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Comment by sdfzguf | Hacker News Reader

Elob has a fixiation on the letter. As I understand it, he wants to create a 'meta' platform for everything. I think in China such platforms exist (?). It's not to far away to say, that you need a 'meta' name for a platform like that. Probably wants to leave the 'private company' image and try to create an 'institution'. I hope it fails.

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WeChat is extremely popular in China and on the surface it's a messaging app but below that is a whole swath of stuff, the most interesting IMO is the decentralized marketplace. My GF's mom is Chinese and she buys tons of stuff like vegetables and housewares from random people through the app.

People pay for rent and various bills, you can call their version of Uber, order food etc.

If Twitter is going to pull this off they should invest heavily in the DMing UX as messaging is the real interface for this stuff. Almost like a terminal with some extra UIs layered on top.

Thanks for the explanation of the 'direct message' aspect. I didn't know that, but it's interesting

WeChat's success lies in chinese culture that people value convenience over privacy bc the gov can already monitor everything its citizen do. It is a "Super App", a mini OS with conglomerate of apps that has everything users need. Without ever leaving the app, it drastically lowers learning curve for people. Instead of learning how to use multiple apps, they need to only learn just one.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app

I mean, you can also buy stuff on WhatsApp... But honestly, Twitter V2, or, well, X, looks more to me Facebook. Twitter was twitter for its simplicity.

Remember when everyone got pissed off because they doubled the characters? How many is on Twitter now, 5000? Markdown support too. And now they are planning banking, latex, some linkedin copy cat stuff...

In reality twitter is trying to become Facebook. Facebook only didn't had banking because FED/EU didn't liked the Libra idea.

Eh, it's simpler than that - X.com was his first company, that became Paypal, that he was ousted from.

This is just basic old man 101: trying to regain the glory days of your youth.

I mean, it'd be already pretty simple ... Make an app that covers several areas of peoples lifes and bring it all under one hood.

Some might call that “an operating system”

I suspect his glory days are right now.

I like Elon, I think he is smart. I also think he has too much power and influence. And along with that comes corruption, non sense and slew of other negative attributes.

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