Threads, an Instagram app
apps.apple.com
apps.apple.com
- Interesting that they went with a stand-alone app instead of baking this into IG like they did with Stories (which killed Snap overnight). I wonder how much they’ll advertise the download inside of IG.
- Can’t say I like the name. Doesn’t evoke much emotion in me. The term “thread” is rarely used by normies without the word “Twitter” in front of it. And the choice of the plural form is interesting.
- The logo looks like it belongs to an app that should start with the letter ‘a’. Confusing that they go with a t-word like Twitter but then make the logo look like a different letter. Also, no color? Will it really stay black and white or will it adopt the IG gradient?
Probably a nod to the @username format that Twitter made so popular.
I remember hashtags being popularized first by Flickr (maybe @mentions were too?)
IRC, chat rooms, web forums. Pretty much any sort of group social arena.
The symbol lends itself to the usage, not vice versa. That's like asking "why do people use quotation marks around quotes"; because that's its intention.
I'm sure I'm not in the majority though.
Facebook designers have suffered quite a bit from dealing with very inconsistent media format: comments on one photo in an album are one of the obvious ones, or a poster criticizing and sharing a video and comments assuming the author shot the video is familiar to anyone with less media-savvy friends. Limiting media forms to consistent sets makes sense to have a smoother experience.
Facebook, and later Instagram once the first one was burned, has done a lot to have a social graph that makes sense: actual people and well-established pseudonyms, famous people and brands, etc. It’s the Social part of what is known internally as “The Graph” and a very crucial asset, something that was expected to be shared across properties: Facebook and Instagram, of course (hence the horrifying confusing relation between your Facebook account with your civil name and your pseudonymous account on Instagram, outing a few people that way), but also the MetaVerse lately and yet again with some controversy. WhatsApp fought against having the Social part of the graph as a default because WA had its own graph; that was a tough battle. It’s not fully isolated: WA Shopping leverages Inventory, the Things part of the graph, massively so.
Despite all that drama, this confirms that Facebook wants to leverage its Graph further, specifically Instagram’s—likely a victory from Ad Partners who want brands to feel comfortable early and spend fast.
The spaghetti logo looks nothing like what I have on my screen, so I think it’s a good one (Instagram gradient was to avoid having to deal with Facebook’s curse of starting very distinct, to be one of the too many blue apps far too soon). The name starting with 't' could be a way to capitalize on people who search by app name and their muscle memory that the app with ranty posts is called t-something.
Maybe I'm in a bubble, IG seems very low text, low drama, low politics. Not very Twitter-y
I follow my grandparents on FB, and I don’t necessarily want that on my Threads.
Very much so: Facebook is unlike Instagram and Twitter in that its relationships are bidirectional.
Why? Pseudonymous accounts. They are huge on Twitter, necessary, and Instagram supports them.
Among Meta properties, Instagram is also the closest to Twitter as an interest-based social network (rather than limited to people-you-already-know)
Euro/GDPR: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly.
The keyword here is indirectly.
Australia: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2019C00025
personal information means information or an opinion about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable.
(a) whether the information or opinion is true or not; and (b) whether the information or opinion is recorded in a material form or not.
The keyword here "reasonably identifiable".
Not a bad name, but the “th” in Threads can be problematic to pronounce in other languages.
Good to have competition in this space.
Similar logo, black and white.
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Also Threads is a messaging app (https://threads.com). Isn't it a trademark violation?
As if twitter or tweet was when twitter launched?
It was quite surprising, I was also surprised people of her age are exchanging discord handles IRL like we used to with MSN/ICQ etc. and then just use it for DMs. She doesn’t even use Snapchat stories because “no one watches stories” and are just direct DMing her friends, and posts general audience stuff to TikTok.
I immediately went and bought Snapchat shares when I found that out.
Seriously, I have no dog in this fight. I stopped using Twitter about a year ago when everything went full Elon. I might use Threads at some point, if it gains enough traction.
Did not expect Fediverse integration from Meta.
[1] https://9to5google.com/2023/07/03/threads-instagram-app-coun...
[1] https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836
edit: More info here: https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/fedipact-blocking-meta/
That’s a pretty doubtful condition, especially if Threads becomes too successful for the Fediverse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
> Fediverse users are already planning to boycott any instance
Though if this is true, yeah, I dislike that too. It should be individual admins’ choices.
I wager most Fediverse users aren't worried about this (at least speaking for myself). The status quo is 2 or 3 big private companies and a few thousand federated alternatives. If Meta betrays the community, things will go back to square one and core functionality of their app will start to falter. They need the community more than the community needs them.
I'm not worried about it really because I think the ethic of fediverse as such that they will be quickly de-federated. But it won't be fun along the way.
Defederated or not, Meta will have pretty much zero bearing on the instances outside their bubble.
You have to be kidding me. The entire fediverse is little over 1M MAU, almost all of them not monetizable. So...tiny and useless. Threads can launch whilst being fully defederated and instantly become the fediverse.
The ActivityPub ecosystem stands to lose nothing either way. Meta is walking a fine line with the remainder of the community that trusts them, but stands to integrate into a pretty nice system if they pull things off.
1. Meta conditionally federates with Mastodon instances that sign the deal (allow ads to be pushed, data to be collected, etc)
2. Small/vocal instances reject the deal and defederate.
3. Some large instances do take the deal.
4. Small/vocal instances defederate from the large ones.
5. Large Mastodon instances become pointless as they're isolated from the rest of Mastodon and have no real value over simply using Threads.
6. Large Mastodon instances implode, and the Mastodon fediverse becomes even smaller than it already is.
Nobody outside of the HN crowd gives half a fluff about distributed social. They'll use the one that lets them interact with people they know. If that means they can talk cross-instance, sweet, they will. If they can't, Mastodon and ActivityPub in general continues to be a pain that the majority wont bother with.
If that's Mastodon's goal, fair enough. I think it's a bad goal.
But indeed, if the goal is to self sabotage and remain an irrelevant corner of misfits, all good.
Yes instances occasionally have issues... But I've experienced less outages than on twitter.
Yes there are unsavory types on some servers, but in my experience most are pretty good at defed-ing from them if needed, and you can block/mute individuals.
First, the technical/usability part...
Picking an instance is a major hurdle. There's no usable feed from the get-go. Following people, especially from other instances, is not intuitive. There's no functional search, no quotes.
Mods are volunteers and can wipe you out at a whim, or just decide to quit the instance. They'll also regularly defederate with other instances, which means they break your followers and whom you follow. There's a perpetual worry of losing everything. In any case, media attached to your content is regularly wiped out, to save costs.
You'll have a feed and see like/boost/whichever icons showing zero. Then you open the individual post and it has non-zero values. Which still is wrong. The original post might have 100 likes but your version shows 15. Not only will it lag, it may never sync as this entirely depends on users on your instance following particular users on other instances.
Worse, the same is true for replies. You will not see most other users replies as those replies are only federated if that user is followed by anyone from your instance. Hence you'll get an original thread with tons of similar replies because users are not seeing the other replies.
I could go on, but almost nothing about it works correctly in the way conventional social media does. It is sorely lacking in basic features and features that are there work poorly.
Second, the cultural part...
Mastodon is basically a community of leftist tech folks, lgbtq, and general misfits. Nothing wrong with that, everybody deserves their place. The problem is that they developed a culture of anti-everything and extreme safetysm.
The bar for hate speech is so low as to exclude most people. They're against any type of commercialization, institutes, influencers. They're against any type of growth or improvement and consider the broken parts of Mastodon features, not shortcomings.
I don't mean to escalate this into a culture war discussion, I'm saying that this attitude is what sabotages Mastodon as a whole from improving and growing, and possibly becoming a much larger and more serious alternative network.
The culture is so cynical and counter productive that even those in the ideological bubble can't take it anymore, this constant in-fighting.
None of this means the entire Mastodon experience is useless. I have used it and it somewhat works. But the more you understand about how it works, the more you realize it can't possibly be a replacement for conventional networks.
It's worth noting that the only time I've payed any attention to twitter is in the last several months, so it's weighted to be worse than it was prior to recent happenings.
The server where I have an account has had downtime twice in the past 200 something days, and had search go down once in that time frame. Occasionally I'll see an update from another server saying "<search|image hosting|replies> are temporarily down", but life goes on fine and they rejoin when they can.
Believe it or not, most Mastodon / Fediverse admins & users aren't interested in taking over the world and having a huge reach. They just want a nice community.
If this rumor is real and Threads takes off, you can still stay in whichever instance that you like, but now be able to get updates from the artist, the experts, educators, politicians, the influencers that would not have joined the Fediverse otherwise. And more importantly, more people now can get updates from you. Reach might not be something you personally appreciate but it's very important for content creators.
Now, I personally I think it's trying to swim up the waterfall & ultimately worse for everyone, but: Mastadon specifically has had a strong history of being anti-search, anti-scraping. You aren't supposed to be surveiling folks at industrial scale on the fediverse.
There's widespread skepticism about Meta respecting rules of the road. Having a huge giant shark join the pool of lots of little fish seems like a scary proposition. How we can still protect & have sovereignty over our different fedi-sites is a real question when there's a company with so much technical, economic, and popular leverages.
I'm honestly pretty skeptical about the fediverse aspect of Threads. It suggests that if I open a new fediverse instance and follow their accounts, I can suck in their timeline and do with it whatever I want. In particular, to bypass ads.
Hence, I could make a "best of Threads" fediverse instance without ads. Or maybe put my own ads on it.
Or, I could build my own client on top of the Threads instance.
None of this sounds very Meta to me.
It's the opposite of naive: it's extremely well thought out and heavily deliberated. Making so many things "public" by default is an invite to people. It's an intentional welcome mat in old school "Internet 1.0" sort of way. But just because you want to welcome people doesn't mean you have to welcome robots (crawlers, etc). Many instances do that deliberately in a very old school "Internet 1.0" way by saying so in their ROBOTS.TXT file (in addition to other places).
In the old web, crawlers were expected to read ROBOTS.TXT and no matter how "public" they thought the website was they found, ROBOTS.TXT was supposed to be the final word.
Anyone scraping or making searchable "at will" random chunks of the Fediverse is easily violating some number of ROBOTS.TXT files. That is an ancient technical convention that isn't new or naive. The internet knew even then that bad actors would ignore ROBOTS.TXT files. The old internet learned to name and shame the bad actors, and in some cases would back that up by force with firewall blocks and in some cases lawsuits. Mastodon does that too. That's why a lot of Mastodon instances are preemptively blocking Threads, because they don't trust Meta to follow good behaviors such as checking ROBOTS.TXT, because Meta hasn't shown a history of being a good actor there and because Thread's privacy policies seem to imply that they don't care to be a good actor for their own users (to the point of not supporting EU users at all because GDPR is "too hard"), so it makes it much harder to assume they will be good actors with respect to all of the conventions around Mastodon data including the classic ROBOTS.TXT.
The Mastodon culture of "public for people, but not for ROBOTS, or only select ROBOTS" is an ancient internet tradition. It's hard to call that naive, when it has decades of history and internet social norms (including good outcomes) behind it. What's naive is thinking that because some major corporations stopped respecting good social norms in the name of increased ad revenue that those norms no longer apply and "anything technically possible is allowable". Read the ROBOTS.TXT in the room and stop being motivated by technology for technology's sake without respecting ethics. Be a good actor in any ecosystem.
But it's still wishful thinking. We live in the age where AI is so bold as to scrape the crap out of even the largest of other big tech companies without blinking. Without permission, attribution, compensation. So surely a little Mastodon scrape isn't a problem.
There's no need to talk about how unethical it is, we agree. Problem is that it's hard if not impossible to stop. That what I mean by naive.
I don't think it is is exactly "wishful thinking" to believe that the way we get back to promoting ethics in software is expecting people to behave ethically. We sure are doomed to be disappointed when people turn out to fail us, but that's all the more reason to fight for it, to remind people what ethics are and why a polite society needs them. All of those disappointments are teaching opportunities, if people are open to listening.
(Will Meta learn anything at all from all the Mastodon instances that have pre-emptively blocked them on ethics concerns? Who knows? Mastodon can teach, but it can't force the student to learn. Is it worth Mastodon trying and fighting to teach Meta, no matter what happens? I'd say yes. Ethics are as much a social construct. How we talk about them, how we try to teach them, that says a lot about who we are and what our ethics are.)
I'd rather have even the attempt at ethics than despair that "ethics are technically impossible to enforce". We know ethics can't be programmed, that's why we have to enforce them socially.
Regardless, I'm predicting that if not for a cultural clash, many instances may de-federate due to the compute cost.
Then those content creators can set up their own (or pay someone else to do so) Fediverse instances. The Fediverse is decentralized on purpose to avoid the kinds of lock-in that FB/IG/etc. require.
I want no part of that, which is why I don't use such centralized services. As such, why should I allow those same centralized services run by greedy scumbags anywhere near my instance(s) or even my consciousness?
Can you provide me with a cogent argument as to why, after making the effort to get away from those toxic ad-riddled environments, I should welcome those same folks into my world? I imagine that could be an interesting discussion.
I do not plan to follow people who are excessively toxic or negative. If Threads launches, and 100% of its users are toxic, I will not follow anyone on Threads. But that seems unlikely to me.
Edit: I suppose it's true that people I don't follow can still reply to my posts. Idk, I suppose it's possible that federating with Threads would make my replies super toxic. But, like, let's see how the community develops first.
I have zero issue with Meta using ActivityPub, cause whatever they try, it makes them at least somewhat permeable in theory. I do have zero intention of interacting with them on any level though.
The fediverse will never be as big as corporate social media, but that’s a feature. Meta can keep the dopamine scrollers and influencers and ads.
As others have pointed out, most hosts will simply de-federate them pretty quickly anyways, and then it will become a useless feature that they turn off.
I suspect it will be one-way anyways, to capitalize on the existing content produced by Mastodon users out there already while they bootstrap. There's no way they'd offer their own content up into the fediverse without the ability to tie it to ads and engagement.
Given the cold reception they've gotten, it will be interesting to see if this feature even makes launch.
Threads development started last January. Quite obviously it's a rush job to capitalize on the fall of Twitter before BlueSky does.
They'll instantly fill it with a zillion Insta users to get a critical mass going and take things from there.
Surely they don't give a crap about any fediverse.
Also that it they will only peer with hosts that sign an agreement with them. There is rumour of $$ involved.
I think you can guess how this will all shake out.
(Snarky aside: maybe Truth Social will federate with them?)
Surely if such deals materialize, many idealistic Mastodon instances will defederate with Meta. A few big Mastodon instances might not. Next, the idealistic Mastodon instances will defederate with the Meta-compatible Mastodon instances.
Which...makes large Mastodon instances pretty pointless. They'll be largely isolated from the rest of the Mastodon part of the fediverse. They can interact with Threads users, but in that case...why wouldn't users simply use Threads?
This time, Threads is a fully fledged app. Getting users to adopt a new app might take as much time as getting Messenger installed. Still, Instagram has a robust social graph to lead users towards downloading it. In fact, they seem to have already onboarded users when they implemented part of Threads with the status update feature in the Instagram messages view.
Twitter will probably remain used by relatively "anti-social" people. In the States, that may be by politicized users, fueled by Elon's freedom fighting. Here in Japan, Twitter is very popular because of the sense of anonymity, coupled with the use of Kanji characters that achieves concision within 140 characters. Instagram might be too social for us (esp. male older than 25).
It will probably pain me to see the diaspora of users among many microblogging services. The transition to a new microblogging hub may be painful for both Twitter Inc (ie. X Corp) and Twitter users.
It's funny to see that Threads is the re-implementation of Facebook status updates before news articles swamped the Newsfeed. Meta's microblogging came back full circle.
Hoping they make the jump, honestly.
At least if this app is good.
Making the jump seems a little challenging right now. Some Japanese people have tried Truth Social, even dominating the trends with Japanese keywords. I'm not sure if they'll stick there given its context with American politics.
As Twitter became popular in Japan with the 2011 Earthquake, the migration to Threads might be another earthquake away (which happens often here).[1]
I wonder who will be the core users of Threads in Japan. Twitter was popular among nerdy "Otakus" who often engaged in anime, gaming, or electronics. Facebook/Instagram always tended to be avoided by that demographics. Instead, Instagram in Japan is popular among young women, who post selfies or food pics. However, I'm not sure if they'll be receptive to a text-focused service.
[1] Side-anecdote: Twitter is the best earthquake detector. Whenever you feel a shake, Twitter users will confirm it sooner than traditional news sources.
Are your friends mostly posting photos of baseball matches?
For cars, typically group touring (basically group caravan drives to various landmarks and other places), photos of the cars with cool views or at interesting places, car shows, club meetings, etc.
Also, Twitter isn't the best place to confirm if there is an earthquake anymore, since the website is completely private if you don't have an account. I use https://unnerv.jp/about/more instead now, since it's on Mastodon and can interop with misskey and other fediverse software easily.
Disclaimer: I run this instance
Not just you, every publisher, influencer, notable person, institute that uses social media to broadcast information to large groups of people.
A big part of twitter is the web client... and embedded tweets all over the internet.
Did they start this product by cloning instagram and removing the image centric approach? Why is this not a website first? My gut feel is that this competes as much with instagram as it does with Twitter.
This bug has been there for months and basically renders it unusable.
The web version is downright awful. Maybe given this is a greenfield project, it won't meet the same fate... but yea. The "web version" of instagram is basically here's a 4x scaled version of the app without much regard to a desktop UI/UX.
It also shows signup takeovers after clicking 2 links so without some sort of scraping proxy like Nitter it will be just as useless as Twitter if you only want to follow from the outside.
Sometimes I wonder if they make their products absolute shit on purpose, for a social experiment or something
... not on the iOS app store?
Depends on which user base they’re focusing. For people who treat tweeting as work, that’s probably not the case.
I think this is arguable. It might be a big part for you, but most people probably use the mobile app.
- WhatsApp - acqusition
- Instagram - acquistion
- Messenger - acquisition
- Oculus - acquisition
EDIT:
- Facebook was all-in on cryptocurrencies. The project is fully gone.
- Facebook was all-in on Messenger as a platform. The project is gone as well.
- Facebook also launched dating a few years back. That project is dead too.
- Someone pointed out in comments that Feed & Like as a concept was also based out of an acquisition called FriendFeed - https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/ 1. Bonfire - HouseParty clone https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/3/18528317/facebook-bonfire-shutdown-group-video-chat-houseparty-clone
2. Poke - Snap clone https://www.vox.com/2018/2/17/17022586/facebook-snapchat-poke-clone-mark-zuckerberg-evan-spiegel-billy-gallagher
3. Slingshot - Snap clone https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/10/snapchat-clones-facebook-copies
Since about 2017-18 there has been a unit at Facebook called NPE, New Product Experimentation, tasked with producing these.
https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/mark-zuckerberg-voice-of-p...
Running threads off IG has a good shot too.
(No one wants to have products shipped from scammy sellers, Facebook, please stop making that the default search option.)
Facebook Groups are very popular in the country I live. (Reddit is too American-centric to have ever really caught on.)
I'm in groups on legal stuff (19,000 members), boardgames (16,000 members), family stuff likes activities for kids (9,000 members), roadtrips (5,000 members), camping (9,000 members), food (41,000 members), dog lovers (14,000 members), and a general city group (150,000 members), a group for my neighborhood (22,000 members), a musicians network (3,300 members), pens (montblanc, etc; 8,800 members)
Most those groups are just for my city (i.e. the dog lovers is just for dog lovers in my city).
As well as local area groups there are quite a few niche hobby groups on Facebook. I'm converting a van into a campervan and on Facebook there are groups specific to converting my van that have the same number of users as the whole vanlife subreddit.
The only thing I don't like is it is tied to my real name and friend circle... I see in my feed friends posts in groups I am not a member of, so I guess it does the same for me. In my recommendations was a BDSM group... Yeah not on Facebook :D
When I open Facebook, I don't see ranting family members. I see half a dozen groups and pages full of or operated by people I don't know.
Take time to prune and shape your network. Unfollow people / brands you have no interest, friend/follow those you do. Maybe join a group that matches your interests or local community groups.
Kind of like clutter in your house, taking time to clean up as your interests evolve, or to some extent undo sins of the past, can make for a better experience.
The last point is that they show you more of what you engage with. So if you want to see more friends and family, actively seek them out and engage and they'll start being more prominent.
Perhaps the bad search was by design to show you as many posts as possible? Either way, it's worse than reddit search, which is saying something...
More so, as a seller... it gets far more leads than the other classifieds options around here. We've been casually selling berries and misc produce off our small farm on it, and it's kinda crazy how many people reach out for random $10 containers of red currants or fresh garlic scapes, etc.
> Facebook has DNA to optimize feeds.
Isn't that the exact thing that Threads would need to succeed? It's a new feeds-based app, piggybacking their existing social graph. That means you have followers/following immediately.
They even have the market opportunity as twitter stumbles.
Facebook Messenger existed prior to the acquisition. Beluga was a mobile only product that was essentially an acquihire of the 3 member team to work on the existing Messenger mobile platform.
>Facebook was all-in on Messenger as a platform. The project is gone as well.
Facebook Messenger platform is still very much alive and well in both the games and the support / chat bot / reservations space.
> games / chat bot / reservation space
Yea thats the bloat that killed it for me, I just wanted something that lets me send messages to my close friends, nothing more, nothing less.
Remember Facebook Watch (videos) - https://www.facebook.com/help/609563009232602
I suspect this has some potential to keep users who were getting FOMO on Instagram from signing up to Twitter.
For what it's worth, their cryptocurrency project is absolutely NOT gone. It's gone in the Facebook-ownership sense (in that it was barred from continuing the project by the SEC (?)), but the code and teams are absolutely still iterating on what began at Facebook. Aptos, Sui, and 0L are all projects that have launched to fanfare within the last year.
I'm up for lambasting Facebook as much as the next guy, but I don't think government blocking their projects existence counts as failing.
And it also shows that cryptocurrency projects will always be at the mercy of the whims of government(s).
They got it wrong in this case. It happens, but Facebook doesn't deserve a complete pass for chasing a high profile project that ended up being a dead end for them.
1. Boomerang - https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/instagram-launches-a-standalone-app-boomerang-that-turns-photos-into-a-1-second-video-loop/
2. Shopping app that was never launched? - https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/4/17819766/instagram-shopping-app-e-commerce
3. Layout - photo collage app https://www.stuff.tv/news/instagram-launches-layout-standalone-app-your-photo-collages/Boomerang and Layout functionality is built in to Stories, now. Shopping is also integrated.
That's ok, and in many ways preferable and transparently communicated in many cases. They spin off an independent application, build an audience, figure out what features best convert and migrate those to the primary platform and transition the userbase over to it. Rinse and repeat.
It allows them to try, learn and refine in a sandboxed environment and bring the best over.
They often talk of this process in terms of their "experiments"
Consider
1. Boomerang - https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/instagram-launches-a-standalone-app-boomerang-that-turns-photos-into-a-1-second-video-loop/
2. Shopping app that was never launched? - https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/4/17819766/instagram-shopping-app-e-commerce
3. Layout - photo collage app https://www.stuff.tv/news/instagram-launches-layout-standalone-app-your-photo-collages/ 1. Facebook Gaming app - https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/meta-shutting-down-facebook-gaming-app/
2. Facebook livestreaming app - https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/meta-testing-livestreaming-platform-influencers-super/
3. Facebook Events - https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/7/13192918/facebook-events-app-ios-androidThe same goes for Facebook Events, which is hugely popular within the Facebook platform.
Many of these experiments are intended to start out as standalone apps that have their best features folded back into the main product and the user's transitioned over. That's by design. Framing it as a failure is not reasonable from that perspective.
This is especially true of many of the products you listed that are arguably some of the most used function of the main platform like messaging, gaming, and events. They all contribute a significant amount to the DAU for Facebook.
However, Google being Google, they shot themselves in the foot with Angular 2.
LI must have more DAU/MAU than Twitter - most people are just scrolling the LI feed, adding random people to their network (better than adding "friends" on FB), posting/re-sharing longer text+image content.
Google Maps - acquisition Ads - acquisition Youtube - acquisition Android - acquisition
I don't need to list all the failed products (included the 285 different kind of messengers), do I?
1. Google Cloud - 50+ services with varying degress of success
2. Gmail
3. Google Apps for work
4. Google ChromeNonsense. Facebook added the news feed in 2006. FriendFeed was founded in 2007. Facebook acqui-hired them for employees, in particular to hire Bret Taylor as CTO, nothing else.
But hooooly crap does it underscore how much of a catastrophe Musk’s actions are.
He bought it for ~40% more than it was valued and then scared away a lot of advertisers. That does not make financial sense, and is in large part the root of Twitter/his money problems.
Most estimates put it at ~25% of the value he paid 7 months ago.
All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that. That was t there until he came along. Another failure.
About the only positive financial thing you can say he did is cut payroll costs. Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
It will be studied in MBA programs as an example of what NOT to do
Income doesn't matter if you're not profitable.
>All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that.
No, Twitter was already in debt. The alternative was letting it die, which mind you I don't think would have been a bad idea, but if Musk's goal is to keep it alive then the huge amounts of debt would certainly do that.
>Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
The site did not have the efficiency or importance to warrant the number of employees it had.
Twitter had around 5.5 billion in debt prior to the buyout. Elon added approximately 13 billion to that.
No rational person would look at his actions and claim they "[made] a lot of financial sense".
He bought the company because he was mad they banned a hate speech account he thought was funny, unbanned them and brought all the other racists back to juice the numbers and so he could reply-guy them, and instantly lost all the advertisers because they don't want to be associated with statue avatar Nazis. That was not good business sense.
sure it's not like several banks have collapsed or anything...
>That was not good business sense.
I'm not in favor of letting nazis on platforms, but having your business decisions be beholden to advertisers is always a disaster in the making.
That's too bad for the shareholders of the banks but it doesn't matter for anyone else.
But on top of cutting costs, Musk has also made terrible product and communication decisions that killed significant amounts of revenue and audience.
I think that pretty much nails it. This is Zuckerberg's life - social media & nearby segments - and he's still in his prime (very active, attentive to threats / paranoid) as a competitor in the business sphere. If you give him an opening to cripple Twitter opportunistically, he's going to take a shot.
Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)? It would be hilariously delusional if so.
It kind of did, just by network effects, but he’s spent the last 6+ months systematically filling it in. This last weekend might be the walls crumbling down
Now that that’s over it can’t meet the needs of services like my local power company pushing updates.
Of course it had a moat, wow.
Yes, first mover advantage. I don't think normal non-technically inclined people are going to move their twitter activities to "Threads".
Normal, non-technical users (including the key ones that produce a lot of content that other people come for) are often already on Instagram, and many are moving more of their presence their recently even without a Twitter-like UI in response to changes on Twitter. So, that’s something Meta can leverage to build Threads if they manage it well.
I don’t think he cared [0], because he’s always wanted to gut Twitter and remake it as a a very different service that is not really in the same market (very different substantive functions and revenue model.)
On the other hand he seems to have very not-evidence-based and turns-out-to-be-wrong-at-every-step map of how to get from a ad-supported microblogging platform to a user-pays long-form-content-and-financial-services platform.
[0] It did, through network effexts, but his plans were incompatible with focussing on preserving it.
since before the acquisition closed? i thought i heard somewhere they started working on this january-ish.
Now call me crazy but I disagree. I think - or rather I feel - he's doing an excelent job somehow. He's doing what other executives are afraid to do: he's building and building requires some walls to be hammered down ; and yeah this makes some noise and smoke. He's moving fast and breaking things (if you'd excuse the easy punt). To me, what he's doing is exciting and I think twitter is gonna thrive once the big work is done.
How so? You're blaming the user for a feature that the user didn't design.
If the commenter complained about their own chronological Followed feed, that would be a "you problem".
The current one is half trying to be the new Reddit account experience and half trying to show you politics news you'll get mad about for engagement.
So who on earth would be irresponsible enough to trust Twitter with anything essential or important after this? Who is going to build a storefront on a platform where they might wake up one day and find out that all of their customers are rate-limited from using the platform? And then the CEO jokes that he's doing people a favor by making them touch grass?
A bunch of artists who had (shortsightedly) built their business models around using Twitter as an art platform woke up one day to find out that their artwork can no longer be embedded in other websites. A bunch of government agencies and public services just found out that "check our Twitter for updates" no longer works. With no warning and with no announcement, all because Elon is mad that OpenAI hasn't cut him a check.
That is a business-destroying decision. Other executives are afraid of doing this because it's the kind of thing that permanently hinders your platform from ever being treated like a reliable place to do business or build on top of. It puts a mark on your businesses reputation that will never go away. And it's not a tech issue, it's a trust issue. Finish the big work and make something exciting, sure, but nobody with an ounce of sense would ever trust Elon not to pull the rug out from under them now.
You're going to build a business on a platform that might randomly decide to effectively shut itself down on a whim? Imagine if you had an Amazon shop and Amazon decided tomorrow with no warning that every customer on the platform is limited to buying at most one item per day, and also external links to Amazon no longer work for guest checkout unless your customer makes an account. How are people defending this? It makes no sense.
Which is a bad idea. China has everything apps like WeChat because monopolies are easier to regulate, but customers don't actually like them, which is why we don't have them elsewhere.
1. Make p2p payments
2. Pay utility bills
3. Pay credit card charges
4. Buy insurance
5. Get loans
6. Make charitable donations
7. Book travel tickets
8. Find nearby stores, store timings, get directions, and see their ratings
9. Send and receive short messages
Unless “we” and “elsewhere” doesn’t include India, I’d say superapps are more common than you think.
These payment apps integrate with a much wider arrays of backends from multiple providers and allow you perform many more unique use cases. E.g., making charitable donations and paying an insurance premium are unrelated but the Indian payment app I’m thinking of enables it.
This brings it closer to being an “everything” app.
Every single change he has made to Twitter is exclusively to claw back income from users because he made all of the advertisers leave. Anyone competent would have just added the features they wanted without burning 80% of the company's income and staff.
I kid you not: I recently saw a screenshot of a post by an engineer asking ex-Twitter engineers for help debugging an issue.. on Blind. Mind you, I don’t blame the engineer at all: it just gives you an idea of the mess Musk has made for himself.
I think the fact that the platform is still running is a testament to those who built & documented the infra. It’s also a feather on the cap for those who remain to man the ship, particularly if there was no other choice.
One catastrophic outage is all it really takes at this point.
I haven't seen any actions where he has prevented people from discussions on the platform within the laws of the United States.
It's okay to support someone, but at least do it without filtering out everything that doesn't fit your narrative.
If someone is one of the most highly influential people on the planet managing gigantic marketcap companies like Tesla/Spacex, It makes sense from a personal safety standpoint not to dox their location each time they travel. Doxing people fits whose narrative again? I'm not convinced thats a 'narrative'.
Banning links to substack was temporary. Substack released a competitor and was scraping their contact data. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/apr/11/row-between-tw.... How would you handle the situation where you have a company losing money and competitors are sucking your data dry?
But either way, that's not a reason to block links, and them being a competitor is not a reason to block links.
Its naive that people sit on the sidelines opining they should've done the opposite when all the evidence points to blocking scraping as a standard business practice (and scraping is illegal if the company forbids it in their policy). Most people saying otherwise have not run a company or startup in a competitive environment where every other player wants to steal their lunch.
If a user signs up somewhere else, and wants their data to be ported over, there is very little to legitimately complain about. Even more so when the scraping is just contact data for that user, because that's very little server load.
Go away with this "steal their lunch" stuff. It should be legally mandated that users can transfer contacts between services.
Also blocking API access is very different from blocking user-posted links.
2. Flight data is public, no one is doxing anyone. The incident Musk used as proof that this was bad was while he was in a car... far from his plane.
3. Twitter banned Mastodon links before Substack. Was Mastodon scraping Twitter's contact data too?
You see, the problem is not even what he's doing with Twitter. It's his company, who cares? It's claiming that Twitter is the internet's "town square" and that he is anti-censorship, while restricting access to the platform and censoring content. It's complete bullshit and people like you fall for it and even defend it.
I'd respect Elon Musk more if he came out and just said "this is my platform, I'll ban stuff that affects me or affects my revenue, get out if you're not happy." Instead, he says one thing and does another.
Jack was a bad CEO because he's even more gullible than Elon and fried his brain with psychedelics, but he's not as bad as the current one.
More like the 'fediverse' is scrambling [0] to block Threads before it has even launched.
If TikTok gets banned, where to the users go? Instagram.
Threads could replace Twitter.
Reddit is going downhill... Maybe Meta could even buy it in a firesale?
Outside of chat apps like Discord, Slack, Teams and Telegram (which compete with WhatsApp), Meta will have consolidated most of the world's social media under them. And that's assuming they dont buy out Discord.
Being able to do payments without a bank through whatsapp is way beyond the risk appetitte of european regulators for example.
Plus forcing whatsapp to add e2e encryption already fixes most of the issues in terms of risk to privacy regardless of how big the userbase it.
That claim does not ring true to me. Maybe a few years ago, but now? I don't use whatsapp and I don't know anyone who uses it, except for a group of expats from South America who probably use it because it's still widespread in South America and their friends use it, maybe?
WhatsApp, Instagram, Threads, messenger, and Facebook all in one app. Horrifying.
The problem is Reddit has very little real value, and to get that value you'd have to go even further into pushing its users away from the platform as you'd need to be able to target and identify individuals.
Unlike Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc the majority of Reddit is very intentionally anonymous, not even requiring an email address. A sizable portion still use 'old reddit' because of how awful and hostile the redesign was.
To get it to a point of profitability it would need to be more viable for advertisers, and that only comes with forcing them down users throats, which traditionally is not a reddit thing and would alienate people even more than they've already done recently.
It's also worth noting its 18 years old and still hasn't come remotely close to being profitable.
I think the fact that users already go looking for a specific thing at a specific subreddit makes the value instantly apparent.
Being able to target users with an interest in your niche is infinitely valuable. Personalised ads are the entire business model of google and facebook to behemoths.
The problem is reddit is led by the most unqualified management of any top 10 most visited world site and they spent 2 quarters developing NFT profile pictures instead of mod tools, or advertiser platforms.
Having non intrusive ads, with good quality, that directly relate to what you care about? Is a dream of users and brands. Have an AMA with a movie start or a videogame developer and have them pay for it as marketing, or allow a weekly "share your news" from brands where they can talk new products, or versions of their thing.
There are a million ways to monetise reddit, in ways that the community would not be angry. But making it look like tiktok, forcing a terrible app, spending billions hosting your own images and video, and having mods do free labour for you while you fight to get any money in... is not the best way to go about it.
Today, it's almost as everyone has forgotten about social media monopolization.
Sign me up. Or rather, sign up everyone I know besides me :)
Most ActivityPub services have taken ages to get decent apps and even now Mastodon has some obvious problems. Opening someone else's profile if nobody on your server follows them shows you a barren timeline with no history and there's still no way to tell Mastodon "go fetch toots from this user's outbox".
If there are more Threads users than non-Threads users then non-Threads instance admins have to choose between adapt or risk emigration. EEE is a consolidation tactic after all.
Mastodon admins might find that law applies to them too.
It's the realm of pure fantasy to envision a world where the EU bans an original community project to force everyone into a Meta-designed fork. Mastodon users should be safe as long as they're free to run their own server and client software.
My point is that this really doesn't matter. If they use ActivityPub as-written, both clients and servers can stop Meta content from reaching their feed. If you just find Threads content annoying, you long-press the post and tap "Block Instance". If you're a site admin and have been given a legitimate reason to block Meta for API abuse (eg. poorly-moderated content, spam, advertisement) then you can exercise your defederation power and be within your right.
Further, interoperability concerns messaging apps, not social media apps.
Explain how a peer that is >100x the size of the Fediverse needs it at all.
a) you don't give a damn about openness or tech or any of that but just want something that works
b) your first priorities are "where the people are" and "it works" but federated and open protocols are a big bonus
c) you absolutely want to go somewhere more open instead of another centralized service
Group A is big, and generally folks not on HN. HN itself splits between groups B and C.
If you think group B is a fair bit bigger than group C, but want the open stuff to thrive in the long term, then an initially-"friendly" Meta controlled app can harm you by attracting a big part of the people in group B and then slowly degrading the experience for folks using open clients over time until finally cutting it off. Most of group B won't migrate again at that point as long as they don't fuck up the experience completely.
Whereas if the Meta version wasn't "friendly" at first, much more of that group B might move straight to open things, and then stay there, creating a larger long-term userbase.
It's a way to keep people from fully jumping ship to open solutions by offering short-term openness that will dwindle over time.
Money is power.
My own thoughts on this is that React has morphed into a something is even harder to use than Angular 1.0
I also remember the rumours stating that the Federation part was exclusively targeting large Mastodon servers, and also mostly unidirectional (from Mastodon to Threads).
I don't think the federation support will be all that great from what I've heard. But who knows, maybe it'll bring the Fediverse to the mainstream.
Unidirectional federation sounds like a nightmare on the UX side, so if that's the case I imagine it'd be Threads to Mastodon, enabling you to follow (but not interact) with Threads users.
Define swap. I'm hearing instances which federate with FB will be defederated as well. If instances need to be federated to "swap", it likely won't be easy.
Our splinter network will exist but be a non-factor to those who want "reach".
What do you mean by this? If you're a Mastodon user, you'd just see Threads users on your feed, and be able to reply/boost/etc their posts normally.
Looking at the largest 30 or so instances by users most of them seem to have a 'wait and see' approach, which seems much more reasonable to me.
Meta isn't making any special deals with large servers and basically no large servers have signed the pact. Most of the pact signatories are single user servers or similar, there's a handful of small to medium sized ones, and even those who are defederating Meta will not defederate the servers that do federate with Meta.
That being said, the big question will be how open Threads is to the rest of the fediverse. It likely won't include the global federated feed, so the question will be how much Threads users end up interacting with the average Mastodon user. It might end up being we only see Threads users when they either manually know a user they want to follow, or Meta promotes content from folks like George Takei into Threads and we see trash comments on that.
[0] https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_bloc...
https://about.scicomm.xyz/doku.php?id=blog:2023:0625_meta_on...
Not only might they mod at will in the way reddit mods do, Mastodon admins take it several steps further by bothering other instance mods about their moderation. And then yet another step: whom they federate with. They'll form little secret discord channels where they gather and form cancellation pacts on entire instances, based on a whim.
Freedom of association is one of the most fundamental freedoms we have and democratic, free market societies can only flourish as long as we all agree to leave one another alone. You or I may not fully agree on the utility of say gay marriage or vaccines or religion or any number of cultural differences, but neither of us should be compelled to seriously entertain or fundamentally alter our way of being and thinking to please the other. This is how the old internet worked, the only reason we feel that it's impossible now is because we've been made to believe in totalizing systems of power that flatten and threaten to erase (by legal mandate or otherwise) different subcultures.
"Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon" Found in the app strings.
While I'm really looking forward to is being able to follow Threads users with any Mastodon client.
Like how GTalk use XMPP, the port 5222 opens, but with tons of customizations and extensions that 3rd-party program can only use the basics?
I'm not at all sure this will be good for the Fediverse. I already see Meta "improving" upon ActivityPub in incompatible ways, urging people to just use their app (potential quote: "you can see all of the Fediverse anyways") and in the long run (when their own "instance" is big enough) will pull the plug again and be on its own.
If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things will just return to the same status quo they are today. Multiple content silos with thousands of freely-federating alternative platforms. As a Mastodon user I can't say I'm very scared of it, such a decision would hurt Meta more than it helps them.
Meta can ActivityPub themselves all day long, as far as I'm concerned. If I were a server operator, I wouldn't let them anywhere NEAR my users though, so no federation with them.
> If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things will just return to the same status quo they are today.
This is very optimistic. EEE in the past didn't turn out that way. I can imagine the Fediverse being an empty husk with no (significant) life left, but that's just my fears.
The EEE attempts on a major open platform haven't even reached step 3, arguably. ActiveX, XServe, Flash and Silverlight all failed spectacularly at their goal of co-opting and extinguishing the concept of the internet. Considering how Meta has no meaningful leverage over the Fediverse community, I think your fears are unwarranted. Best case scenario, Meta plays by the rules and federates well-regulated content into everyone's feeds like Twitter with less extremism. Worst-case scenario, Meta goes crazy and takes all the normies with them to their closed Threads landscape, returning things to how they are now (dense with nerds and misfits). I don't think Meta enthusiasts or current Fediverse denizens would care either way.
I deleted my account this morning, with a backup natch - nice thing about Mastodon, I can start up exactly where I left off, including whatever followers come over to the non-Meta side of the schism.
People act like the schism Fedi being small is a bad thing, I don't think we're supposed to interact with the entire planet as individuals. We apes do not have the capacity to handle it.
This is called Dunbar's Number.
[0]. https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
It's interesting that Facebook/Instagram keeps launching new apps to identify new usecases. Most of them rarely gets heard of, but perhaps they gain a lot of insight even when they shut down.
On the flip side, I hope it's not like Google where services are launched to die soon for the sake of enhancing a promo package.
What I care for when I open Twitter: - news - hearing from other people from the dev community
If Threads can deliver this, I will be hooked
Not for actual censuring in cases where it’s demonstrably harmful - but I’m not required to give attention to someone’s opinion just cause they feel like blasting it into the void. Twitters gone too far the other way.
You can argue that's a good thing, that a person with 10 followers might be as interesting as someone with 100,000 followers, but it's not for me.
you have to engage with what you want to see, if you join in arguments or constantly like posts of a political viewpoint then you'll never find peace
ie, look inward
#1 should be completely, actually bifurcating the experience from their other platforms. If they want me to use my Instagram login and want to make it easy for me to follow my IG followers, fine.
But the temptation to “carry” the network or the content over from Instagram or Facebook is going to be strong for them, because it looks like a baked-in advantage their investors will expect them to leverage to its fullest. In reality it’s the total opposite - I’ll be gone instantly if a bunch of low quality content from people I’m not interested in hearing from (read: that girl from high school I might follow on Facebook.)
On Twitter I've been shown everything from industrial mining supplies, nipple covers, psychology research papers, super yachts, home shopping network junk and just now an ad for an oral dosing technology conference.
Anecdotally I’ve never purposefully clicked an ad on Twitter, I think either the buyers or the algorithms are off there.
I appreciate that Apple has their privacy practices highlighted in a easy to read card so that developers don’t get to hide it in legalease and a click away in a privacy policy.
The next step would be to actually prompt users about this, in the same way that you would get a prompt confirming that if you would like to download a large app when on mobile data. “It looks like you are trying to install the app Threads which reads the following information about you. Are you sure you would like to proceed?”
This would be a natural progressing of the “Ask not to track” dialog that they implemented awhile ago
While what makes twitter great is that it is a more serious platform where you can get the ‘insight’ of professionals (journalists, politicians, etc).
That being said, Twitter’s brand is in the toilet right now. Maybe that is enough for this to attract people.
I do wonder what the alternative would be? Whatsapp branding? Feels off too… Would it have been better to use a new brand?
So I'm not looking forward to trying to sign up with them.
Recently I tried probably 10 separate times to create a fourth one not even linked to those three, and Instagram outright refused to let me do it with any email address. It even got to a point where on the browser I tried making the account it refuses to let me log in with my normal accounts these days.
It’s frustrating Instagram doesn’t have lists so you need a separate account for every interest.
Joking aside, this is a branding decision.
The public associates Facebook/Meta with excessive data collection, overhyped VR, intrusive tracking, etc. That association is much weaker with Instagram.
Also it uses the Instagram infrastructure e.g. auth and design language.
On Facebook your experience is mainly your grandmother trying to write messages to you by typing them into any random thread or text box she sees.
Reinforce insta as a “platform” where features are now labeled as “apps”. Continues to reinforce engagement metrics at insta app level, so big win politically for the insta org inside meta. I’m sure a lot of promos coming down next cycle. Also very easy user acquisition since it piggy backs on existing insta user base.
Insta maps more to the public facing vibe that Twitter does, whereas Facebook seems more for friends and family. Insta also more easily monetized than say WhatsApp, so the business moves all track.
Overall curious to see what happens to the landscape. At a minimum it may leach away engagement from Twitter, so probably not very favorable for Twitter stock price.
Fortunately Twitter is privately owned, so I think they will escape the market reactions this time. :)
but uses an open standard
>owned by a large company
This doesn't contradict with the fediverse. Getting large companies on board is important for ActivityPub's adoption.
>and centralized
So is almost every other fediverse instance.
I mean, this bits not great.
Facebook didn’t write a fediverse compatible app because of warm fuzzy good feelings and wanting to contribute back to the community, they wrote one so they could capitalise and absorb the existing user base. They’ll do exactly the same thing they did with fb messenger at the beginning: massive interoperability with existing protocols and communities, followed by later deliberately breaking compat.
fool me once, shame on me
fool me twice, you can't fool me again
Maybe they're mature enough not to want that?
Sign up to protonmail.com for some privacy, to have your emails not read by Proton Inc., and quickly realize that most – if not all – your contacts are receiving your messages @gmail.com. All your emails will still be exploited by Google Inc.
There are good reasons to want the Fediverse to remain… diverse. Blocking isn't posturing, it's acting.
There's a tangible difference in Twitter now that Musk took over. Raunchy, sometimes offensive jokes are now actually possible on the site. I use Twitter a lot more than I ever did because of it. I don't want Instagram 2.0 with nothing but "models" and stolen videos.
The circle of Web 2.X (3.X?) progress continues! This was called the 'Facebook Wall' in 2007. You could write stories, post links, photos, etc. It worked and scaled. Not much longer until they progress into a 'student directory and message' app, exclusively for college and university students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#Wall
Love it.
But, I generally feel social media is dying in far bigger ways thank just these dilutions.
People don't trust it, and are caring far less.
They hey-day and the novelty has completely worn of for the majority who are not narcissistic enough to put the energy in to arguing or self-promoting.
Reality is here to stay!
I have some other friends who are semi-pro athletes and the same thing, I "like" their posts only really because they want people to care. Aside from that, it's something I look at while on the toilet for 5 minutes and then put it away.
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.
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.
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.
Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN? I never heard of it anywhere else.
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’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?
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! :-)
There is no way to DM, but Firefox Relay can be used for temporary email addresses:
xow6d86sq at mozmail dot com
7jsqi5gf at duck.com
Apologies for the delay.
0df41fec3f63 AT fomogo.club
Apologies for the delay.
I haven't got one either yet so don't know its state.
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. It's a dead party. Inviting a few more people isn't going to help. If they open up the gates to everyone, that's a different story, but they're not nearly ready to do that.
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'.
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.
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 than 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.
Kidding aside, I do seriously question whether that move would ever happen without it being forced.
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 name@newsorg.com accounts for their staff.
I've already seen one: https://social.heise.de/
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...
Although Marianne Williamson (maybe the distant #3 alternative candidate) is generally antivax since she's from the older group of naturalistic-fallacy hippie women where the idea originally caught on.
RFK and Desantis are doing it because the vaccine was a major policy accomplishment of both the last two presidents, ie the party leaders they're running against. It may seem like a natural political opportunity but it's a bad move since normal voters don't like crazy people.
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.
edit: great idea though it functions pretty much exactly as you described, get into product if you're not yet!
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.
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 :)
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.
Sweet project.
Thanks for the kind words! <3
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.
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 mods seem to ban accounts that get enough reports without really reading them. If I report an account it does tend to get banned 3-4 months later even though they've already sent me an email saying they ignored my report.)
The moderation didn't actually change either though. They unbanned a bunch of people once, but as I said I've gotten a fair number banned again since they can't stop themselves.
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.
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.
Not to mention, when was the last time Facebook successfully launched a new standalone social app? Remember Poke, their Snapchat clone? If you do you’re in an exclusive club. They had to pivot the entire Instagram app in order to compete with Snapchat and Twitter isn’t a big enough threat to ever justify doing that. I think it'll get merged into a "text" type of Instagram post eventually and otherwise killed off.
Side note, but:
> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative
I actually don't think there is. Twitter always had a relatively low number of users compared to other networks. The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it being where journalists and celebrities break news.
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, by selling a tiny set of uber celebrities and brand names that no one gives a shit about enough to switch platforms. Forget what the users are doing which is posting as much as ever.
I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes. Apparently Meta is the competent one now because they pigeonholed a cloned feature on their platform + the alternative is no longer cool among the tech crowd on a niche programmer/startup forum.
> 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/late 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.
Are children following your professional account for video game news? Etc. etc. Its just too much of a risk in practice.
-----
EDIT: Wow, a bunch of downvotes. Okay, I'm a Pokemon fan. Tell me, how long do I have to go on Twitter before I accidentally come across rule34 of Pokemon characters? We all know what's out there, I'm sure we've all seen the internet. Nothing against rule34 artists or anything, but these are not things you want to interact with if you're making a career out of video game marketing. There's some pretty uncomfortable taboos that are being explored here.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
* 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?
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.
You do not need to be followed on Meta, only liked.
Interactions on Twitter follow “rules” of interest-based disputes and discussion (sports, finance, AI dooming, technology predictions).
You do not need to be liked on Twitter, only followed.
One of those HN threads you see people bookmark and bring up years later to show HN's competence at prediction using only the current day market players which they glibly generalize as generic pools of social media users going to these sites for their feature sets, like buying CDs of software by looking at the back cover at a store in 1998.
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 also destroys and corrupts Mastodon from the inside out as they are split in federating or de-federating with Meta already as many admins signed NDAs with Meta to have no choice but to federate.
It seems HNers here really don't understand what network effects are. Quite very fixated and emotional about Twitter's immediate collapse (that didn't happen) and constantly don't learn from history and just continue to make up fantasies on the spot and blinded by schadenfreude.
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. Threads has already been killed! https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
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.
> they'll have a userbase in the millions within hours of launch that's able to hop over from IG.
Well done on this prediction.
You can play with the `gl` query parameter in the URL. Yours is for Italy ("it"). It's available in other continental Europe locations like: de, fr, be, es, pt, at, cz, pl. While not yet released for majority English speaking countries (us, ca, uk, au, nz) with the exception of Ireland (ie).
I don't have any insider information even though my employer is Meta. I learned about this release from HN.
Interoperability is a contract,and that contract will slow down product evolution and lead to worse consumer products.
The issue is that forced interoperability will lead to platforms creating an interoperable (and less fully-featured) version of their app to suit the regulations.
I do think that interop is important, but I think it is a harder problem than most people think.
https://www.threads.net looks like where this will live on the web
Seems normal with a reference to the potential fight.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/technology/elon-musk-mark...
I don't see any use of the threads app.
People don't come to Twitter because of the app.
Is there anything else that distinguishes this from existing Facebook products?
To be honest, I fail to see the value of Threads considering both Facebook and Instagram already exist. Is this just "Instagram but the image posts are optional"?
Some kind of "explore not just Instagram but also the rest of the world" take could work to advertise their new network, maybe painting their shitty company in a better light.
How well they’re doing those is up for debate, but they’re doing interesting stuff too.
LLAMA is also exactly my point -- LLMs are pretty well-proven at this point. If you spend $X on machine learning researchers, you can get an LLM with Y parameters that is useful for various tasks like sentiment analysis, machine translation, etc. Facebook should be spending money on that because they have lots of cash, data centers, and ML researchers so they can do this at scale that only a few others can (Google, Microsoft/OpenAI and maybe Amazon).
Facebook has epic amounts of user-generated imagery and text, and incremental improvements in NLP and computer vision generate incremental revenue (and profit) because you can put up better ads and introduce new features like translation. As an investor, that is very appealing.
There's no incremental revenue from Metaverse. It's a huge money pit, with no obvious end date for when enough billions have been wasted to call it quits. It could well work out, but if I'm an investor why would I want to invest in this through Facebook rather than through a bunch of startups pursuing a diverse set of strategies.
Maybe I am not the avenge user I don’t need an IOS app for text, web is fine.
The present Twitter alternatives (Mastodon, Bluesky, Spoutible) are just too hobbyist or finicky.
Meta will presumably bring an ease-of-use to this service and, crucially, scale from minute 1. They're the building blocks of Twitter's current incumbency position, and Meta/Threads can replicate them straight out the gate.
That is a huge advantage.
On the other side of the ledger, the utility of Twitter keeps sliding. Not sure how many Hacker News users are Twitter users or what the crossover is, but the whole blue tick 'thing' has reduced the utility in one key surprising way: high quality replies under popular accounts are impossible to find. It's like if you could buy upvotes on Hacker News to get to the top almost. Secondarily to that is the stuff over the last few days with very low rate limits on how many tweets you can view - if you can't use a social network, it tends to stop being useful.
While I wouldn't say Threads is a slam dunk guaranteed success, I would say it's the most probable contender of all the ones out there.
Ya gotta rock it
If you're going to take on Twitter why on earth would you make Instagram a part of that when the two share nothing in common.
What I expect to happen is for Instagram to expose how bad Twitter was at converting potential users, rather than for Twitter to expose that Instagram users have no overlap with their use case.
Could it be that this was put in together in a couple sprints as they saw Twitter in a weak position?
Or maybe they have a lot of products like this on the bench and release them when the time is right?
Focused UX is something I feel has been really lost by many apps coming out today.
Nature abhors a vacuum, I guess.
[1]: https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-t...
[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/17/22787783/instagram-threa...
If they’re going to ride on the coattails of the existing influencers, might make more sense to keep it a feature than a brand new app. The existing influencers would have no extra incentive to spend efforts on a whole new app if they’re addressing the same audience and won’t be gaining new set of audience.
Or keep it completely new to excite new wannabe influencers and they will put in the extra effort and drive activity at the beginning.
If fbook can somehow persuade a few important influencers to switch over on launch day that could get a bunch of instagram using twitter users to download.
I'd love to see Blue Sky get traction, but I have to imagine that various government agencies that are looking for a new service to use for their communications are going to be more comfortable pivoting to a Meta product than some new startup.
My guess is they will possibly see some growth from instagram power users who are convinced to try it, but I don't anticipate a mass diaspora from twitter to threads.
EDIT: others in this thread are claiming that it may be compatible with activity pub. If that is the case then it may look a little more interesting to those leaving twitter.
Right now neither of those are true of Twitter.
Its not that anybody likes Zuck, but they also don't think Zuck will cozy up with Nazis quite so... obviously?
We all make choices every day about choosing the lesser of two evils. That's all this is.
I think you vastly overestimate twitter users.
"To delete your Threads profile and data, you'll need to delete your instagram account."
Instagram is already a "twitter" app they have. I think IG idea is even better: tweet with image. Of course, they messed it up big time with various anti-consumer measures. Why would this be any different? I am also wondering, if Threads fail – what do they lose?
Its the same with Notes of Substack. If Notes fail in 2 years – can they continue? I imagine they already felt negative effect of their move.
Why absolutely no big company (MS, facebook, google, amazon, etc...) is attempting the same with Reddit? Not even discord has done any single change to try to steal any userbase from it.
When Elon Musk laid off more than 80% of Twitter's workforce (or maybe 90%, the number is quickly increasing), many people said this would prove that a company needed only a handle of software engineers to be successful. If they are correct, it paints a bleak future where software engineer jobs will be forever cut down. I hope Twitter falls so it proves the reverse: a software company cannot survive without enough engineers.
While Facebook also laid people off, the percentage is much lower than Twitter. It will be even better if Facebook has to recruit people to win this battle.
Twitter at least had one you could actually talk to before Elon took over, but Instagram has lacked support contact methods for years at this point.
Using a platform where you have no recourse or even method of reaching out if something goes awry is always a dangerous game to play :(
I guess it makes sense to launch iOS first since those are usually regarded as the highest status users / demographic.
https://www.threads.net/ shows a blank page titled "Instagram" but I'm guessing it'll soon show some kind of website once the server goes live.
I feel like hashtags (where you can put them on any message you want) aren't quite the same thing, but maybe that's just because it makes cross-posting more of a blended experience, where I can't tell if replies are linked to the #localcitynearme or the #coffee tag. Their example post about the coffee shop is a great example -- I might be interested in the discussion if it was near me, in which case comments of other coffee shops around the corner might be fantastic. But if I was reading the post because I follow that user for their singing in a jazz band that I listen to, and I live in a different country, it's just total noise that I wouldn't want to read.
I've only viewed the 'web app store' page and not the real app store page, maybe there are more details there.
Mark my words, the Meta revival story starts now thanks to Twitter and Reddit killing themselves.
I think Meta will realize that it is best to stick with what they are good at: Building profitable apps via social interactions.
It seems this thing's only real association to Instagram is that you use your IG account to login, and they already have your social graph to import if you want to.
But for more than a year now it says it was discontinued at start, and I cannot login again.
I am so likely to use Threads from Instagram /s
I imagine this is as much about capturing the young people not using Facebook as it is about rivaling Twitter, if not more.
Circa 2010's: Facebook sucks, let's all move to Twitter
Circa 2023:OMG Threads killed Twitter, Threads is so great
Circa 2030's: Threads is so lame, let's all move to something else
LOL almost forgot that Meta owns Instagram. Nice try Facebook!
#deleteFacebook
Hope you are from planet earth BTW.
Whereas Twitter now prides itself in being the free speech absolutist social media app, and information flows freely there. While they do have Community Notes to add context to potential (real) misinformation, at least it's guided by Twitter users and doesn't prevent people from seeing the original post without jumping through hoops, and there's no risk of being suspended for angering the Ministry of Truth, brought to you by government officials looking to cover-up inconvenient facts.
(To be clear: I'm 100% expecting "Threads" to become that in the short-to-medium term, unless they have some specific moderation techniques in place.)
This won't make your life "great", mind me. I'm pretty sure it will make it better.
Good luck.
Does anyone who works on apps / software / whatever ever consider how tiring it is to have to adopt all this sheet? It's like the digital equivalent of fashion. Literally just waxes and wanes between apps that are all functionally the same based on trends.
1. Important info is hosted on these platforms
2. It's impossible to look this info up. Their internal search functions feel like their optimized for finding distracting shit rather than finding what you were actually looking for.
I hate it with a burning passion, and I secretly wish for all of these companies to be nationalized and have like 90% of their features deprecated. I hate having my attention abused like that. It's too much hassle and FOMO to uninstall these apps, and I need like 3 external tools to limit my usage to sane volumes.
This is not a top-priotity problem at all, nor one that I think of frequently (just an hour a day), yet I can't fathom how some higher-ups waste their lives thinking of these shticks
Personally I would not use Threads because of association to FB/Meta. But likely many others will.
The only real users left on Twitter will be bots and Musk rats
tech-giants are so powerful, they don't have to move-fast-to-break-things, a small tantrum/jitter (e.g Musk-twitter, or rush-to-replace) can mess-up a considerable part of the ecosystem around them; including their own finances.
happy to try it, out of curiosity.
1. Twitter is all about who is there. How will they make people start posting on this?
2. New platforms take off because they innovate, not because they do what others do but slightly tweaked.
3. I have a really hard time seeing people mass escaping twitter to this du to morals. Facebook/Zuck is just as reviled as Twitter/Musk. If not more reviled. Mastodon has the moral high ground, but still can't take off.
2. But the whole point here is that others aren't doing this any more. Threads isn't supposed to be an innovation, just a Twitter replacement. Twitter is dying, Mastodon is too complicated for non-geeks, BlueSky could have been a contender but they didn't get their act together quickly enough.
3. You're in a geek information bubble here. On the scale of social media, almost nobody cares about that sort of thing. I'd bet money that the overwhelming majority of FB users have never even heard of Zuckerberg.
2. I have seen data that can be used to argue Twitter is slipping. But to claim Twitter is dying is a great exaggeration, based on data. There are perhaps cases where a company will totally mess up something and a replacement can take over, but this doesn't seem to be it.
3. Well, hard to tell. To me the geek information bubble is the conviction that Twitter is dying. Also, I think Zuckerberg is a lot more famous that you account for. But I could not find data on it.
And why does Instagram need a whole new app for text posts?
Are we about to see a hacker news for image posts?
Having said that, the cultures on Instagram and Twitter are no doubt different. So it's hard for me to tell what will transpire here. However, how much of these cultural differences are due to Instagram not having had a live text feed for breaking news etc. before? And how malleable is social network culture?
Threads will also move Instagram closer to Twitter with this. I think how well Meta suceeeds at this is vital to how much of a threat to Twitter this is going to be. Not only this app itself needs to find users; for a real threat they also need to use it for similar things as on Twitter, e.g. politics, a controversial celebrity post here and there, breaking news on the Ukrainian war, earthquakes, imploding submarines...
Finally, I wonder how this will affect Facebook! With both a photo feed, a TikTok-style reels feed, Snapchat-like stories, and Twitter-like Threads... This app that is NOT Facebook is certainly starting to look very complete indeed. Facebook is big where I live so I "need" to be on it to stay in touch, but I can see myself residing more and more on Messages and Marketplace alone, now more than ever.
New users will find empty content, mostly discussions that are already on twitter but at a small scale and reach
A film about life before, during and after a fictional nuclear attack.
1.) Instagram brand is much stronger than Facebooks 2.) Instagram follows some similar design and user experience patterns to twitter, i.e. username based account, people using stories a lot of times as mostly a text based posting platform, etc 3.) Celebrities and newspeople already use instagram for updates, so the transition would be natural 4.) Twitter has never been in a weaker position with the site being limited
Not only there's this limit but they also broke Tweetdeck which is the only way to really use Twitter
Not a Twitter killer after all. Or any kind of killer.
Facebook and Instagram have been stable, if nothing else... But I feel like Meta is under immense pressure to monetize users as more and more see the "Facebook is for old people and TikTok is draining Instagram" writing on the wall.
Influence bloggers who need to issue public apologies?
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wow ok...
I unfortunately am stuck with the ones I have because of their ubiquity. I would jump ship in a heartbeat if a viable alternative actually took off.
2021-2023 social media rotating villain vs 2016-2020 social media rotating villain.
Oh what's that, I'm hearing a new villain, Mr Chew has entered the stage?
Fb hasn't been original from a long time. From trying to launch a substack competitor, stealing snapchat features, creating reels, etc. Now, developer wise, is a different game. React, Pytorch, Prophet, etc... hit after hit.
Twitter can be a "cesspool" but I don't trust fb at all.
Twitter was ok to get (and, equally important in my opinion, share) info really fast; now you need to have an account, be logged in, and be under your meager daily quota to even be allowed to see anything. And everyone you want to share info with needs to do the same. The recent changes have pretty severely undermined what made Twitter stand out among its larger competitors.
Now, I see them winning if they go Twitter's route and nuke their content moderation guidelines but since that won't happen, I doubt you'll see mass migration from the freedom fighters, hehe.
Reality is they need each other. Conflict is what gets Twitter going. That and memes.
This would be the site that has been effectively largely down for the last three days?
There are certainly tankies on there, which is a kind of person that claims to be left but is actually a reactionary.
FB allows a sufficiently diverse, extreme, and even toxic political environment on FB for most everyone. What kind of content would Threads forbid that is more crucial to Twitter users than a functional service?
Putting the content of people who have to pay for engagement above everyone else was one of the most heroically dumb product decisions I’ve ever heard. I was fine putting up with everything else but then the service just became legitimately not compelling because of that.
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It's only logical that meta now sets to take over Twitter, which will happen in a matter of months. Their product is superior and contains very few backdoors on its encryption.
All hail Mark!
edit: I now realize that the time transportation function might also take you to an alternate time branch, disregard my comment if it's irrelevant
b) It is legal and ethical to scrape public data. Especially when that data is owned by its users and not by Twitter.
c) The more likely explanation for Twitter's rate limiting is that they didn't pay their AWS/Google bill and rather than cut the service off they limited its bandwidth and/or compute capacity.
I am 99% sure that this is not a real thing and that you're using all of these words incorrectly.
When was Substack illegally scraping Twitter data? What Twitter data is being used to bootstrap Threads?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779
> What Twitter data is being used to bootstrap Threads?
I have no proof of this. It's just speculation. I also don't have an iDevice so I can't install the app and look for myself.
But the timing of Twitter's rate limiting this week, combined with Elon's clarification that Twitter data is being mass-scraped, combined with the launch of Threads this week...can't be a coincidence, can it?
If someone could marry the two, in a non profit Wikipedia sort of way, with decent Democratic way to moderate and vote on new features etc, we could kill two birds with one stone and replace both Twitter and Reddit.
Like, what would that even mean? Do you really think Meta is going to launch a Twitter competitor and just wholesale impersonate accounts and their content? If not, what even are you implying?
(from the "proof" link where Elon was accusing Substack of scraping:)
>2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.
lol, reading that still makes me chuckle. I can't believe people eat his crap up even when the circumstances make it clear that he's backpeddaling and desperately trying to save face.
But linking to an Elon Musk tweet does not on its face change anything about my prior that this is not a real thing and that you're using all of these words incorrectly. Elon thinks everything that is personally inconvenient to him is illegal. He's threatened legal action in the past over advertisers just not buying ads from him.
He just says stuff. But you have to apply some critical thinking here -- what would it even look like to "bootstrap" Threads with Twitter data? These words mean things, if Threads is being bootstrapped with stolen data, there should be Twitter data on Threads -- accounts should be mirrored, content should be mirrored, there should be something. Is there?
> But the timing of Twitter's rate limiting this week, combined with Elon's clarification that Twitter data is being mass-scraped, combined with the launch of Threads this week...can't be a coincidence, can it?
The timing of Threads launching this week is probably a direct response to gestures wildly around at the state of Twitter right now. I find it incredibly unlikely that Instagram launching Threads crippled Twitter's infrastructure.
Particularly given that Elon Musk himself claimed (also likely incorrectly) that it was AI companies crippling the site, not rival social networks.
Boy do I have a cosmic bridge to sell you!