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.
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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...
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Something like this came up as age-restricted: https://twitter.com/ukraine6679/status/1573928649304276994
Of course this news would come from Ukrainian sources.
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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?
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.