Twitter” in front of it. And the choice of the plural form is interesting.
- The logo looks like it belongs to an app that should start with the letter ‘a’. Confusing that they go with a t-word like Twitter but then make the logo look like a different letter. Also, no color? Will it really stay black and white or will it adopt the IG gradient?