Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads
semafor.com
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So you fire 80% of your workforce claiming they're dead weight and completely unnecessary, while simultaneously suing their new employer because apparently they were vital cogs who somehow "continue to have access to trade secrets"? So vital you're refusing to pay out any of their severance packages. Only in Elon land.
I don't think this is a sane take. Knowing trade secrets and being a "necessity" are not related. They were, and you are, and I am, replaceable. Our possible deep esoteric knowledge of secret sauce maybe makes the replacement more painful, but that's all. If you've ever been on the "not fired" side of a layoff, you'll understand how losing someone "vital" is almost always just a disruption, in reality. The group may even collapse, but if the work truly is non-optional, pressure will build, and it will be done. If there's any competence, nobody will miss that person in a short time, and that's a good thing, because key person risk is a bad thing.
Whether they did or not is maybe the question?
The question is whether the Twitter employees actually brought and used trade secrets for this effort.
The real secrets are the massive money needed to promote the network and to pay for the infrastructure, the massive social reach to attract top posters, the massive networking effect needed to make it a must-have app.
Meta already have all of those.
But do I buy that specifically Facebook could do it? Yeah, obviously they could. It's not at all surprising that Facebook could quickly launch a Twitter clone. This isn't like the "metaverse", Facebook already runs social networks that are larger and more complicated than Twitter is, and Threads looks to be highly tied into their existing infrastructure.
I could not build a Twitter clone in my free time, but I also don't currently run Instagram.
and then I'm pretty sure Elon had a whiteboard session during his first days before firing everyone and had people explain it to him. Which he then posted on his twitter account. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593899029531803649?s=20
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
However I doubt that Musk has any grounds for claiming that "the most useless employees" who weren't even treated with dignity upon firing them would have transferred those to Meta illegally.
IMHO this is just Musk freaking out that the next time Twitter doesn't work as expected or asks for money, people would have real alternative to move on.
Reddit needs something similar.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone admit to major organizational failings like that. I haven't worked for a company in at least 15 years where every single bit of access I had wasn't revoked within minutes.
When I last changed jobs in 2021 I watched the Outlook app on my phone. My boss walked me out of the building at 1:00pm, took my keycard, and the app access was revoked at 1:07pm.
They are suing on the basis that someone somewhere said "when I was at twitter we used tabs not spaces in our code"
- The lawsuit is never actually filed. Turns out just like Delaware (and unlike the SEC), California courts aren't going to bend to Musk's will.
- Twitter continues to bleed users and advertisers. Musk continues to double and triple down on his failed policies.
- Musk declares that this was his intention all along with the purchase, and killing Twitter was a "5D chess move". His fans eat it up.
I think Musk dives further into cultural war nonsense and tries to become a messiahic figure to the right.
Somewhat reminds me of Andrew Wakefield who went from being a licensed research MD to a guest of honor for "Conspira-Sea", a novelty cruise. Just a complete loss of authenticity and meaningful career prospects.
If it were, who pays for the court costs? Is that something the taxpayers have to pay for in the US?
The vast majority of the expense in a court case will be the lawyers on both sides. These are, by default, paid by each party. There are some specific cases where the loser has to pay the winning side’s lawyers, but it’s pretty rare.
Her job is to be corporate and professional - she's there to get advertisers back onboard with Twitter. She's the grownup there to soothe their worries about the instability in the platform. Or she was, until Musk decided to randomly change the basic value proposition behind the site with no warning, undoing anything she'd already accomplished and making it plain that anything she promises can't be trusted because she's completely powerless figurehead.
For her sake, I hope she got her first year's salary up front.
What has she accomplished?
Musk hired her to help improve revenue, and then basically made it impossible for her to ever achieve that goal.
And that’s more than enough.
I had a similar thought when I joined Threads last night and within 30 seconds saw the accounts of Adam Schefter, Adrian Wojnarowski, and Shams Charania all actively posting.
If you follow NFL and NBA news you'll know these names but for anybody that doesn't, these insider accounts are firmly at the center of the NFL and NBA breaking news universe and for going on a decade now Twitter was where you went to follow them.
What Threads has done is break that monopoly Twitter had on this sort of thing. It gives regular users a clean, familiar, functional, working UI with a simple onboard process and it gives high-profile accounts a stable platform, a verified badge, and a boatload of users.
Could Twitter survive if it was no longer the epicenter of North American sports discussion? Probably, but it would be a big loss and would signal to other communities on there that Twitter's expiration date is rapidly approaching.
The reason for this is because Zuck and Meta corp are hostile to user privacy (and drain batteries).
Threads can't even launch in the European Union because of it.
Have fun paying $12 a month to be Threads-verified.
Thankfully day-to-day life isn't yet dependent on Meta corp as a necessity.
Meanwhile (as the article says) Meta has confirmed no employee on the Threads team came from Twitter. So the letter is already shown to be completely without basis.
- Limiting access to Twitter.
- Tweeting incessantly about the Threads launch.
- Threatening to sue Meta.
Musk can't stay out of the limelight, for better or worse, and in this case it is definitely for the worse. Threads would have had a tiny fraction of the hype it does had it not been for his antics these last few weeks.
Meta having a monopoly on all forms of social media does seem pretty bad to me.
I guess “monopoly” has a specific definition, but by having Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and the new Twitter, one company will control the majority of normal peoples’ communication online.
However you can apply the exact same logic to Apple. Is Apple's App Store preventing users from just using an Android phone? Or just launching their own competitor to the iPhone? The answer to that question is also "no".
However, there is a lot of discussion around whether Apple is behaving in an anti-competitive way. Same with Google in the online advertising market. Given the other ant-trust discussions taking place, I don't think it's ridiculous to ask whether Meta controlling _all_ the platforms on which most communications happen is good for society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._Me....
There is an outstanding FTC lawsuit against FB (No I'm not going to call them Meta) which would undo the Instagram and What's App acquisitions. If that were to be successful (it was dismissed once) I suppose Instagram+Threads would be a separate company.
BUT ... the FTC recently lost a case that would have blocked FB from acquiring a VR company (Within) because "Meta could have chosen to try to compete. Instead, it chose to buy". That is, not building their own VR fitness division is anti-competitive. FTC chair Lisa Khan has a raging hard-on for Zuck but it would be hilarious if they also try to block FB for being competitive.
0. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/elon-musks-mommy-says-hes-14...
MySpace concreted Web 2.0. Facebook came a year later.
MySpace sold, Facebook continues. Twitter and here we are today.
Nothing has changed in the grand scheme of things, well apart from your privacy and your data being sold as a commodity.
Apple lost the lawsuit against Microsoft many decades ago when they tried to stop MS from using GUI elements that were similar to Apple's.
You can't copy someone's code, but nobody can stop you from having scrollbars or avatar thumbnails or whatever in your own app.
And then in the followup lawsuit, Steve Jobs settled in order to get Microsoft to promise to keep supporting Office on Mac to keep the Mac from dying.
Meta/Instagram luckily already have a large scale social network, tons of money, and tons of engineers and a codebase that deals in users and text and images already, so it's a pretty good head start.
that is what everyone is doing now.. search for the people they care to follow..
They can work a few more days on that and add it in a update down the line.. by the time thread has enough content that search is important you can bet that search will be there..
i like the theory that they lunched now, sooner then originally planned, to surf on the mess that twitter made on the last few days. This would explain why threads is so incomplete in some areas, but probably will match all twitter features soon enough..
I don't really understand what you're getting at here. I don't see how indexing is a "special sauce"; Facebook has a larger network size than Twitter does and as far as I can tell it indexes all of its posts. What major social sites other than Tumblr/Mastodon don't have functioning search?