I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer.
There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't been able to fulfill it due to scalability and network stickiness reasons. Meta can absorb all of twitter's traffic without breaking stride, and they'll have a userbase in the millions within hours of launch that's able to hop over from IG.
I couldn't disagree more. I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great, and the fact that they're heavily branding it with Instagram, using Instagram logins etc suggests to me that they're just looking for another angle to vacuum up user data. Maybe I'm unusual but the accounts I follow on Instagram and Twitter do not have a huge amount of crossover so the fact that their onboarding process tries to replicate your Instagram social graph makes me feel like this will replace Instagram posts composed of Notes screenshots rather than replace Twitter.
Not to mention, when was the last time Facebook successfully launched a new standalone social app? Remember Poke, their Snapchat clone? If you do you’re in an exclusive club. They had to pivot the entire Instagram app in order to compete with Snapchat and Twitter isn’t a big enough threat to ever justify doing that. I think it'll get merged into a "text" type of Instagram post eventually and otherwise killed off.
Side note, but:
> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative
I actually don't think there is. Twitter always had a relatively low number of users compared to other networks. The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it being where journalists and celebrities break news.
There's two channels here. From a user perspective "what made Twitter great" is also the least attractive parts for any other company to try and mimic. The absurd levels of pornography, the anonymous fan and joke accounts. From a business perspective, "what made Twitter great" was the easy to digest brands, the non-anonymous accounts sharing their day, and journalists/other named professionals providing up to date information directly without the need to learn how to video/image edit.
Meta does not understand the former, but they certainly do understand the latter. It's all they care about, and why they're bothering with this. It's certainly not out of a desire to replace Twitter for the goodness of their hearts, no they want the valuable aspects of Twitter.
I don't see how Twitter, without making any serious changes, will become anything more than a wasteland of people too crude for Threads but also too illiterate for Mastodon.
I'd add that there are more user cohorts than you describe. There are the scrollers that just want a constantly changing feed to "engage" with (typically though not always, showing little discretion about whom they follow), there are the "industrial producers" (whether corporates or individuals) who want the world to benefit from their wisdom (showing little to no discretion about who follows them - the more the merrier), and there are the "communitarians", who want to actively engage with a more narrowly defined set of the tribes they are members of (showing greater discretion in their social graph, and also taking part in providing tribe-relevant content).
Of the three cohorots, the latter is by far the smallest (my own guess), and these are definitely (from my experience) finding homes on Mastodon (tribe-specific servers).
A lot of LGBT twitter tribe are not going to move to a site where they have to post under their government name, for their own safety.
(A very important axis for social networks is the "IRL or not" one; Facebook and Linkedin are "IRL", Twitter and Mastodon are very definitely not. Which way is Threads going to go?)
Good points. The question therefore becomes what persuades advertisers to spend money on there and so what will drive a critical mass of users and content to get to that point. No doubt the "industrial producers" and the peddlers of dopamine and outrage will be what gets the platform there.
> "what made Twitter great" was the easy to digest brands, the non-anonymous accounts sharing their day, and journalists/other named professionals
You should be in sales lol, just sell the B2B folks on ads and sign them up for multi-year deals like Spotify, by selling a tiny set of uber celebrities and brand names that no one gives a shit about enough to switch platforms. Forget what the users are doing which is posting as much as ever.
I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes. Apparently Meta is the competent one now because they pigeonholed a cloned feature on their platform + the alternative is no longer cool among the tech crowd on a niche programmer/startup forum.
Honestly FB being as successful as it was for so long should get some credit. Nothing sticks around forever and they generated massive amounts of wealth. It's wayyy bigger than Twitter still. As I say with Twitter even if they did lose 30% of their users that's still hundreds of millions of people using your website.
> the big expensive Metaverse plan was cancelled.
Has it really? Do you mean the scale/timing of their play (too much too early) or more generally.
>I'd loved to bring up old HN threads announcing the death of Facebook using similar broad strokes. Apparently Meta is the competent one now because they pigeonholed a cloned feature on their platform + the alternative is no longer cool among the tech crowd on a niche programmer/startup forum.
The intelligentsia hates Musk far more than Zuckerberg right now, and will cheer on anything that could potentially hurt him. There's also some wishful thinking that Threads will institute the sort of mass censorship of right-wing speech that was present on Twitter, but it seems unlikely that there will be very different standards than what you see on Facebook, which is often derided as a right-wing boomer-infested hellscape.
I chuckled quite a bit when I realized Musk was buying Twitter to put an end to the totalitarian censorship practiced by the left. And unsurprisingly, Musk is now the big adversary.
Having enemies or groups to disagree with is more important than you think. If the lbgt2s can't shitpost nazi content they soon discover the differences between each of themselves and attack each other. A tribe needs an enemy
There's been no mass censorship of right wing speech anywhere in the US. There has been censorship of both mis and disinformation performed independently by companies who didn't want their customers to die for preventable illnesses or become the next Unabomber due to Russian influence campaigns.
There was a recent study that was floating around the news showing that this, never happened. The study went on to show that actually conservative viewpoints were boosted by social media algorithms.
What actually was happening was mass hysteria, and a political base being radicalized by a cult like leader who claimed every single thing was "lugen press", and anything bad that happened was an attack on them.
Maybe that content was boosted by algorithms which were trained on engagement. The content was indeed popular, if only because it was contrarian. Contrarian viewpoints flourish if people believe that the press doesn't hold government to account. But that is a different topic. Algorithms vs direct influence.
But there were still propaganda efforts, especially for the topic of mis- or disinformation. It served as an excuse to curb content. Trump decried the press, but at the same time he was correct in that the media tried to smear him with a Russian collusion story and promoted and suppress certain other topics. This isn't about conservative vs democrat, this is just underhanded political play. So the worst part is that he was partially correct about the press being instrumentalized. If they just reported critically and honestly, he would never have had an argument here.
Another bad result from this is that this of course might strain the relationship of a country being accused to meddle in elections. It turned large parts of the domestic populations against an imaginary enemy. Not saying that this is relevant for current developments.
You could maybe excuse the press because they have been fed with false info. Checking sources is their job, but worst of all, is that they now claim that voices need to be censored because of misinformation, just as they spread it themselves. I doubt they mean their own and I can fully understand the lacking trust in large press companies.
The press did not try to smear him with the Russian collusion "story". That story is and was very real. The Mueller investigation lead to dozens of criminal charges, of trump appointees and foreign Russian agents. Whoever convinced you otherwise had a successful propaganda campaign and you are one of millions of victims.
The probe did not find collusion, but that isn't the point.
The fact that he was put under that much scrutiny is political play. We have diverging opinions here, but I believe if there were any serious failings, we certainly would have heard of it. People tried to smear him with some failings of alleged contacts. Everyone even slightly connected could be smeared with allegations like that.
But the fact remains that A: The probe did NOT find collusion and that B: the probe was launched on falsified information that was created to start a political prosecutions. That is in my opinion something far more serious than anything the probe laid open and furthermore should obviously be discouraged.
That's not a "conservative" viewpoint. That was a politicaly insensitive take to have that lead to asian hate and violence at the time. I still don't think that the lab leak theory was ever proven to be true. I think the official stance is "it could be".
I don’t really care about the ideology; my point is that it was wrongfully suppressed.
> That was a politicaly insensitive take to have that lead to asian hate and violence at the time.
Is there literally any evidence of this at all? The virus originated from China either way, and if anything, it’s less offensive to blame a mistake at a virology lab rather than the general sanitation level of Chinese wet markets.
The lab leak theory was politically insensitive to the people who backed research at that specific lab. That’s it.
Another example is the leaked contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which have since been confirmed to be authentic. Censored as “disinformation/misinformation” at the time, turned out to be completely true, and again, censored because it was embarrassing to specific powerful individuals.
It's news to me that Twitter mass censored right-wing speech. They did at one time have some standards against hate speech (though they barely enforced them), but certainly nothing against right-wing speech.
I am an anonymous user on Twitter and never saw any pornography. What do you think did I do wrong?
I get that advertisers and credit card companies get careful here, but I think sanitized content will just never be popular. It won't be restricted to pornography, it never is. No platform is interesting if advertisers and other stakeholders prescribe "positivity content". Instagram was successful because people connected with their friends. They will struggle as well if the platform gets more and more commercialized. Celebs will only ever attract certain demographics. New users might look into new platforms. Those will probably be just as shitty as the last one and the cycle continues.
When these social networks became connected to ones professional career.
Let's say you are a marketing director for (small video game company) and are using social media (Twitter, Reddit, etc. etc.) to market, network and hype your games.
Suddenly, porn appears. Possibly your characters in the game get rule34'd. Do you engage?
No one is going to sacrifice their 30+ year career for a bit of free advertising to a video game that you're only going to put 1 or 2 years more into.
I think "mainstream" porn is accepted for the most part. But you don't have to go very far before people ask "How old is that character by the way?" and then everything goes to shit.
Are children following your professional account for video game news? Etc. etc. Its just too much of a risk in practice.
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EDIT: Wow, a bunch of downvotes. Okay, I'm a Pokemon fan. Tell me, how long do I have to go on Twitter before I accidentally come across rule34 of Pokemon characters? We all know what's out there, I'm sure we've all seen the internet. Nothing against rule34 artists or anything, but these are not things you want to interact with if you're making a career out of video game marketing. There's some pretty uncomfortable taboos that are being explored here.
I don’t think Meta even needs to care about the valuable aspects of Twitter. If everyone on Twitter jumps ship to Meta, Meta will own even more social media and there’s no way that isn’t a win.
Meta has been big enough for antitrust since at least 2010 when they went on an M&A kick[0]. Definitely they should have been blocked from buying Instagram back in 2012. Problem is, by that point governments had effectively hollowed out their antitrust enforcement agencies[1]. So the only option now is to break companies up.
Related note: I don't think anyone should be talking about Threads in the language of competition. Either this displaces Twitter entirely or (more likely) it dies on the vine. While there's been a lot of movement to Mastodon and Bluesky, Twitter is still around. There's no competition between the two; they're serving different markets. The people who jumped ship are the kinds of people who were already getting sick and tired of Twitter's toxicity. The people who remain are either hardcore outrage addicts or journalists and politicians feeding their addiction.
[1] This is often couched in the language of the free market, but practically speaking this was done because bigger platforms are easier to understand and easier to regulate.
Surely letting every alphabet group and Cambridge Analytica grab some of that treasure trove of "oops, our API was poorly scoped" data was prioritized higher than breaking up or otherwise slowing down Facebook.
A quick search suggests Meta face or faced two antitrust cases in the USA (acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, and separately a restraining order against the purchase of Within Unlimited), and have been warned of the possibility of antitrust charges in the EU (regarding advertising).
I find it mind blowing that people refer to Twitter as "once great" now that it is known that it was essentially a disgusting totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool for one of the 2 political flavors in the US.
I just don't get how someone can feel that this is better than what it is now and just casually ignore that fact.
I also don't get how people can claim that Twitter is now going to die because "???". HN is into soothsaying now?
The persecution fetish many right wingers had over twitter didn't really play with the vast majority of users. Twitter existed for normal people acting normal, not for "lefists".
It existed for advertisers. All the "censorship" being moaned about is because brands would stop advertising on the platform if Twitter couldn't give reasonable guarantees that their ads would not run next to extremely toxic content.
This seems pretty self evident, since most of them left as soon as Musk took over with the promise to stop policing the platform.
If the U.S. was invaded I'd rather fascist racist nationalists be dying holding the enemy back than artists and scientists.
Regardless Azov iirc has shed it's 'nazi' roots to become an effective legitimate military unit. Turns out a lot of fascist apparently are cowards.
Anyways your attachment to Azov having nationist roots reveals your Russian bias. And they are fascist nationalist. They've been destroying, raping, and pillaging what they can for purely fascist racist reasons. That makes the Russians the side of the Nazis here fyi.
> now that it is known that it was essentially a disgusting totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool for one of the 2 political flavors in the US.
Everything we've seen from the Twitter threads suggests that they were working with both political parties, and that it's just reporting bias that we only got more details about their dealings with one of the parties. For example, the original data dumps mentioned in passing that there were similar requests coming from the Presidency (Trump, at the time), the "journalist" just chose to focus on the ones coming from Biden's campaign.
> I find it mind blowing that people refer to Twitter as "once great" now that it is known that it was essentially a disgusting totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool for one of the 2 political flavors in the US.
You're delusional. Twitter before the acquisition was extremely politically neutral and gave extremist right wing voices way more leeway than should be socially acceptable. Post-acquisition has turned it into the 'totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool' that you're describing, for Musk's personal and political interests, which at the time seem to be ultra-far right.
I said that Twitter is transphobic because Musk has made transphobic statements and has asserted that they are Twitter policy. And he owns Twitter, so they are Twitter policy. Ergo, Twitter is transphobic. This is not hyperbole; it is a simple statement of fact.
> You're delusional. Twitter before the acquisition was extremely politically neutral and gave extremist right wing voices way more leeway than should be socially acceptable.
LOL wow.. calling somebody else delusional is serious projection! Twitter was far from neutral. It was obvious to any objective skeptic in real-time then supporting evidence such as Twitter Files confirmed it. Twitter was far left of center and used constant censorship against opposing views.
> I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great
I mean, it's extremely clear that current Twitter leadership doesn't understand that either. They're not competing with Twitter at its prime (or at least its peak influence; personally I preferred it when it was a lot smaller in the early 10s) from a few years ago; they're competing with a website that just went completely dark to the public internet and appears to be barely usable even if you're logged in.
Twitter is monetized outrage. A lot had to fall into place for that to work. Of course they need a working website, but beyond that I believe they are way sticker than pundits claim. That unique combination of echo chamber plus the ability to reach across and mock, abuse, or become enraged by the other side, all while having a community, is not easily replicable.
I wonder, do you actually use it, or more to the point, did you pre-Musk? That's certainly a belief people have about the site, and it is certainly a facet of Twitter, but Twitter is (or was) only monetized outrage in the same way that Twitter is cat pictures or Twitter is porn or Twitter is celebrities. It was there, but unless you chose to engage with it you likely wouldn't see much of it (as the recommendation stuff started to break down under Musk, many people were surprised to see porn in the algorithmic feed; despite porn on Twitter being a huge deal, many users were surprised it was allowed because The Algorithm(TM) used to be good at hiding it from those who didn't engage with it).
I do think post-Musk that this effective auto-segmentation has become less of a thing, particularly for outrage/political stuff; the algorithmic stuff seems increasingly broken, and the auto-promotion of blueticks shoves all sorts of nonsense in your face. But for most of Twitter's lifespan, unless you were in that world, you didn't really see much of it.
I wonder if you used it, in order to think that it was not monetized outrage, Twitter for me was like the french revolution, one guillotine a day, without trial, where the population was judge jury and executor
In order to do this, you must assiduously avoid mainstream news as well. I think that’s the point where the two sides of this debate are talking past each other. There is the Twitter you see on Twitter (your customized feed) but there’s also the That that is reported on in the news, screencapped on Reddit, shared on WhatsApp and iMessage, etc. If the sense memory of those non-platform Twitter interactions is stronger than the on-platform ones, especially when it comes to negative senses like hate, it tarnishes the users’ experience with it.
What? No, I follow people tweeting in public. I almost never tweet, but when I do it’s public as well.
To be honest I don’t know what you meant on your comment. Was it a mix of tautology with true Scotsman? You have to follow outraged people to say you are properly on Twitter thus if you are properly on Twitter the outrage is unavoidable?
True, but at least the public perception is that the carefully curated non hate, non garbage consuming Twitter user is a person living comparatively in a very small village.
Most people live in a huge metropolis of suffering.
BTW, there are many UX studies showing people don't change defaults. What Twitter recommends to them is what they read.
It's not a feature exclusive for Twitter to be sure but the fact that herd behavior on background of social animosity is much more important driver than cat pictures is pretty much established. There are number of studies on this account
I’ve used it before and during Musk. Twitter has always been outrage by default (at least since ~2014 or so) with some crude controls that allow you to opt out (like blocking/muting people, using curated lists instead of the main feed, and for the love of all that is holy never ever visiting the “for you” or “trending” links). Most of the people I’ve heard claim (as you are) that you have to opt-in to outrage on Twitter are using third party apps that don’t show the same timeline or recommendations as the official app/site (or they otherwise don’t steer users toward the outrage content the same way as the official UIs did).
Agreed that Twitter has improved a bit post-Musk, but it has a decade of ossified outrage culture baked in and that doesn’t change easily. Some notable improvements though include: “for you” and “trending” pages are no longer exclusively showing the worst representations of viewpoints I disagree with (still plenty of disagreement and idiocy, but no longer exclusively the most idiotic representations of the views I disagree with), Community Notes seems genuinely helpful at identifying mis/disinformation that pre-Musk Twitter would have happily boosted (even endorsed via Blue Check), and honestly even the “Blue Check no longer means endorsement but rather access to paid features” seems like a marked improvement. Twitter seems quite a lot more content-neutral without going full anarchy.
The user base is exactly what's not easily replicable.
And trying to "migrate" a user base from Instagram seems like a shot in the foot in this context, even if the whole mechanic of the platform is pretty much the same as twitter, the user base is already completely different
Having that community and culture is the moat. Even like things like “ratio” and “subtweeting” are part of the moat if you’re trying to create a clone.
However, that doesn’t mean there can’t be a next big thing out of nowhere like TikTok.
Incidentally, I feel like Twitter has done more recently to pivot away from outrage (though there is still plenty of only because the culture of billions of users doesn’t change overnight)—when I go to the “For You” page, I no longer exclusively see the most idiotic representations of the views I disagree with, for example—instead it’s mostly just “big conversation topics”, often still controversial and with plenty of idiocy from all sides, but no longer seemingly designed for provocation. Community Notes is probably the most visible example, and something that kind of opened my mind about possibilities for non-censorious forms of moderation (for those who don’t know, Community Notes allows the Twitter Community to collectively identify and label mis/disinformation—it works by finding consensus among people who normally disagree with each other, which seems quite a lot saner than leaving it to the judgment of Twitter staff and has worked out pretty well in my experience).
Casual twitter user here and have heard about 'notes' but not actually seen it in the wild yet? It sounds moderately reasonable; one of my concerns is that there's so much other upheaval going on that whatever effectiveness it might have will be lost in the shuffle or essentially impossible to measure well.
Yeah, I don’t know how you could reasonably measure it and there’s lots of other stuff going on. I was initially pretty “meh” on notes, but a lot of the content that would have otherwise been boosted by algos and endorsed via blue checks now gets cooled off pretty quickly because Notes set the record straight.
Having seen this in action a few times, I wish it were around for the 2015-2020 timeline. I could easily see it being more effective than outright censorship at addressing Trump’s election fraud claims or the various claims about policing in America (particularly egregious information a la Michael Brown “hands up, don’t shoot” stuff). Probably could have reduced a lot rioting and cooled a lot of racial strife / election denialism. Of course, this is all hypothetical speculation and I can’t prove it.
Making a Twitter-like service profitable is difficult. To attempt it, you need
(1) Network effects
(2) Infrastructure competency
I think Facebook can provide these faster at a higher level than anyone else who is attempting it. For profit, things that would help include:
(1) No need for profitability
(2) Profit synergies with an existing business
Again, Facebook is a strong competitor here. They can start at #1 and integrate to achieve #2
To get people to switch from Twitter to your service it helps to have:
(1) Brand recognition
(2) Also be a social network
(3) A marketing budget
However, I think getting people to switch is the hardest part for any network; it's affected by many factors. There is also the consideration of getting them to switch, stay, and not be pulled away by a future competitor.
If only a small % of Meta's users start using the app, it'll quickly become an audience too big to ignore. Anyone with Twitter clout will have to maintain a presence there, and being there on Day 1 is an opportunity for them to possibly get more clout.
Facebook can provide network effects but by leveraging your existing social graph. To me it feels like there’s a risk they’ll just cannibalise social activity on their existing apps rather than create a lot of new activity.
Twitter with my Instagram friends won’t feel like Twitter.
I haven’t had any problem using Twitter recently (hardly “barely usable”). They had a technical hiccup that affected some users, but meh, Reddit serves 5XXs for up to an hour a couple of times a month and people don’t hyperventilate about its impending doom. The thing about social networks is that it doesn’t matter much if Twitter isn’t as great as it was in the early 10s, it still has the users and it’s obscenely difficult to pull users away en masse. Threads can probably carve out a big enough swatch to justify its own existence, but whether those users come from Twitter or other Meta properties (cannibalism) remains TBD and in any case I don’t think it will take enough users from Twitter to sink the latter. All of the doomsday prophesy about Twitter feels a lot like motivated reasoning, much like the smug certainty of the media running up to the 2016 election (and I say this as a someone with a “Trump for Prison 2024” yard sign). I’ve been hearing the same people saying (mostly on Twitter) for many months that it’s a sinking ship and they’re leaving and I’m still waiting for the big exodus.
I don't see any evidence Musk understands what made Twitter great, either.
At this point, someone just needs to stand up a Twitter clone that can handle the traffic because I think most regular Twitter users are having a much worse experience on there now -- from my own anecdotal experience as a semi-heavy twitter user.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yahoo Search, MySpace Social Network, and Digg for link aggregation, amirite?
Blackberry smartphones, PalmOS to organize our contacts, Sony Walkmen to listen to music, Symbian Apps, Java ME phone applications. Flash internet content, Juno Email. UltraSPARC systems running SPARC probably won't be beaten by a scrappy open source startup...
How can Twitter be a Windows of anything? It is a tenth of Facebook's size, it's unprofitable and it can't bend any tech partners to its will, as shown by the Google Cloud situation.
I think in the OPs example Twitter is the Windows of being Twitter. If you want to use a Twitter like social network, Twitter is still king. Facebook is massive but it will still need to capture mindshare to unseat Twitter.
It won’t work just like that because those who you want to follow on Twitter have a big following and are invested in the current platform. You’ve got to get big accounts to switch. This Instagram approach may work.
I’m not a fan of Musk but Musk isn’t trying to make Twitter better…
He’s trying to make Twitter able to pay its own bills. Twitter has never made money (except once) in its 17 years of existence.
Twitter as it was should not exist. It’s like a bakery that sells loaves for bread for 20c at a loss. It’s going to eventually implode unless something changes.
> He’s trying to make Twitter able to pay its own bills.
He could've bought seats on the board to accomplish this through standard shareholder activism. By committing a leveraged buyout and saddling the company with an additional >1 billion a year in added debt payments, while simultaneously driving advertising revenue into the ground, he's basically sent the company on a beeline toward insolvency.
I agree that Twitter should pay it's own bills. But the causes for that are obvious from my POV:
* Their add platform is truly terrible. Ask anyone who deals in that area to compare it with Meta or Google's and they will laugh.
* They can't ship new products. Since 2008 they have increased the size of tweets from 140 characters to 280 characters, and that is the biggest change. Look how many things Facebook has tried in the same time. Some failed, but lots succeeded.
Also in the history of bad decisions, surely the decision to kill Vine is right up there? Occasionally people still find an old Vine video and share it. What could have been...
That’s not true about new products: since idk, 2018 or so, they’ve been constantly shipping new ML crap to ruin the main feed. This is why I closed my account in 2020. “Person you follow liked…” is the literal worst feature.
> Those features drive use but did they also increase profit, given that Facebook successfully enshitified their main product (the news feed)?
I don't have any insight into groups, but I do into Marketplace where yes it absolutely did.
I'd be astonished if Pages didn't have a measurable effect too since they are one of the main ways brands (which is a major source of FB revenue) interfaces with FB.
I see a lot of conspiracy theories like this one but zero explanation of motive.
WHY would Musk act as a stooge for the Saudis in this way, at a cost of $44 billion? He's the richest man in the world, he doesn't have to do errands for anyone.
"Parag hurt his feelings, so he impulsively and vengefully made a buyout offer. He almost immediately came to his senses, and unsuccessfully tried for months to wiggle out of the deal" fits the fact pattern. Once he realized he actually had to try and run the thing, he failed. It's a lot simpler than the Saudi thing.
He's the richest man in the world partially because he's desperate for money. Being bottomlessly greedy is a necessary prerequisite to being a multibillionaire, any normal person would retire before they get there. And although he's one of the wealthiest people in the world, his wealth is dwarfed by that of the Saudi state.
Technically the Saudi PIF and the Saudi ownership of Aramco, which runs into trillions, is all property of the Saudi royalty, and increasingly the personal property of the current rulers, father and son. So no, Musk isn't the richest man on the planet.
Musk has been accused of bringing anti-Muslim content to the attention of his millions of followers (like Amy Mek's tweets about the France riots and other things[0]) and I'm sure that wouldn't sit well with Saudi Arabia.
I understand worries of Musk supporting the right, but your interpretation is a unique one that seems highly unlikely.
Saudi Arabia doesn't care about Muslims and Yada Yada. If they did, where's the outcry over Uighurs and what not? Saudi Arabia just cares about one thing and that's securing the interests of the royal Al Saud family.
It's Musk we're talking about here, so Hanlon's Razor probably applies. Unlike his other companies he doesn't have handlers to mitigate his poor decision-making.
Is it really suppressing liberal discourse, or is the new Twitter balancing the sides by letting the conservative discourse run freely? It’s a common fallacy for folks to think that just because they are seeing tweets from the opposite side more that they think their side is being suppressed
Many have doubted Elon Musk during the early days of Tesla and SpaceX thinking he was incompetent in running those companies and the goals were lofty. People still doubt him with as much ferocity as his fans that adore him. It’s super fascinating IMO.
That being said, I do think Instagram will have some success with threads the same way Reels has been successful in fending off TikTok (as in not made completely irrelevant). People who share on TikTok also cross post on IG reels for more views and for eyeballs that are not on TikTok. I think the same thing will happen, where there will be some crossposting. Twitter still has a large audience - that will still make it relevant for some time.
From an Indian perspective, from the Twitter files, shadow banning 40k accounts 99 percent of them being conservative while all the while saying they aren’t doing anything like this was shady.
Add to that there was no prep to the accounts too, it was just provided without any evidence by an online only news publisher who recently posted fake news about Facebook and got caught.
I think this is a different situation to Tiktok. What Reels did was slow the growth of tiktok, by creating the same product that 18 year olds loved, but for the more mature 25-30+ demographic of instagram.
But twitter isn't growing. There isn't an audience for a new twitter for people who haven't used twitter before, because everyone who is a potential user for twitter has already tried it.
So I don't see where the growth will come from, unless meta can force lots of instagram users to actually START using text only. But then they aren't actually destroying twitter, just creating a parallel product for a different audience.
Why does conservative == hate speech? Hate speech isn’t allowed on Twitter - I have not seen that happen without swiftly being modded out. If anything, I am seeing both sides of arguments in topics. There has been more nsfw images and porn. Will be interesting to see how disinformation operates in the new Twitter and if Community Notes can mitigate that
I was asking. I was asking because that was the only way I could make good sense of your comment. Musk did not change Twitter to allow conservative voices: conservative voices were already perfectly welcome on Twitter. The big change to Twitter under Musk was that he allowed hate speech and targetted harassment. (Or, rather, allowed more hate speech: there was already quite a bit.)
> I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great
Well, Elon definitely doesn't.
> the fact that they're heavily branding it with Instagram, using Instagram logins etc suggests to me that they're just looking for another angle to vacuum up user data
They're using the most popular social network which they happen to own, which already has pre-built social connections for most people who might want to try Threads. Almost none of my real-life friends are on Twitter, most of them have active Instagram accounts.
> when was the last time Facebook successfully launched a new standalone social app
It doesn't really matter, what pays off is being able to run experiments faster. Also, despite all of this they don't have a reputation for killing working products. They either dead before this or become good. Applying the past experience doesn't necessarily provides a good estimate for Threads's future.
> They're using the most popular social network which they happen to own, which already has pre-built social connections for most people who might want to try Threads
For sure. And I’m not writing off Threads being a popular app, just the notion that it’ll displace Twitter. To me Twitter is in a different social space than Instagram: the town square rather than the pub with my friends. Even if I move all my pub friends to sit in the town square it won’t be the same thing.
Threads may be very popular among the existing Instagram user base, but the question is whether Twitter users are going to switch.
Elon’s understanding of Twitter is poor, but Zuck’s may be worse. After all, there’s a reason that Twitter users have been on Twitter and not on Facebook all this time. Facebook is a byword for a locked down, unpleasant social network experience.
Twitter gets all the headlines because it’s becoming shittier, but Facebook has been consistently shit for a very long time and Zuck hasn’t seen fit to do anything about that.
All my IRL friends are on both Twitter and Instagram, but use them for different things due to the differences in content, UI and algorithm. From where I stand I don't see people identifying as "Twitter users who have rejected Facebook" but rather just people who go whenever the action is
that totally depends of discoverability and engagement. Bluesky is close to Twitter but doesn't have Meta resources, Warpcast for now is more like Twitter for crypto and decentraland, Mastodon got a lot of traction but also a lot of people leave it bc of discoverability problems. If threads will be close to Twitter with it's own spin, maybe it'll succeed
Instagram itself was Twitter but for photos. It makes sense that they'd wedge Threads as Instagram but for text.
I believe, the primary catalyst for Meta to build Threads is competing with Google and Microsoft on LLMs. Google Groups and GMail have nice and clean conversational data, while Microsoft has that via LinkedIn (and to an extent, GitHub). Short of Facebook and Messenger, Meta has to license from Twitter and Reddit, but might as well try their luck with Threads instead.
I believe they will eventually change WhatsApp's privacy policy to mine the data in there, as well, with the help of "differential privacy" or something, like Apple. Mark is too smart to not to.
It’s hilarious to think of LinkedIn as useful conversational data for an LLM… LinkedIn content… The majority of direct messaging is recruiting spam and almost the entirety of the public posts and replies are so vapid, inane, fake and performative as to be borderline damaging to the mental health of anyone that doesn’t realise it’s all performative bullshit, a business positivism LARP or MUD wrapped in a kayfabe of having anything to do with real business people doing business things… the quality of a model trained on that dataset would be… horrific.
At least pre-Musk Twitter quick to adopt popular user-innovations as first-class features (RT, QT, threads & more); features filtered upwards from users. Musk-Twitter is very top-down in trying to incentivize specific monetizable/political behaviors.
Instagram is not a heavy political brand. This will attract the less controversial groups )like bird watchers) that generate great revenue while keeping out the controversial political ones that are massive money pits.
I think so to, which says a lot about Meta. They understand full well that the Facebook brand is tarnished, irrelevant, or at the very least "old hat". You couldn't launch a new product under the Facebook brand if you wanted to.
The brand under which they launch isn't relevant though, they aren't going to compete with Twitter. The users they'd need to lure over are well aware that Instagram is Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg and will not even try the platform on that basis alone. It's the same reason that their Metaverse doesn't stand a chance, none of the users who would normally be early adopters wants anything to do with them.
Unless they somehow roles Threads into Instagram I don't see this being a massively successful platform.
The users they need to lure over are athletes, musicians, artists, actors etc. They all are already on Instagram, so they can use Threads while maintaining all their followers.
That's not really who I associate with Twitter. If they want to compete with Twitter isn't it business people, politicians, journalists and "thought leaders" they need to move?
Yeah, this is an underrated point. The huge advantage that Instagram has over Mastodon and Bluesk is everyone is already on it. The bootstrap problem is already solved. By the world's least ethical company. It sucks but this is how we live in the Age of Scale.
> and the fact that they're heavily branding it with Instagram, using Instagram logins etc suggests to me that they're just looking for another angle to vacuum up user data
The same user data they already have from instagram?
I think you’re missing the real reason they are leveraging instagram. Network effects. Instead of building a social microblogging platform from the ground up they are jumpstarting it by taking the existing userbase and their relations.
> I think you’re missing the real reason they are leveraging instagram. Network effects.
I’m not missing it, I’m saying this is the exact problem. My social graph on Twitter is totally different than my one on Instagram. So Threads will be “text posts with my Instagram friends”, which may be or may not be compelling. But it won’t replace Twitter.
It's easy for random people on HN and elsewhere to armchair quarterback, and act as if they know for sure what makes Twitter tick. But they don't have access to the data, and they have no experience building or running a massive social network. (The same goes for me. Take all I say with a grain of salt.)
My guess is there is no single answer to what makes Twitter great. It has so many niches and sub-niches that it's completely different for most people. It's a bit like Reddit, but without formal or visible boundaries between communities.
And the network effects are so strong at this point that it's hard to unravel. Musk can make a million mistakes, and Zuck can launch a million alternatives but they aren't going to succeed in convincing the most powerful Twitter users in each community from abandoning the audiences they've cultivated. And as long as they're there, everyone else will be, too.
Twitter got great by serving their users. They observed behaviors and canonized them. Using @mentions, the word “tweet”, hashtags, re-tweets, quote-tweets were all emergent user behavior that twitter codified and amplified. All without getting in the way of the interactions.
`I actually don't think there is. Twitter always had a relatively low number of users compared to other networks. The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it being where journalists and celebrities break news. ` It's that and a very special kind of controlled chaos that's incredibly addicting.
I work in the public sector in the UK in comms - and our department uses Twitter heavily - as well as Instagram. I've no doubt we will be exploring it. f Threads gets good engagement figures and id supported by Hootsuite, I've no doubt we will be all over this.
It doesn't have to be great. Users are already on instagram. Instagram reels were not better than snapchat stories, yet they still basically killed snapchat, because if people are already on Instagram, and so are their friends, that's all that matters.
Instagram Reels is Instagram's TikTok competitor. Instagram called their stories product "Stories." Also, in a lot of ways, Instagram stories were better than Snapchat stories. For one, you have a wider network on Instagram compared to Snapchat, so there is more content to consume. Instagram also added a bunch of nice features, like various stickers you can interact with. The stickers were also tappable like buttons, which took Snapchat a very long time to add.
As a counterpoint: I don’t use Twitter. I don’t tweet, but I care about reading other people’s tweets. But I never made an account on Twitter, because I would have to curate feeds and create an account, and it’s friction for something that’s ultimately not worth that much to me.
But: I’ve already curated Instagram. My alderman posts things there, the sports teams I care about announce things there, local businesses have accounts there. If they suddenly gain the ability to tweet, great! I’m a new customer that Twitter couldn’t convert before. I’ll check it, and they can serve me ads.
When journalists realize that a broader audience of people are reading stuff there, they will follow the eyeballs. The fact that they are on Twitter will cease to matter.
Serious question: for all of you “Musk / Zuck doesn’t get it” folks, what made Twitter great? I’ve never understood the appeal of it. Count me in the camp of those who don’t understand what made Twitter great.
Twitter is a hard platform to get into I think, I used to think for a long time that what good is this thing for. Then it kinda clicked, at least for me it's not about tweeting stuff, but it's more about finding the people who are interesting and participating in discussions.
It takes time to find people to follow who share information that you are interested in. It also takes constant teaching and hiding the info you don't want to see, but once you build a good following of people (for me personally sw dev and tech and so on), the value you can find out from just seeing what people are working on and sharing their findings, can be very valuable and entertaining.
Of course they're looking for new angles to hoover up user data, that's their entire business model.
I see the Instagram login thing purely as a development convenience- I imagine they scrambled to put this together shortly after the initial Musk-Twitter debacle. Easy to see why Meta executives could have smelled blood in the water. Why not get this thing to market faster by piggybacking off existing infrastructure?
- this comment adds value to the discussion (the original intended meaning) for upvote/downvote
- humor is the lubricant that keeps society and discussion flowing smoothly, +1 for funny (though of limited value)
- queue popcorn for the ensuing debate (I have no value to add to the following discussion and don't actually have any sides to throw chips to, but I vote this up as a hot--if not somewhat redundant--debate)
Whatever Twitter is now, it's hardly a social network. Zuck sucks for many reasons but if anyone can beat Musk to replace Twitter it'd be Meta... this is their core focus area. I doubt they'll ever become the metaverse apple/unicorn they want to be.
FB recently has been gaining some good will in dev communities if only for open sourcing llama and some other ai models.
My point is, the paywall will kill Twitter, with or without a competitor to step in and replace them.
The key thing for me is whether it's really a text focused app or they ruin it by trying to cross promote Instagram/Reels and turn it into a mindless time suck.
If they get the little details right, I see this as the only real competition to Twitter right now. After trying Mastodon for a few months, it's certainly not it.
Agreed. I think this succeeds or fails based on the ability to follow different kinds of things from users separately. If I can follow someone's Threads and not their Reels, I'd be glad to have such an easy migration path off of Twitter (I'm having a lot of fun on bluesky, but it's not ready). I'm not optimistic about that though, because you already can't choose to not follow reels separately from pictures.
I never got a Bluesky invite and I've seen a couple comments mentioning "it's not ready" so I'm wondering why people keep saying that? It has been in development for a while, so I would assume it is ready at this point in time.
It's not. Bluesky is still quite primitive. I wouldn't even call it a "beta", more like an alpha.
They gave invite codes to some "influencers", and it got a lot of hype and media attention, but after the hype died down somewhat, it's become basically a nothing burger. I've stopped giving out the invite codes that I'm accumulating, because my feed is pretty boring and dead. Bluesky is far more "promise" than reality.
Meta has 1000x the engineering resources of Bluesky.
You should post any codes you have here, I imagine the HN userbase is more likely than most to be interested in trying a project like that out (or maybe it's just me :))
> diversify the user base to generate more content
That's an incorrect assumption. I've given out codes before. It didn't generate more content, because people quickly lose interest.
The grass is not greener on the other side. It's a dead party. Inviting a few more people isn't going to help. If they open up the gates to everyone, that's a different story, but they're not nearly ready to do that.
It's not a large team, and it's very barebones in terms of features, like DMs. They also weren't ready for the small boom in users trying to sign up the other day, so networking is still a concern for them. Also they haven't been working directly on the app itself this entire time, they also created a new protocol due to Jack's desire to re-evaluate everything rather than "create a twitter clone".
Bluesky feels like a beta. It's missing: DMs, private accounts, gif/video embeds, and any sort of advanced notification controls. They don't have a trust and safety team, and they're using the invite system to slow down their growth because they can't keep up with demand. It's fun at its current small scale, but they aren't ready to be a Twitter replacement yet.
The invite system just really gives off Google+ vibes and I'm wondering if we end up in the same place after Threads launches. Facebook/Meta seems really poised to eat Bluesky's lunch in a few days.
Gmail also had invites to start, back in the day, and that's the de facto email service now.
But that had a compelling day-1 offering that was clearly better - massive free storage allocation. Bluesky doesn't have a compelling reason to sign up like that, so the invite system feels flawed.
GMail's invite system worked because you could use GMail to talk to your non-GMail friends. G+ failed for many reasons, but one of them is that if you got in before all your friends there was just nothing you could actually do there.
> Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN?
I see a bunch of people talking about it on Twitter in the context of "I'm on Bluesky, follow me there in case this implodes". But yeah, >90% of the Bluesky mentions I see are on HN.
I'd expect that Bluesky would launch invites in next few days or so, to those who left their emails. I mean, their competitor is up so why not sent these invites or even open registration for anyone
Unless of course they first want to see how much interest it gains
Well sure, but to be fair they let a lot of "influencers" on some sort of working platform and it got a lot of hype, but since then... You don't hear much anymore. I was just wondering what was going on, they've been working on it for a while now.
My experience with mastodon was the same for a while until Elon took over twitter. Now I do see discussions on stuff I care about although I am starting to see discussions regarding the threat of Meta federating with some big instances of mastodon.
Yeah, seemed like a lot of chatter from people onboarding Mastodon was 'how does this work' or 'how do I use it to build and find community or news' or 'why this is better than other options'.
That seemed to fade fast on an individual basis once there was critical mass to support conversation on other shared interests between users but flares up again from time to time when a new 'wave' of people join. Maybe bluesky just lacks critical mass for user interest overlap other than 'being on bluesky'.
I think this right here is what makes me curious about Bluesky in the first place, the meta discussion on HN about it is weird and I want to see it for myself.
I think it's too barebones and they are still working out the moderation and safety problem. Besides, it looks like it scales like shit. It's not ready for wide adoption, I have to agree about this one.
Social media is definitely not socialization. In a Venn diagram, the cross section of social media and socialization is tiny.
- A very, very small part of socialization may very, very occasionally happen on social media.
- Social media allows for multiple phenomena to happen, but the overwhelming majority of it won't be socializing.
The issue here is the redefinition of "socialization" intrinsically made by the "social media" marketing campaigns. The solution is a better understanding of what human socialization actually is.
This is not a critique of social media. I like and use it, even though I'd like more diversity. But stop mixing it up with "socialization" because it is not, even if the marketing of social media relies on trying to mix them up.
I have a feeling it'll have the intellectual quality of the Instagram comment section, which is worse than the Facebook comment section, which is 10x worse than Twitter.
But I agree if there is heavy integration with the rest of Meta's products I'll be less happy.
Surely this is about who or what you are following though.
Personally there is very little crossover between what I follow on instagram and twitter. So the quality of the discussions vary greatly.
On Twitter I follow developers and product people. The quality is better on Twitter, but it's definitely declined because of engagement seeking over the last few years.
From my experience:
- Feed was purely chronological (no algorithmic feed) so I missed a lot of content
- Sign-up process isn't obvious due to decentralization
- Likes, profiles sometimes had bugs or required extra clicks if from other servers
- Few people I follow migrated from Twitter, and most have since stopped posting due to lack of engagement
People (tech inclined and looking for a forum platform) want chronological feed, yes. But they want it usable too. Mastodon doesn't have any categorization/classification/tags tools, everyting is dumped into a single gigantic realtime thread, and if you blink you miss the post and its gone forever. I tried Mastodon once, when it was just starting out and abandoned after playing around for a while. It's simply unusable, compared to any forum or reddit. Or even to a Facebook, with it's horrible UI. At least FB has groups and pages which kinda work like a bad crutch for categorization. Mastodon is lacking any of that.
> Mastodon doesn't have any categorization/classification/tags tools, everyting is dumped into a single gigantic realtime thread
I don't know whether it helps your use case, but Mastodon has a "Lists" feature, which allows you to group the accounts you follow into separate realtime threads. For instance, one list could be for small accounts from which you don't want to miss any post, while another list might be for high-volume daily news accounts (and IIRC, there's even an option to "hide accounts on this list from your home timeline", so you could use lists for the noisy accounts and have everything else in the home timeline).
> Mastodon doesn't have any categorization/classification/tags tools
Huh? Mastodon certainly has hashtags. Likewise, there are posting groups. More implicitly, different social groups tend to cluster together and re-boost interesting things.
Like, to be clear, fedi isn't going to be the right solution for everybody (or necessarily even for most people), and it's totally valid to dislike it or prefer something else. But it certainly does have organizational tools; they are just differently shaped.
The twitter I used was way more text than media, I had Tweetbot set to small thumbnails as well. For me at least, Twitter started as text only and ended as text mostly.
I hope Threads won't exhibit the same hostility towards the users as IG does.
(What's up with IG and its hostile UX? Videos can't be fast forwarded or tracked at all, profile pictures can't be zoomed, clicking on it brings you to stories, images can't be copied easily, etc.)
Videos not being trackable is such a perplexing one. Is it intended to keep the user watching longer by forcing them to re-watch the whole video if they want to see something again?
It's also there to force the user to watch the full video to see if the build up to some final product was actually worth seeing. Both reasons are there to take seconds off your life to juice their engagement stats.
That's them trying to rate-limit the use by sex workers. Entire sites have sprung up to turn your single allowed Insta link into a number of other links.
I've not seen anyone mention this yet, but: UK twitter is laughing at "Threads" because it's also the title of a notorious made-for-TV horror film about nuclear war https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative
I'm not quite convinced by this; I think there's demand for things to go back how they were, but that's unsmashing the glass and is fundamentally impossible. Everyone seems to be resentfully clinging to the sinking platform until they hit a "f you I quit" moment, such as being rate-limited or their favourite account being deleted without warning.
Also came to see if anyone mentioned Threads, the film. Really great film, but certainly leaves an impact on the viewer. Slack has a feature called 'Threads' and for a long time after they introduced it, every time I opened the app I got a shiver of fear down my spine. This is one of quite a number of reasons I don't imagine I will be using Meta's offering.
> but that's unsmashing the glass and is fundamentally impossible
I think it's the exact opposite. Musk could roll back most of his hated changes and most users would be happy with that. Staff up a bit to deal with stability and legal problems, and all along the way advertisers would slowly but surely return to previous or greater heights. Twitter still has its network effects and would have its benefits that reduce churn/attrition. As a tool and social space it would still be just as valuable to users as it was a few years ago.
Some of the alternatives look better for now, but they haven't yet had the influx of crypto bots, hustlebros and annoying legions of sycophants that Twitter has been purposely changed to magnify. Reversing course and even making some of those things better (e.g. bots) could even be a net gain for Twitter and its users.
But the thing is, users would still dunk on Elon mercilessly for his buffoonery, and for backing down. And he sees those kinds of personal slights as far more important than Twitter's success (or lack thereof). So yeah, from his perspective and his alone, you can never unsmash the glass. Much of the changes so far have become ride-or-die because they are a matter of Ego.
> I've not seen anyone mention this yet, but: UK twitter is laughing at "Threads" because it's also the title of a notorious made-for-TV horror film about nuclear war https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/
I feel like Twitter could have launched “Nests” (flocks?) to replace subreddits in the face of a Reddit exodus and pretty much just reskinned twitter for the specific use case. Hashtags as top level organizing taxonomy (to replace subreddit). Then tweets as your “posts” with nested replies. Twitter had the infrastructure to just hit the ground running too.
Lol, I built this exact thing as a 120% project at Twitter in 2011.
It was called “Flocks”. It even had transient/temporal flocks based on geo check-in and sound-fingerprint flocks for movies, tv shows, and events. We implemented the Shazam audio signature algo from a research paper we found.
The thesis was: it’s more natural for people to have conversations when there’s a shared context.
It became a widely known project within the company back then, but ultimately, like most things at Twitter, never shipped.
Hah! Working backwards would yield some hits for sure.
“Feather” (a play off a quill) was my prototype (I built a lot of prototypes there in my “spare” time :)) for a richer, write/tweet only app. You could author long-form content, quickly jump into the camera for recording video or taking a picture (goal: frictionless citizen journalism), and other stuff. I wanted to build a delightful tweeting experience and at the time, it felt like the mobile implementation was just yanked wholesale from Web.
This is the sort of comment that keeps me coming back to HN - incredible. You were absolutely right that livetweeting TV is one of the great uses of Twitter, and it's a real shame this never got a wider rollout.
During the pandemic we started a sort of "virtual mst3k": cue up a film, everyone presses play at a particular time, and tweet along with jokes and the occasional screenshot. We're now up to film #300 and still haven't run out of "bad" movies. An endless source of cinematic surprises.
("bad" is very loosely defined, but if it's a critical success or made a lot of money, that's probably not it. We've seen a lot of Roger Corman, Shawscope, Hammer, Amicus, Cannon Films, Dino de Laurentiis etc)
> ultimately, like most things at Twitter, never shipped.
This is why the "Twitter will die instantly when 80% of the engineers are sacked" takes were wrong, isn't it? 80% of the engineers were working on products that would never see the light of day, instead.
Yeah! Wanted a really fast/frictionless way for people to jump into a context based on signals in their environment. This was also around the time of Color (the photo app which raised 40m or something off just a pitch deck) — “ambient computing” was becoming part of the zeitgeist.
They are rate limiting the viewing of tweets now. No way they have the capacity to handle Reddit’s content.
Maybe Google can try replicating Reddit in YouTube - it would just be serving text instead of video; discovery would be via their recommendation algorithm, i.e. no subreddits. Frankly, they can kind of already do this, you can post community messages on YouTube. They just need to tweak the algorithm to recommend such messages.
> Maybe Google can try replicating Reddit in YouTube
They can't. Google as an organization just doesn't understand social networking.
They've had comments and forums (community?) for ages. Do you know how to engage in that community? Do you know how to even track your own comments? Etc.
And on the web IIRC it doesn't show any replies to your comments. And if you click on your comment, there's a 50/50 chance Youtube will not show it to you under the video :)
I prefer using lists or trustworthy OSINT accounts for that.
My impression is Twitter search 1. is now smart enough it doesn't need hashtags to assist it but 2. due to policy choices doesn't work.
Namely, searching for term X returns both "posts containing X" but also "every single thing an account with X in their name" said, meaning any search doesn't work unless you block all those accounts.
And then sometimes it includes porn spammers, who are the main users of hashtags.
I didn't know. I suppose this speaks to Instagram/Meta’s differing strategy: build a product as a separate app and then fold its successful features into its main offering. (Eg., Direct, Layout, Boomerang, Hyperlapse).
Let's hope people will move on from OnlyFans. Truth Social was a joke, but I think Twitter will still be as central as Facebook and Instagram and perhaps we never will see a platform that harbors that many users.
TikTok is another beast. It is used by almost everyone but I never met one that had meaningful interactions on it. It is the laziest form of entertainment. Successful, but lazy.
A bit premature. If you recall on instagram trying to kill tik tok, has not worked. I think your schadenfreude is potentially blurring your vision. I couldnt care less for either of these companies - but the demise of twitter is one of the most popular things to prognosticate about and i think its overhyped.
It's a 50/50 bet, if they lose no one is likely to bring it up here in future (unlike on Twitter where "receipts" are kept), if they win then they get to crow about their prescience. Pound shop Nostradamus stuff.
Time will tell. The issue is not scalability. The main issue is conflict. Twitter has both sides there. Truth social is not mainstream even if the main actor is posting every day. Same goes for the other side. There's also social media fatigue. Tiktok came with something "new" and it's growing because of that. Twitter is trying to move into yt space. Fb is trying to stay relevant in anything related to their core business (aka, ads).
I think political content has run its course as a source of eyeballs. Politicians engaging with people was novel in the 2008-12 " hope and change/Arab Spring" era.
It's since been gamified and weaponized for electoral gain. The algorithms pushed it too hard and monetized division to the point where all but the most addicted people have tuned out.
If you're downvoting this because you haven't tuned out yet don't consider yourself addicted, I'm really curious why you still engage with politics on platforms like Twitter? The friends of mine that still do it talk about it like it's something they really wish they could quit, hence I think "addiction" is a fair label, though some genuinely believe it's important to have voices on the platform countering some of the more heinous things being posted.
And just because it makes $2B/yr vs $4b/yr or whatever doesn't mean it cant sustain as a business indefinitely. The bulk of the critique of Twitter these days is whether Musk can make a profit on $40B as if that's what will determine Twitter's survival long term.
Musk losing billions of dollars in the short term is a private loss for bankers and his own vast ever growing wealth. It's not exactly something that kills a business in the timeline people are hoping for. If anything there's probably a long line of B-tier investors willing to prop it up long enough for the dividends to pay off.
Far shittier companies have survived for much longer on much less.
Every Twitter alternative seems to be worse somehow. I wouldn’t mind if Twitter died, I think it gives people brainworms, but I see comments like this and I just see it as wishful thinking.
> but I see comments like this and I just see it as wishful thinking.
Usually with black/white motivations as to why they want it to die while disregarding the realities of social media markets and network effects. See: the countless threads about HN users deleting FB 6-7yrs ago. Meanwhile Meta is doing just fine.
Someone should make a chart of all the times HN claimed FB will die because [x] and overlay it on their stock price: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/quote/meta
I want to see a social media site poach key users onto their platforms. NBA Twitter (over a million people easily) would switch overnight if Shams Charania and Adrian Wojnarowski suddenly switched platforms.
I think with the right UI/UX, Threads could do it. But we'll see.
I don't think so. No Twitter clone, or Twitter consept is going to replace Twitter.
What made Twitter big, what made Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat, big is that they all brought something new on the table. Blueskye, mastodon etc. don't. It's just the same.
People that are active on Twitter have spent years to make a following, and there are no reason to go over to another app and create that same following again. Why spend the time and effort when Twitter still is a thing.
Plus people have been talking about leaving Twitter for a year now, but few people actually have.
Mastodon/fedi certainly brought something new to the table (microblogging with close-knit communities), it just isn't a technical feature nor something that's meant to "scale".
I am completely ok with this. Let the mainstream have their thing and keep mastodon weird. Right now it’s got a usenet/bbs vibe and I love it. That goes away as the mainstream/tide comes in.
Latter refers to the item at the end of the list, i.e. that HN is the one you're done with. Prior is one of the words that's acceptable to refer to the start of the list.
I am/was a twitter doomer, and jumped ship to mastodon ages ago. I'm not convinced Threads will manage to capture the people that used Twitter (which was significantly media & politics types) and kill Twitter.
Personally, I don't have faith Meta will remain comitted to Threads. We spurn Google for killing of projects, but Meta/Facebook has a history of spinning up side projects especially for Instagram and killing them not too long after. Threads has already been killed! https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
Mastodon ain’t it because the exact minute a minimum wage Geek Squad tech has to explain to a sorority group the reason they can’t follow each other is because they are using different federated instances is the exact minute mastodon fails to gain any mainstream appeal. It will likely always captivate some niche of users looking for a slice of the nostalgic, techie internet (Mastodon will remain an HN darling no doubt), but a Twitter drop in, it is not.
I wish you were right. People talk about it "failing" because it fails to meet the expectations set by capitalist platforms, and you are exactly correct - Mastodon is a throwback to the time before these beasts inundated the earth with their tidal wave enshittification.
But I just closed my account this morning cause there is a large mob now who are quite determined that this will be twitter 2.0, and they are already bullying the culture in that direction.
There’s a big graveyard of products/companies that have tried to kill Larry over the years.
Meta has been trying since 2009. Back then, a former, well-known Facebook employee once told me not to join Twitter (thankfully, I didn’t listen). He said they, “have a wall at the office with a list of all the things Twitter does well. Every week someone checks another item off. We’re going to kill Twitter.”
This moment is probably Meta’s best chance. I’d say, if it doesn’t happen this try, it probably never will.
I could not disagree more. I really don't think people are going to trust Meta that much more over Twitter. I'm a pretty avid Twitter lurker and I don't even plan on trying out the app.
I'm also a very happy Lemmy and Mastodon user, but going from Twitter to Threads is just trading Elon for Zuckerberg - a useless lateral move.
This is thing I don't understand. I admit, I never used Twitter, but out of curiosity I created mastodon account yesterday and honestly I don't have any difficulty using it, it is very straight forward. Patent poster mentioned scaling issues, I don't observe any delays and apparently mastodon grew a lot yesterday.
Mastodon has short-lived slowdowns on the biggest servers when it’s going through explosive growth, and somehow people spin this into general scalability issues. It’s not a problem in reality.
Twitter went down completely all the time in the early days.
I share your sentiment. I use Twitter for business and Instagram (before I deleted it) for friends. I follow very different accounts on each. I'm not going to mix business and pleasure so to speak, especially with Meta's poor privacy reputation.
And for people who have strong negative opinions on Musk, most of them hate Zuckerberg too. For them, Threads might have a better chance if it was a non-Meta product.
The AI mania has been great for Meta. The android, Zuckerberg is ideally suited to take advantage of it. All year, Meta has been publishing a steady stream of fun, almost-open-source AI models. They have, no doubt, gained a huge amount of kudos, in a short time, from all the AI bros who have taken over twitter. Credit where it's due, the 2023 firmware and model updates to Zuckerberg have been quite impressive.
I agree, but I really wish I could've seen the spectacle if they had been able to launch this past weekend. Twitter is still in rough shape, but it was flat out non-functional on Saturday, which is one of its busiest days of the year (the start of NBA Free Agency).
Agreed. When Instagram added stories, my entire Snapchat friendlist disappeared within a month and they were all posting to Instagram instead. I think the same will happen here. But it will be lopsided toward people who are already more popular on Instagram than they are on Twitter, which is a lot of social/non-professional audiences. I expect that Twitter accounts with large followings will continue posting there, and Twitter will continue to dominate the professional niches (coding twitter, medical twitter etc.) while the more general shitposting and possibly even politics will move to Threads.
> Twitter will continue to dominate the professional niches (coding twitter, medical twitter etc.)
I couldn't speak about "coding twitter" in general, but Apple developer Twitter in specific has almost entirely migrated to Mastodon (as well as a large contingent of the Apple news media). I see a lot of non-Apple devs there too.
I think this is a biased view held by people who migrated to Mastodon. In my experience on Twitter, the coding topics are as lively as ever, particularly around Web development. Personally, the introduction of the "For You" page has triggered me (very low following, previously inactive) to interact with accounts just because the algorithm does such a good job of surfacing relevant niche technical content for me.
I don't know about Apple Twitter myself, but Web Dev Twitter seems more active. Infosec Twitter was a notable niche that loudly proclaimed they were moving to Mastodon but in fact many of them are still quite active on Twitter.
Yes and that might actually be a better outcome. Keep the narrow lines of shared concentration spheres bumping state of the art who did what releases on Twitter and have the more social social media noise join on Insta where thats already happening. Not even sure I would notice a change if that was the way it played out.
I do wonder how much stickiness Twitter has for professional niche communities. Don't they also enjoy shitposting? Isn't what makes it kinda work -- the interconnectedness of the platform?
> I expect that Twitter accounts with large followings will continue posting there, and Twitter will continue to dominate the professional niches (coding twitter, medical twitter etc.)
Coding maybe, but I think Musk's perceived hostility towards the trans community is going to drive medical and educational Twitter to the first viable alternative, and they will serve as catalysts to peel off other professional groups.
The big obstacle is that people worked really hard to get their followers and some of Twitter's best accounts only have 1k-50k followers, which will be hard for them to get back on Threads. Elon will no doubt make it extremely difficult for people to share their Thread's handles on Twitter. Celebrities can build followings immediately and won't care.
Your point must ellude me then, unless by point you just mean you were being ironic, which wouldn't change my reply since it was a little tongue in cheek itself.
Just because there is porn on Twitter doesn't invalidate the fact it is the app for spreading ideas in public. The most popular people on Twitter post their thoughts and opinions, Instagram's most popular users are people who like showing off things visually. In many cases this is images of themselves.
I didn't miss your point then. You've unfairly summarized one app as a thirst trap in spite of it's myriad other users, while underplaying the role of porn on another. Twitter is an app for thought in the same way Instagram is an app for photography. They both have cohorts of cheap thrill users and users who are being more thoughtful.
Surprised I haven't seen this response, but I have a suspicion that Threads will be a referendum on Elon, and most of Twitter's left leaning users (which are most of its users, or at least most of its power users) will flock to Threads, which will start the death spiral. That's my forecast, anyway.
The blue bird is going to die soon with Musk at the helm. He only seems to make decisions in the dumbest and most haphazard ways possible.
That's not to say that something else will kill it. It's more likely that for most folks, they'll just stop or shift to something different that's not like Twitter (e.g., Instagram).
I'm not exactly bullish on Twitter, nor a fan of Musk, but I don't think it'll happen quite that way. I suspect Twitter will lose in the long run but it won't be this sudden or as soon.
I feel like this has been being said repeatedly (remember the "Twitter will irrecoverably go down any day this week!" craze from late last year after the layoffs?) and yet hasn't really materialized in a meaningful sense.
Sure, the fediverse has been growing, but most users haven't left Twitter, they've just also made an account on the fediverse. I don't see how this will be any different. It's already normal for people to have both a Twitter and an Instagram account, or even stuff like both a TikTok account and posting shorts on YouTube.
> It's already normal for people to have both a Twitter and an Instagram account.
This is the key! Because now if Twitter or Elon annoys you, you just delete Twitter and are already on an identical service with all your followers essentially.
It's not so much how many users have abruptly left, it's how much people are actively using Twitter and posting on it. How many people are just ghosting the site?
I thought many here were saying Meta was 'dying' a year ago because of Zuckerberg, layoffs, etc. Now they are changing their opinions and predictions like the weather, based on emotion and supporting the further monopolization of social networks?
> I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer.
More like it destroys Substack Notes, Post, T2, Hive.social and all the other so-called 'alternatives'.
The same people who incorrectly predicted Twitter's immediate collapse are now furious that didn't happen. Now we see them hastefully predicting the end of Twitter again. It is quite hilarious and this will age extremely poorly.
This actually also destroys and corrupts Mastodon from the inside out as they are split in federating or de-federating with Meta already as many admins signed NDAs with Meta to have no choice but to federate.
It seems HNers here really don't understand what network effects are. Quite very fixated and emotional about Twitter's immediate collapse (that didn't happen) and constantly don't learn from history and just continue to make up fantasies on the spot and blinded by schadenfreude.
HNers obsessed with Twitter remind of westerners who obsess over the Ukraine war who have said that Russia has lost and run out of missiles, tanks (insert item) 20 different times now. Only for Russia to prove them wrong over and over again. And with complete lack of shame or self awareness, they continue to make terrible predictions which continue to be wrong, and pretend that the past predictions never happened.
The stickiness of Twitter isn't just about reliability and handling scale, but also (and in fact mostly) the network effects.
You can't transfer over your content, likes, replies, followers. So even in the best case scenario where Threads picks up and outshines Twitter in the long term, do expect that to be a long term. At least few years.
That is, unless Elon continues on his steady path of catastrophic degradation of the service, which is also possible.
We've seemingly had consensus Twitter is dead since October. Even earlier maybe. And yet people are staying on it. Even all those people who are constantly "quitting it" or tweeting all day that's it's dead.
Therefore beyond the facade of the public discourse, people will keep using Twitter while it works. Anything else they will do to have plan B will be in addition to Twitter, not instead of.
Meaning few did and will abandon their accounts outright, but they will have the link to this and that in their bio.
Do you have an example of that happening before? Every exodus I've seen is just the most vocal bubbles jumping ship for political reasons, but once the dust settles ends up being just a rounding error.
Companies can and do die, but rarely (if ever) because a niche on one end of the political spectrum has a tantrum. Have you considered that what you call consensus might just be within your bubble? I don't know anyone who cares.
should. I hope it does. Treating users like they are deserves much worse.
> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative
Nope.
If there was, we'd already have seen more attempts with some strong competition.
Twitter has always struggled to make more money. Founding team and CEO are gone. Musk tried all he could to get himself out of buying it. Twitter board was desperate to sell it.
Twitter's power users were happy with 140 chars and a textbox. They got there years ago. They're still there not because of what Twitter has become, but despite of it. Not many, not a growing community and they're not leaving.
What kept it alive en-masse was celebs and politicians. They're seemingly not missing Twitter.
Threads is about Ego. Musk burned $400 billion and Zuck $650 billion on shit ideas. This is them dueling, burning more money just to prove they know how to make popular products. In reality neither has a
a fking clue about what people actually want.
Interactions on Meta follow “proximity”-based neighborhood customs (birthdays, pictures of kids, social flexing, vacations). Polite society dinner talk.
You do not need to be followed on Meta, only liked.
Interactions on Twitter follow “rules” of interest-based disputes and discussion (sports, finance, AI dooming, technology predictions).
You do not need to be liked on Twitter, only followed.
So basically like predicting Instagram will destroy Snap/Tiktok by cloning features like stories?
One of those HN threads you see people bookmark and bring up years later to show HN's competence at prediction using only the current day market players which they glibly generalize as generic pools of social media users going to these sites for their feature sets, like buying CDs of software by looking at the back cover at a store in 1998.
Agreed. Everybody here is thinking about how they as technical users have used twitter and use mastodon/bluesky. The general public doesn’t care. Twitter has more friction now and this threads thing seems like it won’t. If Facebook got the permissions/privacy right, this could be their next big thing
I have Facebook and Instagram DNS-blocked on my network and have negative feelings towards Meta.
But I wouldn't feel bad if Threads took over Twitter's most important data generators (politicians, journalists, newssites). I dislike what Twitter has been turned into, it's close to nothing else but a megaphone for the owner to mostly troll the world.
If Threads would be usable on a desktop via a website, I'd gladly register, but I won't install social media apps on my phone except for HN and Reddit via a 3rd party apps of good reputation.
Hmm, corporate crystal-balling coupled with remnants of activism... In my book, twitter was never useful and always a waste of time for non-journalist, however, people are still using it :-)
Why is there a demand for a alternative? I dont see any signs. All channels I follow. I mean large channels like brands, politicians etc are still using twitter. Nothing changed there.
And what is the parallel between instagram and twitter? Indeed. Nothing. Meta completely lost his mind here
Talking about young people. Snapchat and Tiktok is what they use. Noone uses meta anymore. Most people before 16 dont even have a Meta account.
Meta the new Yahoo.
Here's why this is an uphill battle, which no-one seems to understand. Everyone who actively participates in twitter, and even has a modest following, is tied to twitter.
You cannot move a 100k followers from twitter to thread. All the influential people HAVE to keep using twitter to serve their followers. Even if they build a following on thread, it will take years to build what they have on twitter.
The problem with this is that that following is only worth something if they actually see your posts, and stats on twitter makes it clear how small a proportion of your following will see any given of your tweets. Other interaction drives that home as well. Typically people seem to largely get far more engagement with a far smaller number of followers on Mastodon, and the same will be true on other new platforms for two simple reasons: Attrition and the algorithmic feed. Most long lived accounts will have a huge number of followers that have simply stopped using twitter, and secondly the default being the "for you" tab means that people have a habit of following accounts they never engage with or ever even see a tweet from, and so the follower numbers on Twitter are vastly overestimating how many people are actually meaningfully "following" you in the sense that they're still logging in and seeing what you tweet.
Doesn't mean you won't still have a challenge building up a presence again on a new platform, but getting to the point of equal engagement in a new platform where users are motivated and active only takes a tiny proportion of your followers to make the move.
I addressed that in the sentences immediately following what you quoted, but to clarify the point on algorithmic feeds:
I think it is relevant to any new social media, because even with an algorithmic feed, unless it's really badly done, you'll first start to swamp out an increasing number of those you follow once you follow a large number and/or have given a strong signal about which of them you actually engage with, so you're likely to get a "honeymoon period" even with one where the need for a huge following seems less important because your followers are in that situation too.
I was about to agree with you, until I noticed they called it a "text-based conversation app". I just scrolled through my Twitter feed, and out of the first 50 posts in my feed, 46 of them were accompanied by either an image or a video. If Threads truly is a text-only platform, then the communities I'm a part of won't have any use for it.
I'm not sure I'm actually going to use Threads. My Instagram and Twitter worlds are wildly different, and by using Instagram for login I'm reluctant to conflate the two.
This just seems like they want another vertical to vacuum user data and cram advertising.
I'm not against it, I'd just rather it was its own platform.
I doubt that Threads will be free from the political flamewars that engulfed Twitter.
It's inherent in the content type.
It's just hard to argue with photos, but it's the default with text, especially given the propensity for some people to interpret everything in the worst possible light.
HN disables answers after some period of time, which appears to be a couple of weeks.
I think Twitter won't go in a couple of weeks. I also think that in case of Twitter not going anywhere in a year or so, we won't be able to call your call, due to HN comments disabled.
What do you propose to resolve that?
Regarding the core of your proposal, these who use Twitter and these who use Instagram, are different people. Twitter is primarily text based, Instagram is primarily picture and video based.
My prediction is that there will not be huge (dozens of percents) outflow from Twitter to Threads. I also think that there won't be noticeable (dozens of percents) use of Threads by Instagram users.
Instagram is already a social network of people with needs different from social network like Twitter.
It’s been nearly two decades since Meta last made an original new product that was successful. People on Instagram have close to nothing to say. Good luck to Meta trying to become relevant again.
Talking about Mastodon is talking about the wrong level. Whether or not the Fediverse succeeds does not depend on Mastodon alone, but also e.g. Pleroma, Misskey, Akkoma, Pixelfed, Peertube, Bookwyrm, Lemmy, and many more, all of which federate.
It's very possible we've not yet even seen the killer app for the Fediverse yet, but it can survive even if none of them individually get "big enough" in a way that many of the other Twitter competitors won't, not least because they're viable even as small self-contained communities.
As such, they don't need to "have a shot", and in the long run, ironically, that gives both the network as a whole and individual apps a shot. E.g. you can launch w/ActivityPub compatibility and instantly have some degree of network effect that helps levelling the playing field.
This would be about the tenth death of Twitter proclaimed loudly and confidently on this very site. Meanwhile Twitter’s popularity continues to grow. Good luck with this one.
> I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion.
No matter how hard I try to keep my Twitter timeline clean of politics, the algorithm fills my timeline.
If Threads doesn't do that, I'm in.
Except it won't, because two decades of social media have taught those companies that 'engagement' is key, so they'll shovel the same *.
> I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion.
Good, but I expect the first movers are going to be the anti-Musk types that tried to go to Mastodon, which means half that "political discourse" will move to a different app. So there will be two echo chambers.
Sort of. It's clear yet to what degree they'll federate or be able to federate given the animosity towards Meta and the seeming back room negotiations they've been alleged to be engaged in.
Same with news outlets, government accounts, agency and municipality accounts etc. Forcing login was such a tonedeaf move. Twitter was a broadcast platform, the internet soapbox, now it can't be and there's no reason for those accounts to stick around. Previously those entities could assume Twitter was essentially the internet's town centre, now they can't.
I wonder if it was an attempt to cater to advertisers concerns over bot traffic inflating ad numbers.
Journalists are not that critical to it. They actually get paid for contributing to other sites, some of which Musk has now banned like Substack, and they specifically don't get paid to tweet.
There are other large communities on Twitter. These include sports, semipro artists, the nation of Japan, people in politics, and a variety of assorted insane people and scammers like crypto, VCs and vaccine skeptics.
The reason it's failing is that the last group now owns the site.
Your comment makes no sense. Why would a vaccine skeptic be in the same group as a venture capitalist and why would they be in the same group as a scammer. And why do you think two people have something in common because one of them is Japanese and the other is a sport athlete?
This seems like some contrived way for you to just state your hatred towards certain people, and not much more. Keep on hating I guess, but that doesn't say anything about Twitter.
That said, the Twitter-owning VCs are trying to become political kingmakers by promoting scammer presidential candidates who are all antivaxxers and going to lose.
I am referring to them, yes. After all, nobody else exists, so there's no one else to refer to really.
Although Marianne Williamson (maybe the distant #3 alternative candidate) is generally antivax since she's from the older group of naturalistic-fallacy hippie women where the idea originally caught on.
RFK and Desantis are doing it because the vaccine was a major policy accomplishment of both the last two presidents, ie the party leaders they're running against. It may seem like a natural political opportunity but it's a bad move since normal voters don't like crazy people.
RFK is doing it because he's thought vaccines were bad for literally his entire adult life, here's an article from 2011 where Salon had to retract a thing they let him publish in 2005 on the subject:
You're not required to bring everything you've believed your entire life to your political campaign though. In fact, it's better not to. You're there to do a job, not get a prize for believing things.
I have no side in this debate because I don't support any of the potential candidates, but since US politicians are not effectively disciplined by their base but rather by their donors, it's quite reasonable for the base to seek evidence of past commitment to issues they prioritize. It's a very poor heuristic, but it's all they've got. As you said, the politicians are doing a job, but they don't take their orders from the voters. The system is utterly ruined.
Twitter doesn't have "free speech rules". There is no connection between something Elon said once and the actual moderation system. This is true even though he owns it.
(The mods seem to ban accounts that get enough reports without really reading them. If I report an account it does tend to get banned 3-4 months later even though they've already sent me an email saying they ignored my report.)
Hate to break it to you but when Professor Skullmeasurement went to an African country in 1920 and gave people IQ tests in a language they didn't speak then wrote a paper about it, that data is in fact racist.
Or more recently, Harvard's algorithms that mathematically demonstrate Asians don't have interesting personalities.
No, it's less safe for it because he fired all the lawyers protecting you from governmental consequences of speech.
The moderation didn't actually change either though. They unbanned a bunch of people once, but as I said I've gotten a fair number banned again since they can't stop themselves.
Why does everyone have to disclaim that they would be a fan Meta/FB? We already know that everyone hates Meta on HN; gets kind of old, just express your unbiased opinions.
You are 1000% right. Facebook’s value prop since instagram started doing stories has been ripping off successful social media apps. Snapchat but it’s done in instagram. TikTok but it’s done (less well) in instagram. Twitter paved over their moat, and their lunch is going to be eaten by this.
I won’t be using it, but it will probably absorb a lot of the dopamine scrollers from Twitter and those are the people advertisers most want. So yes it probably will hasten Twitter’s demise.
I don’t think original Twitter is coming back in any form. Tech people and a few lefties go to Mastodon. Cryptobros go to Nostr. Scrollers go to Threads if they aren’t already on TikTok. Not sure who is going to Bluesky.
Twitter will be left with culture war trolls screaming at each other and outrage porn. That’s not going to attract a lot of ads.
Twitter is done. There's no question about it. BREAKING NEWS: a bombshell. Today is a turning point, today was historically bad for Twitter. A turning point. We're at a turning point here. The beginning of the end for the Twitter administration. The beginning of the end! Breaking news: we have ANOTHER bombshell! Mike Zuckerberg might have to assume the office of the Twitter. The call for impeachment. Rumblings of the word impeachment"". Breaking news, another bombshell out of the Twitter HQ. I believe this is the beginning of the end. It's really the beginning of the end. The beginning of the end. He may be feeling the walls closing in on him. All the walls closing in on him. The walls closing in. Breaking news: a new bombshell. One astrologer says says this means the beginning of the end for Twitter. The beginning of the end of the Twitter presidency. Twitter will resign. Is this the tipping point? I know we've said it over and over... you think this is the tipping point? ... and over and over... this is a tipping point... and over and over. Breaking news: Twitter off the rails. This was the beginning of the end today. The beginning of the end... Reminds me a lot of the last days of Nixon. Breaking news tonight: new bombshell. This is the beginning of the end....
There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't been able to fulfill it due to scalability and network stickiness reasons. Meta can absorb all of twitter's traffic without breaking stride, and they'll have a userbase in the millions within hours of launch that's able to hop over from IG.
RIP twitter, 2006-2023.