Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]
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I guess one takeaway for me is if you don’t want your competitor to hire a bunch of your former employees, don’t make a bunch of your employees former employees.
That's not all that surprising though, Meta could obviously build such a product from their own learnings and IP.
Twitter is a public app. How hard it’s to keep the app open on one monitor and write a spec doc on another?
Is an artist with references open in another pane breaking copyright?
If we stoop to the rounded-corners Apple level then there's not really much point anyone making anything new anymore.
It seems kind of ludicrous that one company can't look at another's product and create the same type of thing, just improved. That's how innovation works.
It's just that in this case, apart from a handful of differences, the core innovation of threads seems to be that Twitter has been taken over by an egotistical maniac and while Zuck is still a billionaire he seems wholly less concerned with tooting his own horn in public as Elon is.
I don't think Elon/Twitter has a leg to stand on, they don't own the concept of a public forum/social media platform, I'm sure that even the shortform that Twitter has enforced since its inception had been done long before.
Twitter's idea came from Text messages
This sentence is clearly trying to establish liability by accusing Meta of wilful infringement of Twitter’s rights (i.e. it acted in full knowledge of these fact, even though they may lead to violation of the employees’ restrictive covenants, etc.), as evidenced by the context and indeed the rest of the letter.
As such, the first instance of “Twitter” is surely a mistake; shouldn’t it say “Meta”? This would make sense given the next sentence (“With that knowledge, Meta [...]”).
As this is supposedly from such a large law firm, I’m amazed a mistake like this could slip through; it completely changes the meaning of the entire sentence, even if the intent is recoverable from context.
Does no one proofread Letters before Action? Am I misreading it? Is this fake?
Whether Twitter knows that employees previously worked for Twitter (etc.) should not have any bearing on Meta’s liability; whether Meta knew this or not absolutely has an impact on liability.
The fact that the next sentence refers to Meta’s knowledge of the the facts in the preceding sentence seems to justify my reading.
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon insisted on more aggressive language and it was hastily edited.
Is it the same law firm that went with the 'offering to buy twitter and signing a purchase agreement was just a prank bro' defence?
If you find yourself standing up in court making the prank bro argument, then I hope the amount of money you got was a fair price for your dignity.
IANAL but my dignity's for sale at pretty low prices. Hell, get a few tequila shots in me and you can have it for free.
Yes. He was represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP for the Twitter lawsuit[0]. The threat was written by a Quinn Emanuel partner.
> If you find yourself standing up in court making the prank bro argument, then I hope the amount of money you got was a fair price for your dignity.
I'm not sure whether he has equity, but the average profits per equity partner at Quinn Emanuel are $5.22 million[1].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/twitter-gets-rea...
[1] https://www.law.com/law-firm-profile/?id=1830&name=Quinn-Ema...
No! I think they wrote it correctly. The wording is confusing definitely as it’s written in first object. They are trying to tell them (Meta) - they (Twitter) are aware that they are hired our ex employees.
Under-the-hood, I assume Meta was able to launch this quickly because it's largely built on existing tech.
Anyway, sounds petty and short-sighted. So. Totally on-brand!
Whatever Meta did or didn’t steal, sounds like he shouldn’t consider it particularly advantageous anyway /s
IANAL but it seems like a compelling defense.
Threads is written in Python, and Instagram is largely a Python monolith.
I loathe Meta as much, if not more, than the next person.
However, if upon the events at twitter a little over 6 months ago, they decided then to build a competitor and the result of that decision is Threads ... I have to congratulate them on a job well done.
If they did what Twitter is claiming, then I applaud them even more.
Part of the tech labor market downturn has been driven by skepticism over the costs: if Twitter can slash its workforce and keep running just fine, why can’t other companies?
Well, Threads swooping in to rapidly drain Twitter’s market share might change that reasoning.
I believe Twitter had ~7,500 at its peak. Even if Threads succeeds, its not going to be because they have meaningfully more employees. Cloning twitter is a fairly easy technical problem nowadays... in contrast to early 2010s era of no-cloud, poor infra management and so on
Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now. That trend will only continue. OpenAI only had ~100 employees at one point.
You don't need 100s of operations people if you move from on-prem to serverless, for example. Today, social media requires the most people in content moderation/support, rather than development. Tomorrow those people are likely to be supplanted by LLMs or similar more tailored AI moderation models.
Many products that required 1000s of people 10 years ago, may only require 100s today. To me this is just a fact
1. Desperately trying to make short term cash, and are trying to do their best with fewer employees than needed to maintain the current product. (Twitter is here).
2. Enough staff to maintain the current product, but not significantly innovate.
3. Significantly more than needed to maintain the current product, leaving room for people to work on non-core products that may end up being the next billion dollar project, even if the vast majority flop (Most big tech companies are here).
4. Way too bloated, with not enough projects to work on or not enough revenue to justify the R&D.
The problem is that outsiders have a really really hard time understanding the product complexity of half a billion+ user services.
Comparing OpenAI to the social media sites that this HN post is talking about is a great example. It's a completely different product with completely different challenges than FB, twitter, threads, youtube, whatever.
Another great example is people citing "day in the life" videos that are actually recruiting videos showing the brighter sides of the job. Or people citing employees who claim that the company hired them to do nothing, when in reality it's a recruiter that was hired shortly before hiring slowed.
Everything else is irrelevant. Technology drives abstractions which drive deflation by allowing fewer people to produce more goods. This has been proven and observed for thousands of years
Companies can thrive while overemploying people, but eventually they get undercut by one that doesn't
1. "Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now."
Correct. It's easier now to build apps that we used 10-15 years ago.
2. "Do you agree or disagree that techproducts today are easier to build than 15 years ago?"
Incorrect. Tech product complexity has increased in many ways in the last 15 years (and the increase in complexity is larger than the decrease in complexity we talked about above).
-- Regulation. COPPA regulations strengthened significantly around 10 years ago. Europe's GDPR went into effect in like 2016. Those are just a couple popular ones. Remember when Amazon just didn't collect sales tax? Sure makes things easier! And remember, those laws are constantly changing. If NJ raises their sales tax, you better have someone paying attention. If Europe comes up with a new privacy law, you better have enough people to drop everything and implement everything that's needed.
-- Scale + globalization. Myspace topped out at like 100 million active users around 15 years ago. Facebook is 30 times that size now! That scale comes with complexities most don't think about. How do you report user video ad income to the IRS-equivalent in Andorra? I don't know, but you now need to know at Facebook's scale!
This can trigger entirety new projects. Some industries still transfer their driver updates in sealed, marked usb sticks to their clients. A lot of companies invested in IOT in the past 5 years, and just recently decided they wanted all their connected stuff to go through specific Cisco routers. Security is my SWE job security.
That said, being present in Andorra is probably necessary to get to 3 billion MAU but not 100 million MAU.
Exactly. You know those undersea cables that Google laid? Or Facebook's controversial "Free Basic" internet program in India?
At a certain point you start to run out of people, and need to go to great lengths to get more people on the internet and using your services. And then you need to start a financial relationship with those people.
This statement really leaks a lack of experience with large systems.
The efficiency loss for going to some serverless regime and the costs associated would be astronomical. My god…
In a non competitive world this might be true (although I have my doubts). In a competitive free market world it isn’t because a competitor can then beat you by hiring more developers and delivering more features faster than you could.
> Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now.
The consequence of this isn’t that people continue using those tiny apps. The consequence is that people’s expectations increase dramatically. There was a time Evernote was a Unicorn. Today, even though building a product like Evernote would still be fairly challenging, it’s considered a feature.
> You don't need 100s of operations people if you move from on-prem to serverless,
I have not yet, in practice, seen overall spend go down by moving to serverless. You may have fewer ops people, but you now need more devs to achieve the same work because a lot of ops has been shifted to devs. That being said, I’ve often seen serverless not even lead to a reduction in ops.
> Many products that required 1000s of people 10 years ago, may only require 100s today. To me this is just a fact
This does not come close to matching reality. In the late 90s early 2000s you and a handful of other devs could build a multimillion dollar product using Visual Basic which only ran on Windows and was distributed as a binary to be run by your clients and it would be a best in class product.
Today, you would need a designer, web developers, and someone with experience in pushing it to production and securing it to simply build an MVP version that ran on browsers. In addition you would need another set of iOS developers and another set of Android developers. Heck, you may even need an Apple Watch and iPad app to be competitive. All of this would probably be required to simply make your app competitive, never mind best in class.
What your comment appears to be missing is that with software development becoming easier, what changes most is an increase in customer expectations.
"Serverless" is not really an option at a certain scale. It's likely too expensive, but especially a giant risk if you abstract away something that can fail in an interesting way.
I remember we once managed to break the AWS ELB in one AZ and had a nice little call with a dev from Seattle. Another time we managed to saturate EC2 in a zone at a certain time.
You will need people who can dig into this. If you're at Twitter scale you'll probably want whole teams digging into aspects that you take for granted.
The moderation, whatever people personally think of it now, has certainly suffered from an advertiser perspective, which is why they left. It was a mistake to fire many of them.
The sales people with relationships to advertisers left, and so again did many advertisers.
It's apparently impossible to get your account reinstated if you were banned, because there is no more support.
People had pay issues due to lack of HR and also lost benefits, so they left.
On top of that, almost all the features they shipped were in the works before the company was bought, so they didn't really ship anything. Stability was worse and users left. They are flocking to Threads because it's stable. Remaining devs continued to trickle away as the work environment became intolerable.
Basically every aspect of his experiment was a failure. I'm sure Twitter could have cut 10-15% and been okay but what Musk did absolutely did not work. All those things managers talk about, those reasons to treat your people well: cratering morale after layoffs, increasing attrition, dead sea effect, loss of institutional knowledge, it's all true, and just what everyone expected.
The only thing to learn from Twitter's fall is that they were right. Great experiment I guess? Really validated some things we had all seen small scale or intuited.
Twitter laid off 80-90% of their people and the app functions the same. No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. Even if the features were in the pipeline already, none of them appeared over the 5-6 years preceding the acquisition. Highly coincidental, to the point of being suspect.
Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons, not because of moderation. The individuals behind advertising at many large corporations simply didn't want to help Elon. Would you want to give money to somebody you hated, and who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? This part is obvious to any objective observer.
It's clear at this point that net added value per Twitter employee was low or even negative for many. If a company can layoff 90% of the developers and have no material change in availability or development velocity, then it's really inarguable otherwise
> who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles?
I mean, you're talking about moderation. It's always going to be based on where the culture is at the moment. 70 years ago, nobody cared about misogynistic ads, now they've fallen out of fashion. People don't want to advertise on a site flooded with posts that go against the values of their customers. You simply can't have it both ways, Elon's preferred kind of speech and having advertisers.
> No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased.
The downtime and strangeness has definitely increased. And the features aren't good! Blue was not good. It existed as a paid feature with edit capability. He added boosting for Blue and removed verification, and he fired all the product people who told him it was a terrible idea to convert to pay to win comments. They lost users, saw hate comments float to the top under ads etc. etc. Nobody wanted massive walls of text on Twitter, that's what made it different. Brevity is the soul of wit. And they put up a login wall because of scraping? It's a public site, you just have to live with that. If you're getting slammed, the solution is to increase your server availability, not take eyeballs of your content.
> If a company can layoff 90% of the developers
It wasn't 90% of developers. It wasn't even 90% of the company, if they really went from 7500 to 2000, which was the last count. Most of the layoffs/firing/quits were outside of development, in moderation, sales etc.
And after all this, their traffic has massively declined, and ad sales are down 60% YoY. It is absolutely spiraling. It is unreal how it can be seen as anything but.
At their respective peaks Meta had around 12x the staff of peak Twitter despite not having 10x the user base (that said Meta towers heavily over Twitter in users and monthly accesses.)
Even today Meta still has more than 10x the staff of peak Twitter.
If anything you're highlighting that at ~7,500 staff Twitter was probably too thinly run.
I don't know--based on the behavior observed from the client-side in chrome devtools, twitter seemed to be DDos-ing itself with no exponential backoff and no jitter.
That seems like exactly the kind of problem I'd expect if I fired all the senior people.
Although Reddit's changes are fresh, it has declined both in quality and esteem from copying this business style. I expect further decline if they follow this road.
As for the companies that aren't following Elon's lead: they are flourishing. We have enough data points now to say it authoritatively.
Slash and burn is not effective, smart or conducive to the desired results.
But this is another area where Zuck beat Musk because Meta addressed this issue in a much more sensible way which involved considered changes in workforce as opposed to Musk’s impetuous unthought through slash and burn style.
The bloat was a mismanagement problem "solved" by cutting everything but management. That plus a bit of over-hiring from covid and cheap money. But that's also a management issue.
1. Many people who were commenting on how this would adversely affect Twitter were doing it solely because they didn’t like Musk, as opposed to an understanding of how software development works. So these people were basically predicting that Twitter would stop working entirely in 2 weeks. But that’s not how software is developed. If it was, engineers would never be able to take a vacation and major web apps would all start failing on Jan 1.
Those who understood how software development worked recognized that what we would see instead is a slow decay in software quality where things would consistently become slightly worse. Also, we’d see a complete inability to change major functionality without causing problems. Finally, there might be a few big bang failures (eg the domain name expires, but no one with access to the domain is still hired by Twitter anymore) but those would be few and far in between and would take time to uncover (although it does appear Twitter has faced at least one such situation).
Twitter is indeed facing these situations.
2. The real threat to Twitter was always competition. In a competitive environment staying still is a death trap since your competitors will outpace you. There are a few reasons why Twitter has largely escaped this so far. (a) Twitter’s business is a fundamentally bad business model with a lot of hassles most businesses simply don’t want to deal with. (b) a misconception by many competitors that there was something fundamentally wrong with Twitter that needed to be addressed.
(b) is why Bluesky and Threads have been the most successful Twitter alternatives. They’ve basically been Twitter clones and are not trying to fundamentally change the model. Of course, Bluesky is now basically getting crushed by Meta’s resources and existing user base, but they were fundamentally ok the right track and could have been competitive if they were able to reach technical parity earlier.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-had-a-plan-to-fix-social...
NOT to get too political - but - people like Musk and Trump and their ilk are just the natural progression of the PR focused United States culture. Spin and story are just as good as skill and intelligence. Being able to control a narrative is a superpower that leads to massive connections, wealth, and power.
This is what we asked for when we invented PR and advertising. We're reaping what we sow and nobody wants to eat the harvest.
Here are some monthly active user stats for social media/chat networks(1):
1. Facebook ~3B
...
3. WhatsApp ~2B
4. Instagram ~2B
...
7. Facebook Messenger ~0.93B
...
14. Twitter ~0.56B
I'm no fan of Meta, but it's plain to see that Meta have no problem or lack of talent with regards to scale.
(1) https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/twitter-down-elon-musk-ex...
Could you give a generic example of the sort of secret an employee might take out of Twitter and use to build a competing product?
By the way, Musk didn't specify "code" either.
> Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
> He also alleged that Meta assigned those employees to develop “Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”
Isn’t the burden here on Twitter enormous? And given META’s size, a discovery would be enormous and require serious legal effort and money on Elon’s behalf, legal effort that would be better appropriated in dealing with legal issues in EU?
I don’t care much for either of these guys but you gotta love seeing a guy’s own toxic personality traits used against him.
Looks like Zuck’s jiu jitsu training is paying off after all!
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/elon-musk-mother...
> Despite the concerns raised by Elon’s parents, plans to hold the fight at the Vegas Octagon are moving forward.
Thanks
I think that the Elon/Zucc fight thing makes them both look ridiculous and childish and I've been enjoying that aspect of it (it doesn't matter even a little who wins, they both lose). This lawsuit strikes me the same way.
That’s a pretty good list, but I’d add “meteor strike” to the end of it.
> “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” the source said.
If Twitter knew what Meta was doing, surely they could have shut this down right away?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Novell,_Inc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-cage-figh...
I can't find the video I wanted to. It was a breakdown of some big guy who didn't know how to fight go up against someone much smaller but knew some boxing. The little guy backs up, moving laterally away from the big guy's primary hand. After the big guy throws a punch and gets himself off balance, the little guy knocks him out with one good punch to the jaw. Lights out.
Scaling aside, Twitter is as simple an application as you could imagine.
If Meta was incubating a rocket ship division, it might be a little bit easier to demonstrate that former SpaceX employees were making non-obvious design choices based on SpaceX research and undisclosed features of SpaceX tech
Probably won't help that a lot of the more Twitter-specific knowledge around content recommendations and warning algorithms and scaling up moderation processes is stuff Elon's spent his time trashing Twitter's original implementations of anyway...
While Bluesky has been having problems with their (invite-only) spike in signups from Twitter refugees, Threads has been chugging along with no issue.
Also, Zuckerberg made a post saying they got something like 5 million "signups" within the first few hours of launch.
That’s the kind of unforced error you can’t sue your way out of.
Discussion over here from earlier:
Not to defend Meta, but this isn't true. Meta is embracing the fediverse protocol with Threads.
"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.'"
Maybe it's the cynic in me but I think Meta will just implement a tiny portion of the spec that benefits them (importing posts from Mastodon?) and then stall there.
Maybe Elon and The Zuck can settle it in a cage match?
That'll make HN top 10 for sure...
---
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:
I write on behalf of X Corp., as successor in interest to Twitter, Inc. ("Twitter"). Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched "Threads" app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms ("Meta") has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property.
Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices. With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta's copycat "Threads" app with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta's competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter.
Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information. Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.
Further, Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter's followers or following data. As set forth in Twitter's Terms of Service, crawling any Twitter services - including, but not limited to, any Twitter websites, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, ads, and commerce services - is permissible only "if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file" available at https://twitter.com/robots.txt. The robots.txt file specifically disallows crawling of Twitter's followers or following data. Scraping any Twitter services is expressly prohibited for any reason without Twitter's prior consent. Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seck both civil remedies or injunctive relief without further notice.
Please consider this letter a formal notice that Meta must preserve any documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter. Meta, and/or former Twitter employees who now work for Meta. That includes, but is not limited to, all documents related to the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of these former Twitter employees, the development of Meta's competing Threads app, and any communications between these former Twitter employees and any agent, representative, or employee or Meta.
Very truly yours,
(s)
Alex Spiro