The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative
restofworld.org
restofworld.org
Not to say it wasn't humorous though. People had a lot of fun talking about and asking others about their Koos.
> People had a lot of fun talking about and asking others about their Koos.
You just might enjoy the opening sequence of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yek4hrl25qU&t=23
> Not to say it wasn't humorous though. People had a lot of fun talking about and asking others about their Koos.
Probably helped with some initial hype with some people just to be able to joke about it. Is it a bit like Mastodon's "toots", I guess. It was funny for a bit, then it was just eye rolling.
On the other hand in Russian and ex-Soviet space, "koo" would a great reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin-dza-dza! a movie by Georgiy Daneliya.
> The natives of the planet appear human, with deceptively primitive-looking technology and a barbaric culture, which satirically resembles that of humans. They are telepathic; the only spoken words normally used in their culture are "ku" (koo) and "kyu" (kyoo), the former stands for everything good, the latter being a swear word that stands for every bad thing.
Given the number of words with "bit/byte" for instance there's a point they just let it go.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56007451
After koo was announced many of the supporters of India's R/W central govt switched over to Koo boosting its numbers.. but as with Meta's Threads, it was inevitable that the platform would lose its shine quickly
Ahhh
A lot of "this happened, and then this happened," but I would have liked some more insight.
The arb was that they had advantages as a local firm willing to play in the niche of providing local governments an advantage. But that's not enough to provide a social network.
Also their user base gain was because of controversies, you bring controversial public, they're gonna want that sort of environment.
One more thing worked for them was Nationalism, Indian platform, for Indians, by the Indians type of thing. That also will only take you so far.
I still like the app, it's just that, it's not going to be the "Big thing" that they promised their investors.
Even Airplane was a copy!
I don't know much about large scale projects, but wouldn't hosting videos become a huge cost in a project like this? Many social medias didn't have video support until they were huge. In fact, I think Plurk still doesn't support it, even though it has existed for 16 years.
But the other day I learned about this "TikTok" thing that is video-centric, and that there is a clone called Kwai, which is also video-centric, and that everyone seems to want a platform to share videos for some reason.
That's the feeling I always got.
It was just a place for RWingers of India. Even that could be an interesting place. But it wasn’t.
I tried reading Koo once or twice, and I wasn’t interested in anything.
I don't have any preemptive beef against Commies or Indian RW or whoever, but that platform had more saffron color than the BJP party office. Saffron border, bland white background, and saffron checkmarks for verified accounts. Total UI design hell.
No wonder it failed.
Just a vile place filled with some of the most blatantly misogynistic, racist, hatefilled content.
But now that the Twitter is happy to host all these people, Koo was destined to fail
Here's a fun fact about federated Twitter by the way: ActivityPub is just a JSON-ified reinvention of SMTP.