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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
- Email is federated so there is much less cost to switch providers where you can still receive and send from others. No stickiness factor
This is why Gmail succeeded and g+ failed
Different world, different internet, different userbase.
Unless of course they first want to see how much interest it gains
I haven't got one either yet so don't know its state.
I’ll DM you!
EDIT: realised you can’t DM on HN
How can I send a code to you? If you want one that is, you might not be bothered :-)
EDIT EDIT: I’m using the Hack App on my Phone, I think maybe I can DM followers from the desktop site?
There is no way to DM, but Firefox Relay can be used for temporary email addresses:
xow6d86sq at mozmail dot com
Not sure on the DM stuff, if you figure it out let me know!
6ndpn1zk AT duck.com
zhym4g7v AT duck.com
Apologies for the delay!
I'm all out of codes now - If I get anymore, I'll share them here.
I didnt realise at first there were so many requests! :-)
7jsqi5gf at duck.com
Apologies for the delay.
0df41fec3f63 AT fomogo.club
Apologies for the delay.
and Mastodon.
Ceci est un post de protestation.
- 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.
But I agree if there is heavy integration with the rest of Meta's products I'll be less happy.
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.
But I'm guessing they wont do that, as Meta wants lock in and registration, and following all your data.
At least current version of instagram on the web is pretty lame, if you don't install some browser extensions.
Why?
People normally have the reverse complaint, that the algorithm makes them miss content.
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.
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).
HackerNews posters are not the typical Twitter users.
(Just to be clear I personally hate the algorithmic feed but there are lots of use cases for it that just don't align with my Twitter usage)
I don't personally notice a lack of engagement. Maybe not everyone migrated, but I feel like the most important people have.
what ratio of tweets are rich media vs. text?
Whether that's for unknown logins, spam accusations (just an accusation is enough for a tech company to throw the ban hammer), etc.
Edit: that was meant as a compliment but keep downvoting dipshits
(that reminded me of a Reddit bot)
Most of the Twitter Blue subscribers were those that bought into the freedom of speech aspect of Twitter 2.0.
They will likely stay where they are but everyone else will slowly but surely move.
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.
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.
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.
Facebook has celebrity influencers but that is a different demographic.
People are not interchangeable. Eg Journalists would make a very dull Instagram.
I think with the right UI/UX, Threads could do it. But we'll see.
I hear former more commonly that prior. Out of geo-curiosity, where is prior used?
(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.)
Instagram is a Duke of dark pattern ux, I'd say king but there's travel booking websites out there that hold the crown.
TikTok on the other hand I think the video needs to be much longer to be trackable.
The white bar at the bottom, which shows the progress of the reel/video, can be dragged. It is a very buggy experience, but it works.
I think it doesn't work with very short videos.
It's free and open to the world and they can just join any other server too if desirable.
I'm still looking for major outlets to set up their own servers and be able to follow [email protected] accounts for their staff.
I've already seen one: https://social.heise.de/
Kidding aside, I do seriously question whether that move would ever happen without it being forced.
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.
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.
Uhu, borderline hysterical. What are you talking about, actually? Sounds like you have been confused by ongoing political wars...
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 (and an evil one.)
I wonder if it was an attempt to cater to advertisers concerns over bot traffic inflating ad numbers.
It's not a particularly wholesome platform even on the "ideas" front. It's just as bad as any other mainstream internet platform.
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.
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.
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.
On YouTube actually yes, it’s in “History”. :P
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 :)
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.
edit: great idea though it functions pretty much exactly as you described, get into product if you're not yet!
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.
Also, “nest-ed comments” on different “branches”.
You could work backwards and find the bird-related concept and then build the correspond technology?
What would “feathers” be?
“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.
Sweet project.
Thanks for the kind words! <3
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.
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
The moderation didn't actually change either though. He just says stuff, he doesn't have time to actually monitor the implementation of it.
Or more recently, Harvard's algorithms that mathematically demonstrate Asians don't have interesting personalities.
Perhaps a tiny minority of 1st Amendment weirdos in America, but outside of them nobody else cares. Normal people just want to follow Kim Kardashian.
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.
Twitter went down completely all the time in the early days.
Not because I love twitter but rather because of the following
1.Network effects are just that powerful.
2. This looks like a group chat killer rather than a Twitter killer.
So I think the blue bird will go on to live a rather long life.
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).
You can cherry pick a few abhorrent Tweets but that’s not going to be representative of most peoples’ experience.
I, on the other hand, go into many different spheres of Twitter.
The wider Twitter universe has gotten much worse since Musk took over.
between the OnlyFans models and AI bots roasting people on demand, its a bit of an amusement park!
Believe it or not, there are also group chats in the DMs
I say this as someone who is no big fan of Meta.
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.
You: I think this is a biased view held by people who migrated to Mastodon.
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.
But they didn’t when Facebook launched Poke, did they? You’d be forgiven for forgetting it ever existed:
https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700732/facebook-poke-is-d...
Point is, FB actually doesn’t have a great record of launching brand new apps. Instagram Stories worked by pivoting almost the entire app around them. Remains to be seen if Threads fares better.
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.
This is regional/network-effect based.
I've seen it situated the exact opposite opposite direction in some locales.
I don't doubt they will have lot of users at launch but I think it'll be hollow and empty content-wise and people will get sick of it pretty quick. 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.
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.
You should be in sales lol, just sell the B2B folks on ads and sign them up for multi-year deals like Spotify 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 and having the same conversations.
I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/breakdown-indictments-cases-...
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.
Much of which, like the lab leak theory, turned out to be true but politically inconvenient at the time.
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 was all there before and after Musk on Twitter. Post Musk you get the added overt racism as a bonus though. Choices choices...
Unless you mean from an ads perspective, but there are many ad companies.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
[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.
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?
I'm not American, but that doesn't reflect what I was seeing on Twitter before I closed my account (mid 2020).
I'm surprised to see a crowd that is supposed to see through the BS of the industry falling for Musk's neutrality and anti-censorship claims... https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...
AND that Musk's anti-censorship claims are exaggerated at best?
This seems pretty self evident, since most of them left as soon as Musk took over with the promise to stop policing the platform.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/03/elon... is where a summary of the most neutral analysis on this "debate" can be found.
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.
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.
Hacker News has become Reddit. ${the thing I hate} is racist and transphobic!! And mindless anti-Musk hate.
We should not accept this type of comment ^^^ it is objectively and intellectually dishonest.
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.
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.
Incidentally, that is also the case on Bluesky and one reason I would not dare to invite anybody on there until they address it.
Seriously though, how did Spanish Inquisition levels of prudeness become the norm on the interwebs, of all things?
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?
Maybe if you're developing a spreadsheet app or some such, then sure.
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.
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).
plus ça change
In the beginning, every social network tends to offer that. (Some call it attention arbitrage.)
To drive a critical mass of users, social networks offer incentives to content creators so they flock to them and start producing content there.
The main incentive is the aggressive free distribution of organic content.
Once the social network matures, it reduces the proportion of free content in favor of paid content. And the attention arbitrage goes away.
(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?)
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.
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.
Oh, I totally agree. I just don't think that means Meta will win here.
> 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.
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.
And it has actually been a quiet but lucrative success for the company.
Meta is the kind of company to throw $25+ Billion into a vanity project and not really sweat it.
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.
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.
https://imi.org.ua/en/news/twitter-shadowbans-ukrainians-who...
-----------------
Something like this came up as age-restricted: https://twitter.com/ukraine6679/status/1573928649304276994
Of course this news would come from Ukrainian sources.
---------------
https://www.reddit.com/r/NAFO/comments/145zfi7/twitter_has_d...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.understandingwar.org/
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.
Yes, that’s one of the sources I use as well.
> But I don't think that the propaganda memes should be deboosted / shadowbanned
I’m still not convinced that they are, to be honest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Find me a smartphone that isn’t made in china.
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.
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.
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 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’m just saying his goals and his poor ability to achieve them.
If that isn't his main goal, then he must be a bigger idiot than I thought. His actions are observationally identical to that objective. Making a company profitable is not the same as running it into the ground, and his moves toward profitability have been so obviously set up to backfire that he'd have to be wildly incompetent on every level if he thought they were going to work. An answer with more malice is simply much more believable at this point.
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.
Also who exactly financed the purchase of Twitter?
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.
Article from 2019 Twitter denying any such shadow bans are occurring https://theprint.in/politics/new-allegation-against-twitter-...
Another reference from bbc that shows wire.in removing fake articles about Facebook/meta https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63226111
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...
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.
I understand worries of Musk supporting the right, but your interpretation is a unique one that seems highly unlikely.
* 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...
Like which ones? Not being sarcastic, I just can't think of any off the top of my head.
(on Facebook core product)
I am leaving out their never really widely launched crypto hype disaster of a product on purpose.
These are pretty major, successful features that drive a lot of use.
I don't disagree with your main point, though: Facebook certainly developed lots of new features, whereas Twitter pretty much stood still.
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.
* Facebook Apps (not really a thing anymore. Maybe it still exists)
* Facebook Games (remember Zynga?)
* Facebook Deals (they were taking on GroupOn)
* Messenger (as a separate product. One of the most heavily used products in the world)
* Events (which for many people is the only reason they have an account)
* Facebook Groups (still heavily used)
* Facebook Pages (still heavily used)
* Facebook Video (still heavily used)
* Facebook Marketplace (extremely heavily used in many markets)
* Stories (still heavily used)
* Reels (sort of merged into Videos)
* Facebook Places (big plans, but died)
* Facebook Graph Search (nothing like originally released: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Graph_Search)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
My understanding is the majority of those loss years was due to how they accounted for RSUs, however I can’t find that easily right now.
I don’t get the impression that it was at all close to imploding pre-musk. Do you have any links to back up that claim?
First mover advantage and already existing userbase. Its the Windows of Operating Systems. Market domination.
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...
Isn't that exactly what meta are doing here?
To be fair, I don’t think I’ve seen much sign that Twitter understands what made Twitter great, either.
(both before and after Musk)
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.
and can start being fed notifications and UI for the other thing at a moment's notice.
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.
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.
What made Twitter great?
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.
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.
Twitter/Elon no longer know 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 agree with GP, it’s very easy to stay out of outrage sight.
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?
You're an ivory tower inhabitant of Twitter :-)
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.
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.
What makes you think so? Twitter has no moat, the functionality is easy to replicate. It's all about the user base.
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
However, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a next big thing out of nowhere like TikTok.
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.
(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.
Twitter with my Instagram friends won’t feel like Twitter.
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.
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.
Threads, a Facebook app - hel no. I would rather install the spying app TikTok on my phone than a Facebook branded property.
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.
Nailed it.
- 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)
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.
Insta reels are a successful competitor to TikTok
FB marketplace is a successful competitor to Craigslist
FB Messenger is a successful competitor to iMessage
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?
Marketplace
> when was the last time Facebook successfully launched a new standalone social app?
Marketplace =]
How many years will Twitter have to still exist for some of us to admit he didn't kill it.
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....
and so on and so forth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VdynwAkQy8
I’m not sure if matching twitter in that way is a recipe for growth.
The accounts that are most active/followed on Twitter are not the type of people that have Instagram accounts.
People with large followings are not going to simply switch, no matter how much they hate Elon.
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.
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.
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.
Interactions on LinkedIn follow Gervais Principles.
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.
But maybe it goes the other way with clones. (“[Original thing] doesn't stand a chance. Releasing [Clone] will totally kill the userbase.”)
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.
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.
> 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 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.
This has become the indicator of hubris, the red flag that indicates the rest should be taken, at best, with a very large pinch of salt.
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.
Your kind of opinion is clearly from someone who lives in a bubble or inexperienced.
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.
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.
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.
Are we talking about mastodon or threads? Do you think Threads won't have an algorithmic feed?
It obviously will, so this point is only relevant to mastodon, which is still 100x smaller than twitter.
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.
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.
>Twitter no longer has a press department. Questions sent to the former email address received a poop emoji as the auto-response.
What the heck?
According to notorious liar Elon Musk.
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.
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.
Once the schism comes I'll go back.
Yes, it will beat Twitter, it is what Twitter ever wanted to be.
Man, wow, I just checked it. The list is so long that it made me laugh.
I guess they’ve decided to scoop up every last bit of data they can lay their hands on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
i have some bad news for you
> 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.
> I'm not quite convinced by this;
Agreed, only the very political types want this. No one else cares.
No, they're not.
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 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.
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.
Twitter may die but this will not replace it.
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.
RIP Threads, 2023-2024 (generously).
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.
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.
We'll see this burn to ashes after the elections.
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.
RIP twitter, 2006-2023.