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?
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.