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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

> I don't see any evidence Musk understands what made Twitter great, either.

Oh, I totally agree. I just don't think that means Meta will win here.

Meta is an exceptional copier. They might not be coming up with many novel features but they are great at stealing from their competitors.

Are they?

https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/

Yes

Ah yes because stories wasn’t a massive success.

Stories was a massive success because they pivoted their massively successful app Instagram around it.

They’re never going to do that with a Twitter clone, the stakes aren’t high enough. It remains to be seen if they can actually launch a copy of another app without subsuming an existing one to do so.

Facebook Workplace is an example of a completely new product.

And it has actually been a quiet but lucrative success for the company.

Looks like they already tried this once: https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...

Fair, but their main competitor wasn’t doing everything it could to implode at the time either.

I was just sharing what I thought was a useful link, not editorializing (though I can see where it looks like I was). Amazing how that came and went and — I’m guessing — many people (even in a niche place like HN) probably don’t remember.

For anyone confused by the same name on separate apps, this is the description of the previous Instagram Threads app:

> Threads was introduced in 2019 as a companion app to Instagram shortly after the company shut down its other standalone messaging app, Direct. Instead of focusing solely on the inbox experience, Threads was built as a “camera-first” mobile messager designed to be used for posting status updates and staying in touch with those you designated as your “Close Friends” on Instagram.

Ahh, I knew I knew I had seen that name before! So they've indeed pulled a Google Meet[0].

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Meet

All they need to do is copy Twitter from like ten years ago, and they already have a killer product that's an order of magnitude better than what Twitter is now.

At this point, they would likely prefer a profitable product.

Profitable? Like what? Metaverse?

Meta is the kind of company to throw $25+ Billion into a vanity project and not really sweat it.

All this talk about demise of twitter, and why ?

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.

You mean like how Elon Musk has shadowbanned pro-Ukrainian talk, such as Kyiv Independent? All pro-Ukrainian sources do not trickle up the timelines anymore.

Twitter also puts Ukrainians soldiers petting-puppies and/or showing off their cats behind the age-restriction filters.

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Before, Twitter had a committee and moderators who you could talk to about these shadowbans and other such moderation decisions. Today, all those have been fired, and strangely pro-Russians are being boosted... while pro-Ukrainians are being shadowbanned.

I doubt what you're saying is even close to true. Hand out the evidence.

https://ain.capital/2023/06/07/ukrainians-are-massively-shad...

https://imi.org.ua/en/news/twitter-shadowbans-ukrainians-who...

-----------------

Something like this came up as age-restricted: https://twitter.com/ukraine6679/status/1573928649304276994

A Ukrainian news site seems like great evidence indeed.

Do you expect the Russians to talk about Ukrainian accounts getting shadowbanned on Twitter?

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.

Maybe Twitter just stopped artificially boosting pro-Ukraine content.

And it coincidentally matched all these Ukrainian videos being locked behind age-verification?

Again, Ukrainian memes include a bunch of soldiers petting cats or dogs, or helping kids. Its not all frontline war footage. In fact, the meme accounts tend to be more tailored towards the cat videos.

The frontline footage accounts absolutely should be age-verified. But the meme accounts getting age-locked proves that Twitter suddenly had a change of heart over Ukrainians.

I’ve hardly seen any age verification on war content, though to be fair I don’t follow a lot of the propaganda (“meme”) accounts you’re discussing.

Also, Twitter doesn’t have an age verification mechanism; it just sort of requires you to click through to see images that have been tagged as sensitive content.

They've basically moved onto https://nafo.uk / Mastodon instance now, if you wanna see what its mostly about. (I guess I see on Mastodon.world as well)

Twitter is obviously hostile to them, so they were basically forced to move. Given that Threads is likely going to be Mastodon/Fediverse compatible, that basically means that pro-Ukrainian side will be migrating off of Twitter and likely be compatible with Meta / Instagram Threads.

Good for them. I’m mostly interested in OSINT content, not so much war propaganda.

For OSINT, I usually use the Institute for the Study of War.

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.

> For OSINT, I usually use the Institute for the Study of War.

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.

Don't know about that, but before Musk the shadowbans were just a theory and I remember Jack Dorsey even denying existence of them.

The committee twitter had before was in close collaboration with FBI. Currently twitter is one of the only of the bigger social medias, where you can even discuss controversial topics and see discussion around those.

Better to be in collaboration with FBI than the current set of Twitter executives who seem to be pushing pro-Russian talking points and shadow-banning Ukrainians.

Agreed. I only started using twitter after the changes musk made. I found it absolutely intolerable previously.

The search feature needs a complete overhaul though, and despite musk’s claims of cracking down on spam I still see far too many crypto spammers every day.

Yeah, must be a damn big task trying to fix a codebase that is already over 10 years old.

The only thing they’re truly good at is copying features and using regulatory capture to outmuscle the competition.

Meta would have been absolutely toast right now if TikTok wasn’t banned in India. All of their user growth has come from that market lately, and that could only happen because Indian users have no option but to use Reels (TikTok was killing it here).

And the TikTok ban was also very suspiciously timed - right after Meta made massive billion dollar investments in India’s most powerful and politically connected business (Reliance/Jio). There have been no subsequent bans on anything Chinese.

> Regulatory capture

You say this and in the next breath mention India banning TikTok, which indicates that you don’t know what you’re talking about. India banned TikTok and 57 other Chinese apps in June 2020 in response to clashes between the PLA and the Indian Army in the Himalayas.

How are you going to explain that? That Zuck picked up the phone and encouraged Xi to attack Ladakh so that Modi would ban TikTok? Be real.

It is definitely true that Meta has tangentially benefited from this, but let’s not pretend that Meta was the driving force behind this.

Of course not. That was just coincidental timing, and a popular move politically at that time.

Because if Chinese apps were so dangerous, why haven't other Chinese apps been banned since, or why have Chinese smartphones continued to prolifer in the Indian market since?

India's trade with China has only increased since then. Yet somehow, TikTok was the first casualty - and nothing since.

It was an Indian response to a Chinese provocation. But you’re not very familiar with Indian matters if you think there have been no further Indian responses.

Banning apps is one thing. Military exercises with America, Japan and Australia is another. A state visit by the Indian PM to America where defence deals were struck is yet another. All of these responses hurt China’s interests.

It’s quite simplistic to think that app banning is the only thing a country can do.

Also, you might not understand this but it’s easy to replace Chinese apps, so it only hurts the Chinese companies and not Indian consumers. It’s harder to replace physical goods overnight because that would increase prices and decrease choice for Indian consumers. That’s why it hasn’t happened.

>Chinese smartphones

Find me a smartphone that isn’t made in china.

There's "made in China", and there's "based out of China, headed by Chinese nationals, and owned by Chinese nationals". All of India's top selling brands (OPPO, OnePlus, Vivo) fit into the latter category.

I don't think you actually understand what makes Meta great and why they continue to win.

It is the fact that they run the most sophisticated, best-performing and well-run advertising platform of any website on the planet. And nothing comes close. Not Google. Not TikTok. And definitely not Twitter.

The fact they are going to bring that to Threads is going to utterly decimate Twitter's revenue.

They may be good at copying features, but they then destroy the gains by trying to push real name policy. The only difference between Fb, Ig, Oculus, Threads, and its counterparts is traceability to cardface information printed on your driver's license, and that alone is forcing them into positions they are in.

But making a copy is never enough. Users are only willing to migrate to a new platform for lower price, superior features, or when the original platform screws up big time. Otherwise it's just more of the same, and now instead of sending a tweet, you now would have to use multiple platforms to reach the same audience which probably already uses Twitter anyway.

If they really want people to move from Twitter like from Digg to Reddit or MySpace to Facebook they need a unique selling point. Having to use my real identity for a Twitter clone isn't one.

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