[HN Gopher] Threads, an Instagram app
___________________________________________________________________
Threads, an Instagram app
Author : Xeophon
Score : 950 points
Date : 2023-07-03 23:31 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apps.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apps.apple.com)
| bakugo wrote:
| I can tell just by the name alone that this is going to flop
| pretty hard.
| paxys wrote:
| Interesting that it's an "Instagram app" and not a Meta app.
| LordShredda wrote:
| Because only losers use facebook. the cool kids use Instagram,
| a totally different thing
| cft wrote:
| Cool kids used Instagram till 2015. Now their parents use it,
| while they use TikTok
| jdm2212 wrote:
| The parents are the ones with money to spend, which means
| they're the ones advertisers want.
| peruvian wrote:
| A lot of young people are back on Facebook for Marketplace.
| It's the "app" a lot of people use nowadays to find cool
| second hand furniture.
| hbn wrote:
| That's literally the extent though. And a little bit for
| groups. But other than that, I don't know the last time
| myself or any of my friends have posted a status update.
| Maybe the occasional wedding announcement or baby photos,
| but it has to be that big of an event. And then the women
| get more active when they become moms, cause seemingly the
| family who skews older wants to see the babies.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I'm guessing they're going to try to meld the two together
| sometime down the road. Branding it as connected to Instagram
| now will make the transition less jarring.
| gochi wrote:
| Not that interesting, the app is mostly relying on Instagram
| infra to operate. Hence, log in with Insta and keeping your
| username being the primary selling point.
| impulser_ wrote:
| It because it's integrated with Instagram.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:
|
| Health & Fitness
|
| Purchases
|
| Financial Info
|
| Location
|
| Contact Info
|
| Contacts
|
| User Content
|
| Search History
|
| Browsing History
|
| Identifiers
|
| Usage Data
|
| Sensitive Info
|
| Diagnostics
|
| Other Data
| saos wrote:
| "An Instagram app"
|
| LOL almost forgot that Meta owns Instagram. Nice try Facebook!
|
| #deleteFacebook
| darklycan51 wrote:
| I'm not touching anything by Zuckerberg again, nice try though
| victor22 wrote:
| Twitter = free speech Meta = lol
| GSimon wrote:
| For those racing to call this an end to Twitter, remember which
| platform allows you to post spicy pics.
| meindnoch wrote:
| So after all, you _can_ write twitter in a week, it seems.
| mellow-lake-day wrote:
| This has been in the works since January and still hasn't been
| released, so at least half a year
| meindnoch wrote:
| I worked at Meta. Maybe I worked at the slowest department,
| but based on what I saw, if they really built this in half a
| year, then I'm absolutely positive that a nimble team of four
| can replicate it in a few weeks at most.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I'm calling it, network effects are very hard to overcome. Users
| with thousands of follows will have to wait a loooong time to
| have Threads side to catch up. In the mean time they will
| absolutely use Twitter along with Threads and the one likely
| getting abandoned is Threads.
|
| New users will find empty content, mostly discussions that are
| already on twitter but at a small scale and reach
| ghop02 wrote:
| just need a "follow who you followed on twitter" feature
| tremarley wrote:
| API fees will be high on that order?
| vlunkr wrote:
| There are already more people on instagram than twitter, so the
| network effect is already in their favor.
| Cwizard wrote:
| I think it is surprising they went with the Instagram branding.
| Instagram has a better brand reputation than Facebook but I would
| also say that the brand image is still more for young and fun
| content, less serious things. Which I would think appeals more to
| younger people 20-35yo.
|
| While what makes twitter great is that it is a more serious
| platform where you can get the 'insight' of professionals
| (journalists, politicians, etc).
|
| That being said, Twitter's brand is in the toilet right now.
| Maybe that is enough for this to attract people.
|
| I do wonder what the alternative would be? Whatsapp branding?
| Feels off too... Would it have been better to use a new brand?
| naillo wrote:
| It's either instagram or facebook and the facebook brand is in
| the gutters so it's not like they had much choice.
| tbolt wrote:
| Meta?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| If this is any good I'll 100% switch off of Twitter
| l33tc0de wrote:
| Just like all those who have mastodon links on their twitter
| profile and still complaining on twitter
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| You can't tip over a vending machine by yourself with one
| push
|
| Ya gotta rock it
| jwmoz wrote:
| Of all the alternatives though for the love of god why Facebook
| Lucent wrote:
| "Keep your username" already sold me. Exhausted with every new
| namespace landrush. Lemon8 made a terrible mistake not
| piggybacking off TikTok's, alienating everyone who didn't want to
| battle anew, and no one is happy with Discord's disastrous
| rollout.
| esskay wrote:
| This _could_ be a twitter competitor. But the instance of
| bundling it with Instagram is what will ensure it fails. Meta
| have absolutely no common sense when it comes to understanding
| their audience.
|
| If you're going to take on Twitter why on earth would you make
| Instagram a part of that when the two share nothing in common.
| gemstones wrote:
| Could it be that you don't understand Instagram? My circle of
| friends all rely on Instagram for announcements (mostly local)
| in addition to seeing updates/photos/etc. Twitter just
| underserved this market, and Meta realized that Instagram does
| serve this market, badly. Right now my local politicians have
| to put their text posts in a square image on a story, but it
| would be more convenient for them and me if they could post in
| a text format to their existing Instagram audience.
|
| What I expect to happen is for Instagram to expose how bad
| Twitter was at converting potential users, rather than for
| Twitter to expose that Instagram users have no overlap with
| their use case.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Will this also take some of Reddit's market? If so, Meta was just
| given a golden opportunity that couldn't have fallen together
| more perfectly.
| perceptronas wrote:
| I suspect after some time this will fail and will get merged back
| to Instagram.
|
| Instagram is already a "twitter" app they have. I think IG idea
| is even better: tweet with image. Of course, they messed it up
| big time with various anti-consumer measures. Why would this be
| any different? I am also wondering, if Threads fail - what do
| they lose?
|
| Its the same with Notes of Substack. If Notes fail in 2 years -
| can they continue? I imagine they already felt negative effect of
| their move.
| [deleted]
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| Any details about what APIs would be available?
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Disappointing that competitors are bootstrapping new social
| networks by mass-scraping Twitter data. This is almost certainly
| what Elon was referring to earlier this week; the same thing
| happened with Substack Notes. Hope Twitter pursues legal action
| against Meta for this.
| gsabo wrote:
| I'm curious how you think data scraping could be used to
| bootstrap a new social network like this
| smoldesu wrote:
| What content is being scraped, here?
| tills13 wrote:
| maybe I missed it but how does this utilize Twitter data for
| bootstrapping?
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| I am not sure what you mean? Why does Threads need any Twitter
| data?
| threeseed wrote:
| a) There is no evidence of mass-scraping.
|
| b) It is legal and ethical to scrape public data. Especially
| when that data is owned by its users and not by Twitter.
|
| c) The more likely explanation for Twitter's rate limiting is
| that they didn't pay their AWS/Google bill and rather than cut
| the service off they limited its bandwidth and/or compute
| capacity.
| asdadsdad wrote:
| Meta is extremely hypocritical about scraping. They
| continuously send their legal team to threaten third parties on
| scraping of their platforms yet time and again are caught red-
| handed
| danShumway wrote:
| > are bootstrapping new social networks by mass-scraping
| Twitter data
|
| I am 99% sure that this is not a real thing and that you're
| using all of these words incorrectly.
|
| When was Substack illegally scraping Twitter data? What Twitter
| data is being used to bootstrap Threads?
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| > When was Substack illegally scraping Twitter data?
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1644638493883211779
|
| > What Twitter data is being used to bootstrap Threads?
|
| I have no proof of this. It's just speculation. I also don't
| have an iDevice so I can't install the app and look for
| myself.
|
| But the timing of Twitter's rate limiting this week, combined
| with Elon's clarification that Twitter data is being mass-
| scraped, combined with the launch of Threads this
| week...can't be a coincidence, can it?
| danShumway wrote:
| I can't read this tweet to find out what Elon is claiming
| because... _gestures wildly around at the state of
| Twitter_.
|
| But linking to an Elon Musk tweet does not on its face
| change anything about my prior that this is not a real
| thing and that you're using all of these words incorrectly.
| Elon thinks everything that is personally inconvenient to
| him is illegal. He's threatened legal action in the past
| over advertisers just not buying ads from him.
|
| He just says stuff. But you have to apply some critical
| thinking here -- what would it even look like to
| "bootstrap" Threads with Twitter data? These words mean
| things, if Threads is being bootstrapped with stolen data,
| there should be Twitter data on Threads -- accounts should
| be mirrored, content should be mirrored, there should be
| something. Is there?
|
| > But the timing of Twitter's rate limiting this week,
| combined with Elon's clarification that Twitter data is
| being mass-scraped, combined with the launch of Threads
| this week...can't be a coincidence, can it?
|
| The timing of Threads launching this week is probably a
| direct response to _gestures wildly around at the state of
| Twitter right now._ I find it incredibly unlikely that
| Instagram launching Threads crippled Twitter 's
| infrastructure.
|
| Particularly given that Elon Musk himself claimed (also
| likely incorrectly) that it was AI companies crippling the
| site, not rival social networks.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| actually it can, because threads has probably been in
| development for months? I doubt Zuck put it together since
| Friday. Most likely he knew Elon musk is an idiot who
| doesn't know the first thing about social media companies
| and has created a power vacuum for a Twitter like app, and
| now there's one for a Reddit like app..
|
| If someone could marry the two, in a non profit Wikipedia
| sort of way, with decent Democratic way to moderate and
| vote on new features etc, we could kill two birds with one
| stone and replace both Twitter and Reddit.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Friend, I am a fan of, and highly recommend use your
| critical thinking skills to evaluate statements that others
| make before parroting them. I don't repeat things that make
| no sense on their face, like "Substack is scraping Twitter"
| or "Threads is bootstrapping off Twitter data".
|
| Like, what would that even mean? Do you really think Meta
| is going to launch a Twitter competitor and just wholesale
| impersonate accounts and their content? If not, what even
| are you implying?
|
| (from the "proof" link where Elon was accusing Substack of
| scraping:)
|
| >2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of
| the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so
| their IP address is obviously untrusted.
|
| lol, reading that still makes me chuckle. I can't believe
| people eat his crap up even when the circumstances make it
| clear that he's backpeddaling and desperately trying to
| save face.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > can't be a coincidence, can it?
|
| Boy do I have a cosmic bridge to sell you!
| clipsy wrote:
| As respectfully as possible: can you define what you mean by
| scraping? Because it seems very much like you don't understand
| what that word means or are using it very idiosyncratically.
| 0x53 wrote:
| As others have said, I'm sure this will do really well and is
| probably close to the final straw for Twitter. I just wish it
| wasn't being produced by meta. I really hope that a non-meta
| competitor is able to gain significant market share.
| yarsanich wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| I think the real longcon of this is to seed people into a TikTok
| competitor using the existing meta user base who will gladly give
| it a try initially. It will catch plenty of the Twitter crowd and
| even reddit crowd but that's just a coincidence of the state of
| those platforms. Long term I think it will be to agrigate their
| more active users away from Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat
| into something that provides the lowest common denominator of all
| of them so they can slowly erode them as part of the Embrace
| Extend Extinguish playbook taking a cue from M$ They took the
| best engineers and lessons learned from the platforms they bought
| but ideally they don't want to maintain products that do 80% of
| the same functions
| annadane wrote:
| The problem with Facebook's products always comes down to one
| overriding fact, Zuckerberg's desire to win over everybody else;
| he's constantly been accused of stealing from people, it's not a
| surprise everything he owns is either extremely coercive or
| broken from a technical standpoint
| maverickmax90 wrote:
| Never seen a more idiotic response lol. Twitter was there during
| fb highest time ...people have moved away from meta cra* because
| of values difference.
|
| Hope you are from planet earth BTW.
| keyle wrote:
| Wait, where is the web version?
|
| A big part of twitter is the web client... and embedded tweets
| all over the internet.
|
| Did they start this product by cloning instagram and removing the
| image centric approach? Why is this not a website first? My gut
| feel is that this competes as much with instagram as it does with
| Twitter.
| nickwanninger wrote:
| It looks like threads.net is going to be a web version --
| though it isn't very clear how useful it will be.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Instagram has a web version, and the ability to HTML embed
| instagram posts, so it seems likely that this will have a web
| version.
| timeon wrote:
| At least one can see some content on Instagram web while not
| logged in. If Tweet is no embedded one is out of luck.
| robswc wrote:
| >Instagram has a web version
|
| The web version is downright awful. Maybe given this is a
| greenfield project, it won't meet the same fate... but yea.
| The "web version" of instagram is basically here's a 4x
| scaled version of the app without much regard to a desktop
| UI/UX.
| aeyes wrote:
| 4x scaled? On my machine the web version is tiiiiny. Even
| when we had 800x600 screen resolution websites showed more
| content than Instagram.
|
| It also shows signup takeovers after clicking 2 links so
| without some sort of scraping proxy like Nitter it will be
| just as useless as Twitter if you only want to follow from
| the outside.
| saurik wrote:
| I feel like I'm at risk of blowing both of your minds
| here, but you can change the size of the website by just
| scaling it in your browser to exactly the size you want,
| likely using ctrl-+/- (maybe cmd).
| stefncb wrote:
| The point is that the content density is abysmal and you
| can't change that with C-+.
| Biganon wrote:
| And let's not forget, you cannot post content from the web
| version, unless you resize the window to make it small
| enough.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if they make their products absolute
| shit on purpose, for a social experiment or something
| gedy wrote:
| That's not correct? I see the post button on side in full
| screen web.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It used to be like that until some months ago.
| keyle wrote:
| Have you tried to use the instagram web version though? It
| used to be better, getting incrementally worse on purpose
| every "redesign". It's borderline web hostile.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Instagram's web version has a serious bug that when you
| scroll down fast enough, it constantly loads the same content
| again and again.
|
| This bug has been there for months and basically renders it
| unusable.
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| To get around it, actually grab the scrollbar with your
| mouse until you see new content. Scrolling will work again
| work a while then.
| tech234a wrote:
| Another bug I've had several times on the web version is
| that when I open the account privacy settings page the
| "Private account" checkbox will load for a few seconds and
| then change my account from private to public. Quite
| annoying especially since that also approves all pending
| following requests. I don't know if they fixed in the last
| few months but I'm kind of afraid to check.
| pcchristie wrote:
| I wondered if this was just me because I use Opera. It's
| awful.
| sgt wrote:
| Same in latest Chrome.
| ggasp wrote:
| Threads.net https://www.threads.net/
| keyle wrote:
| Poor threads.com missing on their 2M exit /s
| abdusco wrote:
| They're probably getting the highest traffic they've seen
| in years. And they'll continue to get it until `threads`
| search results are dominated by the Threads app.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I have to assume they were approached to sell the domain
| and declined?
| lopis wrote:
| > A big part of twitter is the web client
|
| I think this is arguable. It might be a big part for you, but
| most people probably use the mobile app.
| notatoad wrote:
| >where is the web version
|
| ... not on the iOS app store?
| fullshark wrote:
| www.threads.com not leading to a web version is a huge
| problem though.
| notatoad wrote:
| threads.net is a pretty decent domain though.
| kredd wrote:
| > A big part of twitter is the web client
|
| Depends on which user base they're focusing. For people who
| treat tweeting as work, that's probably not the case.
| sgt wrote:
| I think for Instagram, Twitter and presumably Threads, very few
| people will use or bother with the web app. It's just not apps
| for the desktop.
| AzulMarino wrote:
| Summary of this discussion https://tinyurl.com/22yzt9xz
| [deleted]
| dado3212 wrote:
| Cannot believe that they have a second stand-alone IG spinoff
| app, and they ALSO called it Threads[0].
|
| [0]. https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-
| down-i...
| xeromal wrote:
| haha, wow. That is impressive.
| dbbk wrote:
| Oh there have been many more spinoff IG apps. Boomerang,
| Hyperlapse, and IGTV.
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| That's really cool. Someone from that project must've been
| really attached to the name.
|
| It's interesting that Facebook/Instagram keeps launching new
| apps to identify new usecases. Most of them rarely gets heard
| of, but perhaps they gain a lot of insight even when they shut
| down.
|
| On the flip side, I hope it's not like Google where services
| are launched to die soon for the sake of enhancing a promo
| package.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Thats Google level of shutdowns!
| jadtz wrote:
| No its not, Google kills projects before they even mature.
| META kills them when they are already dead.
| toastal wrote:
| Instagram booted my account for looking too suspicious. To
| reactivate the account they wanted me to send a 3D video selfie
| to verify myself, but that company doesn't need those sorts of
| head scans on me. Nope. Account is gone & I'll never return.
| kbos87 wrote:
| There's a real opportunity here for Meta, but their success is
| far from a given. To get this right they are going to need to
| make some product decisions that aren't in their nature.
|
| #1 should be completely, actually bifurcating the experience from
| their other platforms. If they want me to use my Instagram login
| and want to make it easy for me to follow my IG followers, fine.
|
| But the temptation to "carry" the network or the content over
| from Instagram or Facebook is going to be strong for them,
| because it looks like a baked-in advantage their investors will
| expect them to leverage to its fullest. In reality it's the total
| opposite - I'll be gone instantly if a bunch of low quality
| content from people I'm not interested in hearing from (read:
| that girl from high school I might follow on Facebook.)
| pmlnr wrote:
| "Threads"? Really? Just to have it confused with Thread, the
| protocol, right?
| yoavm wrote:
| I actually have a feeling not that many people around the world
| will be confused between this and an IPv6 based low-power mesh
| networking protocol for IoT devices.
| al_be_back wrote:
| a replacement for X, signals a Temp/emergency solution, not a new
| market, if that's the driver with Threads, they've lost it
| already.
|
| tech-giants are so powerful, they don't have to move-fast-to-
| break-things, a small tantrum/jitter (e.g Musk-twitter, or rush-
| to-replace) can mess-up a considerable part of the ecosystem
| around them; including their own finances.
|
| happy to try it, out of curiosity.
| mullingitover wrote:
| 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.
|
| RIP twitter, 2006-2023.
| russ wrote:
| 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.
| romwell wrote:
| This would not be Meta killing Twitter, as much as Twitter
| doing a seppuku and Meta walking over Twitter's corprse.
| russ wrote:
| Twitter has been and still is, its own worst enemy.
| silverlyra wrote:
| except seppuku is considered an honorable death.
| lynx23 wrote:
| 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 :-)
| dorkwood wrote:
| 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.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I disagree because many people like Twitter because it's not
| Meta. More people are aware of monopolies and the problems they
| cause than you think.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Yeah this was good timing on the part of Meta. Twitter is done.
| foderking wrote:
| lmao
| mezobeli wrote:
| BS
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| Just going to post this here, was reading an article about
| Threads, but it mentioned Twitter as well :
|
| >Twitter no longer has a press department. Questions sent to
| the former email address received a poop emoji as the auto-
| response.
|
| What the heck?
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| You just woke up, or something? That was one of Musk's
| first innovations at twitter.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Musk's open contempt for journalists is a key motivation.
| That's why he ruined the verification feature.
| prox wrote:
| That's nuts. I guess not liking journalists is fine, but
| to shutdown your press department? That's just juvenile.
| pgayed wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| pgayed wrote:
| Yes, agreed. HN archetype usually predicts failure of the
| introduced product or its irrelevance.
|
| But maybe it goes the other way with clones. ("[Original
| thing] doesn't stand a chance. Releasing [Clone] will
| totally kill the userbase.")
| no2_fresh wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| joepie91_ wrote:
| 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".
| holoduke wrote:
| 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.
| gfodor wrote:
| Twitter is the idea app, Instagram is the thirst trap app. It's
| not going to work.
| ehnto wrote:
| Well that is a little naive, Twitter is full of porn. It is
| probably one of it's largest userbases.
|
| It's not a particularly wholesome platform even on the
| "ideas" front. It's just as bad as any other mainstream
| internet platform.
| gfodor wrote:
| Accusing someone of being naive is rude when it could be
| that you just missed the point.
| ehnto wrote:
| It was very soft language.
|
| 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.
| gfodor wrote:
| 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.
| meerita wrote:
| I'm saving this comment. No Mastodon, no Facebook, no IG can
| beat Twitter in terms of publishing/forum/discussions. It's a
| worse censored-garden.
| nailer wrote:
| 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.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Couldn't disagree with you more. Threads will be a flop.
|
| The accounts that are most active/followed on Twitter are not
| the type of people that have Instagram accounts.
|
| People with large followings are not going to simply switch, no
| matter how much they hate Elon.
| bmarquez wrote:
| 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.
| pseudopersonal wrote:
| Threads can succeed on sports alone. NBA/NFL moving from
| Twitter to Threads will pull millions. And those users are IG
| friendly
| babl-yc wrote:
| 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.
| no_butterscotch wrote:
| If they also tie your account to Instagram/FB, then do I get
| banned across services if my account is somehow "flagged"?
|
| Whether that's for unknown logins, spam accusations (just an
| accusation is enough for a tech company to throw the ban
| hammer), etc.
| rodgerd wrote:
| If?
| solarkraft wrote:
| > After trying Mastodon for a few months, it's certainly not
| it.
|
| Why?
| babl-yc wrote:
| 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
| mjhagen wrote:
| The pure chronologic feed is why I used Tweetbot and is
| why I'm on Mastodon.
| dbbk wrote:
| Twitter has had a chronological feed for years
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Feed was purely chronological (no algorithmic feed) so
| I missed a lot of content
|
| People normally have the reverse complaint, that the
| algorithm makes them miss content.
| Yizahi wrote:
| 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.
| cesarb wrote:
| > 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).
| joepie91_ wrote:
| > 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.
| Marazan wrote:
| The majority of people who use Twitter use the
| algorithmic feed.
|
| HackerNews posters are not the typical Twitter users.
|
| (Just to be clear I personally hate the algorithmic feed
| but there are lots of use cases for it that just don't
| align with my Twitter usage)
| solarkraft wrote:
| I agree about the algorithm. People wanting a strictly
| chronological timeline seem to largely be a very
| particular tech crowd.
|
| I don't personally notice a lack of engagement. Maybe not
| everyone migrated, but I feel like the most important
| people have.
| [deleted]
| vlunkr wrote:
| That's the key thing for you, but reels are super popular, so
| I would expect cross promotion.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| kafkaesque wrote:
| Social media needs to be destroyed, not enhanced, empowered
| or encouraged. Don't give Meta PMs ideas.
|
| Ceci est un post de protestation.
| pxoe wrote:
| it's akin to calling for people to be silenced. it is
| literally that. "socialization needs to be destroyed".
| lol
| BonitaPersona wrote:
| 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.
| skiman10 wrote:
| 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.
| firecall wrote:
| I just checked, I have some invite codes!
|
| I'll DM you!
|
| EDIT: realised you can't DM on HN
|
| How can I send a code to you? If you want one that is,
| you might not be bothered :-)
|
| EDIT EDIT: I'm using the Hack App on my Phone, I think
| maybe I can DM followers from the desktop site?
| grepfru_it wrote:
| can I ride this wave?
|
| 0df41fec3f63 AT fomogo.club
| pablasso wrote:
| Would love an invite if you still have
|
| 7jsqi5gf at duck.com
| skiman10 wrote:
| Sure, thanks! Seems like an interesting platform.
| skiman10 at duck.com
|
| Not sure on the DM stuff, if you figure it out let me
| know!
| dotcoma wrote:
| Would love an invite, thank you!
|
| 6ndpn1zk AT duck.com
| Vaskerville wrote:
| I can't resist - I've been trying to get an invite for
| awhile now. Thanks!
|
| zhym4g7v AT duck.com
| skiman10 wrote:
| Well this turned into a begging fest for invites. Sorry
| about that.
| INGSOCIALITE wrote:
| I would love an invite if you could DM me fellow HACK
| user :)
| rwl4 wrote:
| Sadly I don't think Hack adds DMs either. I'll pile on
| here and ask if there's any chance you have an extra
| code! Thanks either way! rwl4@duck.com
| [deleted]
| throwaway9418 wrote:
| Not to turn the thread into a code request party, but if
| you have a spare one I would be interested, too. Just
| professional curiosity.
|
| There is no way to DM, but Firefox Relay can be used for
| temporary email addresses:
|
| xow6d86sq at mozmail dot com
| [deleted]
| r5w7tpN wrote:
| [dead]
| astrange wrote:
| If it was ready I assume they'd take the invite wall
| down.
|
| I haven't got one either yet so don't know its state.
| dbbk wrote:
| The UI sucks.
| skiman10 wrote:
| This is a new one I haven't seen before, could you go
| into more detail?
| gochi wrote:
| 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".
| lapcat wrote:
| 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.
| biggestfan wrote:
| 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 :))
| lapcat wrote:
| I already have plenty of people interested in the codes.
| But when new people arrive and look around, they tend to
| lose interest just like I did.
| skiman10 wrote:
| So instead of sending out your invite codes to diversify
| the user base to generate more content, you will instead
| not distribute the codes?
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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.
| skiman10 wrote:
| I guess that's fair. I don't necessarily think I agree
| with you yet, but I don't think I disagree as much
| either. Interesting discussion.
| elliotec wrote:
| I feel like the fact you can't even use it yet because
| you don't have an invite is exactly why it isn't ready
| yet.
| skiman10 wrote:
| 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.
| depereo wrote:
| I've heard most of the discussion on the platform is
| 'meta' discussion _about_ bluesky itself, rather than
| anything interesting.
| skiman10 wrote:
| 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.
| sokz wrote:
| 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.
| depereo wrote:
| 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'.
| shivz45 wrote:
| Bluesky is where ppl bash twitter and no other comments
| delecti wrote:
| There's definitely some of that, but it's a minority.
| Most people are just enjoying being weird and horny on a
| new platform.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Bluesky is where ppl bash twitter and
|
| and Mastodon.
| jug wrote:
| 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.
| firecall wrote:
| You arnt missing anything :-)
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| skiman10 wrote:
| 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.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Facebook exists because they started off as .edu only.
| depereo wrote:
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| 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.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Gmail also had so much hype around it, invites were sold
| online (I paid ~1.10EUR or something on eBay). ~~Blusky,
| not so much.~~
| mminer237 wrote:
| I see a lot of Bluesky invites that have sold on Ebay
| today. For ~$20 too.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Huh. Not only correct, they were selling for ~200 in May.
|
| Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN? I
| never heard of it anywhere else.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > 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.
| ulfw wrote:
| Gmail was so much better than competing services at the
| time (in terms of storage) and also this was almost 20
| years ago.
|
| Different world, different internet, different userbase.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| - Gmail had killer features that made even moving
| desirable.
|
| - Email is federated so there is much less cost to switch
| providers where you can still receive and send from
| others. No stickiness factor
|
| This is why Gmail succeeded and g+ failed
| pndy wrote:
| 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
| fomine3 wrote:
| Loginwall is what I really dislike about Bluesky. Is it
| temporaly or design?
| pferde wrote:
| Apparently, (at least some) content creators like it
| better than Mastodon already. See
| https://drewdevault.com/2023/06/30/Social-and-parasocial-
| med...
| 1270018080 wrote:
| 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.
| gureddio wrote:
| 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.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| Hopefully they really put effort into the web part of the
| product, I mean really writing text on a phone or even a
| tablet is not so easy.
|
| But I'm guessing they wont do that, as Meta wants lock in
| and registration, and following all your data.
|
| At least current version of instagram on the web is pretty
| lame, if you don't install some browser extensions.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > text focused app
|
| what ratio of tweets are rich media vs. text?
| mjhagen wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| jefc1111 wrote:
| 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.
| DrBazza wrote:
| >> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative
|
| > I'm not quite convinced by this;
|
| Agreed, only the very political types want this. No one else
| cares.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > 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.
| dbbk wrote:
| > 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/
|
| No, they're not.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Far too late to edit so self-reply: Threads App is banned in
| the EU for GDPR reasons, so it's probably dead in the water.
| https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/no-
| instagram-...
| elwell wrote:
| 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.
| mullingitover wrote:
| I felt like I needed to qualify it since I'm pretty
| aggressively claiming they're going to defenestrate twitter
| here.
| tonymillion wrote:
| [flagged]
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| [flagged]
| DrBazza wrote:
| > 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.
| overseer_dk wrote:
| Saving this comment to laugh at later thanks
| threeseed wrote:
| Twitter is just going to end up being a cross between Truth
| Social and OnlyFans.
|
| Most of the Twitter Blue subscribers were those that bought
| into the freedom of speech aspect of Twitter 2.0.
|
| They will likely stay where they are but everyone else will
| slowly but surely move.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| 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.
| interestica wrote:
| 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.
| gingerrr wrote:
| They already have exactly this, it's called "Communities" and
| not very heavily used.
|
| edit: great idea though it functions pretty much exactly as
| you described, get into product if you're not yet!
| interestica wrote:
| 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).
| astrange wrote:
| Nobody uses hashtags anymore. You can actually tell when
| someone is a clueless LinkedIn refugee because they hashtag
| random words in their sentences.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Interest groups do.
| sgc wrote:
| It's a good way to follow Ukrainian news, for example
| (#ukraine, #ukrainewar). It definitely has its place.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
| sgc wrote:
| I use the hashtags to discover new accounts to then
| follow / add to lists. It is not the same stage of
| research.
| brigandish wrote:
| Because apps ignore them in favour of their algorithmic
| method of taxonomy instead. If hashtags were actually
| useful they'd doubtless take off again.
| rlt wrote:
| Why would the people leaving Reddit because they killed the
| API go to Twitter which killed their own API last year?
| dbbk wrote:
| This did exist at some point, it was called Communities:
| https://twitter.com/hiCommunities
| worrycue wrote:
| 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.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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.
| worrycue wrote:
| > Do you know how to even track your own comments?
|
| On YouTube actually yes, it's in "History". :P
| troupo wrote:
| Not in the app :)
|
| 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 :)
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| they could have, if they didn't close down their API, nobody
| wants to migrate from one API-less company to another.
| russ wrote:
| 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.
| thakoppno wrote:
| Twitter and a a time shifted and syncd media experience is
| still such a good idea.
| russ wrote:
| I agree -- I'd love that.
| pschuegr wrote:
| That sounds really cool, you were basically (my
| translation) auto-creating sub-reddits based on the media
| people were consuming at the time?
|
| Sweet project.
| russ wrote:
| 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.
|
| Thanks for the kind words! <3
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| interestica wrote:
| Lol that's amazing. They could have even now done tongue-
| in-cheek marketing and straight up call it a "migration".
|
| Also, "nest-ed comments" on different "branches".
|
| You could work backwards and find the bird-related concept
| and _then_ build the correspond technology?
|
| What would "feathers" be?
| russ wrote:
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| Aren't you in a unique position to make a start-up out of
| this?
| DANmode wrote:
| Based on their legal situation, they may (unfortunately)
| feel in a unique situation to NOT make a startup out of
| this.
| [deleted]
| MarkMarine wrote:
| 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.
| elforce002 wrote:
| 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).
| gmerc wrote:
| Gotta love American googles... everything be 'both sides'
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| I don't think "monetizing" is the right word because if
| that was happening, they'd be making money, which they
| aren't.
| rchaud wrote:
| Twitter was making $4bn a year, that they couldn't turn a
| profit on that doesn't mean it wasn't lucrative.
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| gmerc wrote:
| You're optimistic. it's an ads platform that's purposely
| crippled reach. They are not 50% of last year anymore.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| > 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
| neximo64 wrote:
| Until someone like your parents use it casually they have no
| shot. BlueSky and Mastadon quite sorry to say have no shot.
|
| Your kind of opinion is clearly from someone who lives in a
| bubble or inexperienced.
| dbbk wrote:
| Quite the opposite. Social networks die as soon as parents
| get on it. Kids don't want to be on the same platform as
| their parents. The cycle repeats.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| I though 'parents' were more like Facebook category. What I
| think holds Twitter in position are news and public orgs.
| pferde wrote:
| Arguably, Mastodon does not even want that shot. They've been
| perfectly happy even without last year's big influx of ex-
| twits.
| sn_master wrote:
| It won't. People use Twitter because of its free speech rules
| and this is very unlikely to give the same degree of freedom to
| the "conservatives".
| astrange wrote:
| 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.)
| cubefox wrote:
| Twitter does allow much more free speech than before the
| acquisition.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
| cubefox wrote:
| Some things are definitely sayable now that could easily
| get you blocked before.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| Yes, Twitter does allow you to be racist and transphobic
| as fuck now. What a win.
| cubefox wrote:
| Previously things would be censored that were legitimate
| statistical data. Data can't be racist, but the old
| Twitter moderation team didn't care.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://twitter.com/achenfinance/status/16760083898040197
| 13
| cubefox wrote:
| It's US data. To claim it is racist and censor it is
| exactly the problem.
| dbbk wrote:
| > People use Twitter because of its free speech rules
|
| Perhaps a tiny minority of 1st Amendment weirdos in America,
| but outside of them nobody else cares. Normal people just
| want to follow Kim Kardashian.
| civilized wrote:
| Calling it now, none of this will happen. Meta doesn't
| understand how to support the kind of community that people on
| Twitter want.
|
| RIP Threads, 2023-2024 (generously).
| bhouston wrote:
| Will they win the journalist contingent? Twitter won mostly on
| news.
|
| Facebook has celebrity influencers but that is a different
| demographic.
|
| People are not interchangeable. Eg Journalists would make a
| very dull Instagram.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| 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.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Did that happen with substack notes?
| chrjxnandns wrote:
| [dead]
| 1270018080 wrote:
| I don't know anyone who left Twitter for substack
| majani wrote:
| Live streaming platforms poach all the time.
| bhouston wrote:
| Yeah you are correct. There are a few different twitters
| besides the journalists. And others may be more poachable
| and also maybe even more valuable.
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Sorry to say this but this is a premature conclusion. Facebook
| can't build a Twitter competitor.
| [deleted]
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| takeda wrote:
| 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.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| 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.
| russdpale wrote:
| uh, threads is mastodon.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| scarab92 wrote:
| 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.
| buro9 wrote:
| > I'm calling it now
|
| This has become the indicator of hubris, the red flag that
| indicates the rest should be taken, at best, with a very large
| pinch of salt.
| justinhj wrote:
| 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.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| > Meanwhile Twitter's popularity continues to grow
|
| According to notorious liar Elon Musk.
| [deleted]
| api wrote:
| 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.
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| onychomys wrote:
| > and Reddit via a 3rd party apps
|
| i have some bad news for you
| shaunxcode wrote:
| 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.
| heyoni wrote:
| Totally agree with that. It's kind of like Reddit vs HN, the
| latter of which I'm done with..:I just feel more like a
| person here
| wholinator2 wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Prior is one of the words
|
| I hear former more commonly than prior. Out of geo-
| curiosity, where is prior used?
| meanmrmustard92 wrote:
| bayeslandia
| heyoni wrote:
| Geez yea I meant it the other way <_>
| ipaddr wrote:
| This reminds me of google+. RIP threads - 2023-2023
|
| Twitter may die but this will not replace it.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| 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
| renewiltord wrote:
| How much and what timeline and define death? I'll do $1k to
| $10k bet depending on answers.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| 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.
| gmerc wrote:
| Networks move when there is a general consensus that their
| future is at risk though.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| 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.
| worksonmine wrote:
| 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.
| pcchristie wrote:
| 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.
| smcl wrote:
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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...
| bleachedsleet wrote:
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Maybe not - I'm wont be a mastodon apologist - but I'm also
| pretty skeptical at Meta trying to just brute force their
| way to make a twitter clone.
| py_rrho wrote:
| [flagged]
| dhruval wrote:
| I am willing to take the other side of this bet.
|
| Not because I love twitter but rather because of the following
|
| 1.Network effects are just that powerful.
|
| 2. This looks like a group chat killer rather than a Twitter
| killer.
|
| So I think the blue bird will go on to live a rather long life.
| TheCleric wrote:
| 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).
| thereare5lights wrote:
| Every day Musk brings Twitter closer and closer to 4chan.
| It's only a matter of time before the whole rotten house
| collapses.
| rlt wrote:
| I must be using a different Twitter than you.
|
| You can cherry pick a few abhorrent Tweets but that's not
| going to be representative of most peoples' experience.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| Perhaps you are highly curating your slice of Twitter.
|
| I, on the other hand, go into many different spheres of
| Twitter.
|
| The wider Twitter universe has gotten much worse since
| Musk took over.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| 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.
| danjac wrote:
| 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?
| wilg wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| wahahah wrote:
| 600 post views per day qualifies pretty close to
| "irrecoverably down" for me.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That's an odd definition of irrecoverable you have there.
| methou wrote:
| Clicked on the Details next to the App Privacy, scrolling down
| the long list.
|
| Yes, it will beat Twitter, it is what Twitter ever wanted to
| be.
| winter_blue wrote:
| > Clicked on the Details next to the App Privacy, scrolling
| down the long list.
|
| Man, wow, I just checked it. The list is so long that it made
| me laugh.
|
| I guess they've decided to scoop up every last bit of data
| they can lay their hands on.
| tennisflyi wrote:
| Threads will need porn.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I think Crypto Twitter and Racial Insensitivity Twitter will be
| pretty sticky over there
|
| between the OnlyFans models and AI bots roasting people on
| demand, its a bit of an amusement park!
|
| Believe it or not, there are also group chats in the DMs
| partiallypro wrote:
| 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.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Making it harder to share Thread's Handles will only make
| people... want to share them.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| 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.
|
| I say this as someone who is no big fan of Meta.
| zuminator wrote:
| > 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| Me: I couldn't speak about "coding twitter" in general
|
| You: I think this is a biased view held by people who
| migrated to Mastodon.
|
| Me: ???
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Fair enough :) I suppose we agree then.
|
| 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.
| irishloop wrote:
| 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?
| DANmode wrote:
| > people who are already more popular on Instagram than they
| are on Twitter, which is a lot of social/non-professional
| audiences
|
| This is regional/network-effect based.
|
| I've seen it situated the exact opposite opposite direction
| in some locales.
| [deleted]
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| 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.
| rayxi271828 wrote:
| 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.)
| Tepix wrote:
| Not to mention that you're only allowed a single hyperlink.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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.
| Tepix wrote:
| Still, it's user hostile behaviour.
| latenightcoding wrote:
| And you can't hide who you are following (even tho you can on
| fb), which is a big deal.
| [deleted]
| agys wrote:
| The UI to post a story is so inconsistent/illogic that it's
| difficult to understand if it comes from incompetence or from
| some hidden scheme.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| You can bet it will be as bad or worse
| frogulis wrote:
| 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?
| komali2 wrote:
| When I complained to my friend at Instagram about this,
| this is the exact answer she gave as to why they have it
| like this.
|
| Instagram is a Duke of dark pattern ux, I'd say king but
| there's travel booking websites out there that hold the
| crown.
| Larrikin wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| Given that Youtube copied it for their "shorts" clone of
| TikTok/Reels, it must be working for the platforms...
| balder1991 wrote:
| I think their reasoning is that if it's just a few
| seconds it "simplifies" the UI, which is why if the reel
| is just a bit longer it is trackable.
|
| TikTok on the other hand I think the video needs to be
| much longer to be trackable.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Really wish the engineers behind that design did us a
| solid and at least left the shortcut keys
| (left/right/j/l) in. Dropping those too is criminal.
| chromakode wrote:
| YouTube shorts are seekable.
| schott12521 wrote:
| It's a double edged sword, because the seekability of YT
| Shorts mean I'll actually watch them.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| Not in my web browser right at this minute. I have to
| edit the URL from /shorts/ to /watch?v= all the time.
| redsaber wrote:
| I used a greasemonkey script to automatically edit the
| URL for me
| mh- wrote:
| That is a relatively recent change.
| lxgr wrote:
| Huh, yeah, I just checked and can indeed now scrub them!
| It's been a while since I last gave them a chance.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| You definitely can jump in a video (at least on android).
|
| The white bar at the bottom, which shows the progress of
| the reel/video, can be dragged. It is a very buggy
| experience, but it works.
|
| I think it doesn't work with very short videos.
| CaptainBanger wrote:
| [dead]
| mcbutterbunz wrote:
| It's really confusing because you can fast forward some
| videos but others you can't. It drives me crazy that it's not
| easier to control things.
| black3r wrote:
| the worst user hostility is that you can't browse it while
| not logged in (which was also introduced to twitter recently)
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| Angostura wrote:
| 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.
| gemstones wrote:
| 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.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Instagram stories are a successful competitor to snap
|
| Insta reels are a successful competitor to TikTok
|
| FB marketplace is a successful competitor to Craigslist
|
| FB Messenger is a successful competitor to iMessage
| gochi wrote:
| 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.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| The branding and business might be what makes it great for
| businesses, but I'm not migrating so I can follow KFC on
| Meta.
| thrashh wrote:
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Might get big enough for antitrust.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acq
| uisitio...
|
| [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.
| DANmode wrote:
| 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.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| Anti trust for a free service?
|
| Unless you mean from an ads perspective, but there are
| many ad companies.
| ben_w wrote:
| 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).
| l33t233372 wrote:
| That's interesting. I wonder what the legal arguments
| were
| vGPU wrote:
| Zuckerbot controlling an even larger portion of the
| public discourse is somehow a good thing?
| thrashh wrote:
| I'm speaking from Zuckerbot's PoV since that's what I
| replied to.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| > "The absurd levels of pornography"
|
| 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.
| dmix wrote:
| > "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.
| yanderekko wrote:
| >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.
| lynx23 wrote:
| 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.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| 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.
| thumbuddy wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| > There has been censorship of both mis and
| disinformation
|
| Much of which, like the lab leak theory, turned out to be
| true but politically inconvenient at the time.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| There was a huge amount of media propaganda and every
| diverging opinion was banned. With "conspiracy theories"
| being the strawman argument.
| phatfish wrote:
| I wonder how Threads users will survive without the
| latest conspiracy theories and concern trolling from
| right-wing accounts.
|
| It was all there before and after Musk on Twitter. Post
| Musk you get the added overt racism as a bonus though.
| Choices choices...
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/5/9/facebook-
| has-3-b... : Facebook is at the top of their adoption
| curve, it seems. Downwards, but it will take a very long
| time. It's also notable that the big expensive Metaverse
| plan was cancelled.
| hobo_mark wrote:
| > The absurd levels of pornography
|
| Incidentally, that is also the case on Bluesky and one
| reason I would not dare to invite anybody on there until
| they address it.
| animuchan wrote:
| Thanks for recommendation, going to check out Bluesky
| now!
|
| Seriously though, how did Spanish Inquisition levels of
| prudeness become the norm on the interwebs, of all
| things?
| orra wrote:
| Prude may be an unfair complaint. Being okay with the
| existence of pornography doesn't mean you want to see it
| all the time.
| DANmode wrote:
| Kids with iPads.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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?
| animuchan wrote:
| I see what you mean, but specifically for a small video
| game company this is a potential goldmine of free
| advertising.
|
| Maybe if you're developing a spreadsheet app or some
| such, then sure.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > potential goldmine of free advertising.
|
| 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.
|
| -----
|
| 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.
| iopq wrote:
| Do you have an invite for me? Tell me where you found all
| that porn so I can avoid it
| phs318u wrote:
| 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).
| jack_riminton wrote:
| 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.
|
| plus ca change
| carlossouza wrote:
| Advertisers are persuaded by underpriced attention.
|
| In the beginning, every social network tends to offer
| that. (Some call it attention arbitrage.)
|
| To drive a critical mass of users, social networks offer
| incentives to content creators so they flock to them and
| start producing content there.
|
| The main incentive is the aggressive free distribution of
| organic content.
|
| Once the social network matures, it reduces the
| proportion of free content in favor of paid content. And
| the attention arbitrage goes away.
| pjc50 wrote:
| 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?)
| iopq wrote:
| My open source tribe switched to Mastodon, but not the
| pro-Ukraine tribe which relies on reporters to Tweet
| stuff from Ukraine
| bboygravity wrote:
| 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?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Twitter was arguably significant in getting Trump to win
| the primary and hence get elected.
| Shekelphile wrote:
| > 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.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| The fact that the platform is now explicitly transphobic
| is a case in point. Musk has made transphobia part of his
| policy position.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > The fact that the platform is now explicitly
| transphobic is a case in point. Musk has made transphobia
| part of his policy position.
|
| Hacker News has become Reddit. ${the thing I hate} is
| racist and transphobic!! And mindless anti-Musk hate.
|
| We should not accept this type of comment ^^^ it is
| objectively and intellectually dishonest.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| 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.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > 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.
| subdude wrote:
| Maybe I'm crazy, but I preferred it when Twitter wasn't
| suggesting I follow Nazis and putting their tweets in my
| feed.
| cpursley wrote:
| I thought Azov promotion was banned on Twitter?
| 1270018080 wrote:
| 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".
| saynay wrote:
| 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.
| DANmode wrote:
| > Biden campaign flagged tweets in lead-up to the
| election
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/03/e
| lon... is where a summary of the most neutral analysis on
| this "debate" can be found.
| luuurker wrote:
| > propaganda tool for one of the 2 political flavors in
| the US
|
| I'm not American, but that doesn't reflect what I was
| seeing on Twitter before I closed my account (mid/late
| 2020).
|
| I'm surprised to see a crowd that is supposed to see
| through the BS of the industry falling for Musk's
| neutrality and anti-censorship claims...
| https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-
| fulfillin...
| DANmode wrote:
| Can I simultaneously believe that there were pretty
| strong Left connections within Twitter (and many other
| groups, large and small)
|
| AND that Musk's anti-censorship claims are exaggerated at
| best?
| simiones wrote:
| > 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.
| censor_me wrote:
| [dead]
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| I think the Instagram branding is deliberate.
|
| 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.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| so you think they're also aiming at reddit?
| foogazi wrote:
| The influencers and brands are already there
| dash2 wrote:
| 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.
| DANmode wrote:
| > everyone is already on it
|
| and can start being fed notifications and UI for the
| other thing at a moment's notice.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I think the Instagram branding is deliberate.
|
| 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.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter
| great
|
| To be fair, I don't think I've seen much sign that Twitter
| understands what made Twitter great, either.
|
| (both before and after Musk)
| sangnoir wrote:
| 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.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Haven't all this features been a thing since forever?
| rsynnott wrote:
| None of them were in the original product; they were
| essentially community-created.
| nathell wrote:
| As an example, RTs have been an official feature since
| late 2009
| (https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2009/retweet-
| limit...), more than three years after Twitter has first
| gone live.
| irishloop wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| > I don't see any evidence Musk understands what made
| Twitter great, either.
|
| Oh, I totally agree. I just don't think that means Meta
| will win here.
| comte7092 wrote:
| Meta is an exceptional copier. They might not be coming
| up with many novel features but they are great at
| stealing from their competitors.
| joegahona wrote:
| Looks like they already tried this once:
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-
| down-i...
| drusepth wrote:
| 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.
| codethief wrote:
| Ahh, I knew I knew I had seen that name before! So
| they've indeed pulled a Google Meet[0].
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Meet
| comte7092 wrote:
| Fair, but their main competitor wasn't doing everything
| it could to implode at the time either.
| joegahona wrote:
| 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.
| lodovic wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| Are they?
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/
| wilg wrote:
| Yes
| comte7092 wrote:
| Ah yes because stories wasn't a massive success.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| Facebook Workplace is an example of a completely new
| product.
|
| And it has actually been a quiet but lucrative success
| for the company.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| 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.
| akho wrote:
| At this point, they would likely prefer a profitable
| product.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Profitable? Like what? Metaverse?
|
| Meta is the kind of company to throw $25+ Billion into a
| vanity project and not really sweat it.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| All this talk about demise of twitter, and why ?
|
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
|
| --------
|
| 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.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| valval wrote:
| I doubt what you're saying is even close to true. Hand
| out the evidence.
| dragontamer wrote:
| https://ain.capital/2023/06/07/ukrainians-are-massively-
| shad...
|
| https://imi.org.ua/en/news/twitter-shadowbans-ukrainians-
| who...
|
| -----------------
|
| Something like this came up as age-restricted: https://tw
| itter.com/ukraine6679/status/1573928649304276994
| valval wrote:
| A Ukrainian news site seems like great evidence indeed.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Do you expect the Russians to talk about Ukrainian
| accounts getting shadowbanned on Twitter?
|
| Of course this news would come from Ukrainian sources.
|
| ---------------
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/NAFO/comments/145zfi7/twitter_ha
| s_d...
|
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| Maybe Twitter just stopped artificially boosting pro-
| Ukraine content.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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.
| philwelch wrote:
| Good for them. I'm mostly interested in OSINT content,
| not so much war propaganda.
| dragontamer wrote:
| For OSINT, I usually use the Institute for the Study of
| War.
|
| https://www.understandingwar.org/
|
| 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.
| vGPU wrote:
| 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.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| Yeah, must be a damn big task trying to fix a codebase
| that is already over 10 years old.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| 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.
| nindalf wrote:
| > Regulatory capture
|
| 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.
| vGPU wrote:
| >Chinese smartphones
|
| Find me a smartphone that isn't made in china.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| 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.
| nindalf wrote:
| 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.
| abledon wrote:
| > I don't see any evidence Musk understands what made
| Twitter great, either.
|
| First mover advantage and already existing userbase. Its
| the Windows of Operating Systems. Market domination.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| 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...
| thrashh wrote:
| 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.
| nl wrote:
| 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...
| codethief wrote:
| > Look how many things Facebook has tried in the same
| time. Some failed, but lots succeeded.
|
| Like which ones? Not being sarcastic, I just can't think
| of any off the top of my head.
| nl wrote:
| Some of the things they have launched:
|
| * Facebook Apps (not really a thing anymore. Maybe it
| still exists)
|
| * Facebook Games (remember Zynga?)
|
| * Facebook Deals (they were taking on GroupOn)
|
| * Messenger (as a separate product. One of the most
| heavily used products in the world)
|
| * Events (which for many people is the only reason they
| have an account)
|
| * Facebook Groups (still heavily used)
|
| * Facebook Pages (still heavily used)
|
| * Facebook Video (still heavily used)
|
| * Facebook Marketplace (extremely heavily used in many
| markets)
|
| * Stories (still heavily used)
|
| * Reels (sort of merged into Videos)
|
| * Facebook Places (big plans, but died)
|
| * Facebook Graph Search (nothing like originally
| released:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Graph_Search)
| vGPU wrote:
| Don't forget the Facebook phone!
| ulfw wrote:
| because there are none.
|
| (on Facebook core product)
|
| I am leaving out their never really widely launched
| crypto hype disaster of a product on purpose.
| nl wrote:
| Really? Facebook Events? Groups? Marketplace?
|
| These are pretty major, successful features that drive a
| lot of use.
| codethief wrote:
| Those features drive use but did they also increase
| profit, given that Facebook successfully enshitified
| their main product (the news feed)?
|
| I don't disagree with your main point, though: Facebook
| certainly developed lots of new features, whereas Twitter
| pretty much stood still.
| te_chris wrote:
| 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.
| discardable_dan wrote:
| [flagged]
| nwiswell wrote:
| 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.
| post-it wrote:
| 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| How is Saudi Arabia paying him without anyone noticing?
| post-it wrote:
| Maybe they promised him free rocket fuel and a launchpad
| where he doesn't have to care about safety. Complete
| speculation on my part.
| rvba wrote:
| I wonder if anyone is checking if they arent pushing
| Tesla stock price high.
|
| Also who exactly financed the purchase of Twitter?
| rajamaka wrote:
| If Saudis wanted it why would they have to do it by proxy
| of Elon Musk. What a bizarre theory.
| DANmode wrote:
| Morgan Stanley Bank of America Larry Ellison, (ORACLE co-
| founder) Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
| fakedang wrote:
| 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.
| danjac wrote:
| 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.
| concordDance wrote:
| I think his main issue here is that quickly trying lots
| of things to see what works works way better with cars
| than social networks.
| danjac wrote:
| Well, if you don't mind your cars randomly catching
| fire...
| hw wrote:
| 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.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| When you say "conservative" do you mean "blatant hate
| speech"?
| hw wrote:
| 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
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| 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.)
| rustedspoon wrote:
| 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.
| rustedspoon wrote:
| Why the down vote ? Reference from times of India
| https://m.timesofindia.com/world/uk/twitter-files-reveal-
| hin...
|
| Article from 2019 Twitter denying any such shadow bans
| are occurring https://theprint.in/politics/new-
| allegation-against-twitter-...
|
| Another reference from bbc that shows wire.in removing
| fake articles about Facebook/meta
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63226111
|
| If I'm missing something here let me know, I don't want
| to be misinformed
| Kbelicius wrote:
| Because twitter files are mostly a crock of shit.
|
| https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-
| lawyer...
| rustedspoon wrote:
| I read it 3 times, the headline and content do not match,
| and it doesn't negate anything about shadow banning
| Indian Twitter accounts
| DANmode wrote:
| Do you happen to have a different source handy that
| presents the same content?
| zpeti wrote:
| 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.
| zogrodea wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671397462043512833
| fakedang wrote:
| 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.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| Twitter was profitable for two years, 2018 and 2019.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-
| income...
|
| My understanding is the majority of those loss years was
| due to how they accounted for RSUs, however I can't find
| that easily right now.
|
| I don't get the impression that it was at all close to
| imploding pre-musk. Do you have any links to back up that
| claim?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Also "technically profitable" in 2021 -- except for a
| $760M legal settlement they had to pay out which dropped
| them to a ~$490M loss.
| mullingitover wrote:
| > 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.
| thrashh wrote:
| I didn't say he did anything right.
|
| I'm just saying his goals and his poor ability to achieve
| them.
| Nursie wrote:
| > At this point, someone just needs to stand up a Twitter
| clone that can handle the traffic ...
|
| Isn't that exactly what meta are doing here?
| ericmay wrote:
| 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.
| ambyra wrote:
| 100% agree with all this, 100% not going to use this until it
| until it shows up on instagram.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| 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.
| rumblerock wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| 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.
| version_five wrote:
| 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.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Twitter is monetized outrage.
|
| 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.
| brokenkebaby wrote:
| 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
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| 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
| soneca wrote:
| I still use and barely see any outrage on it. I am just
| selective with who I follow and stay in the feed where I
| mostly see tweets of who I follow.
|
| I agree with GP, it's very easy to stay out of outrage
| sight.
| blitzar wrote:
| Its even easier when you only get to see a few tweets a
| day.
| isykt wrote:
| 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.
| soneca wrote:
| That's right. I avoid mainstream news completely
| (everywhere, not just on Twitter) for several years now
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| So you're not having the twitter experience, you're
| living in a twitter ghetto away from the public?
| soneca wrote:
| 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?
| oblio wrote:
| His point is that you are not the average Twitter user.
|
| You're an ivory tower inhabitant of Twitter :-)
| soneca wrote:
| A village is an analogy that I like more. And there are a
| lot of those villages around Twitter
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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).
| jacobyoder wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| 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.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| > _is not easily replicable_
|
| What makes you think so? Twitter has no moat, the
| functionality is easy to replicate. It's all about the
| user base.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| carafizi wrote:
| 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
| DANmode wrote:
| > I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter
| great
|
| Marketplace
|
| > when was the last time Facebook successfully launched a new
| standalone social app?
|
| Marketplace =]
| ymolodtsov wrote:
| > 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.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| My recent surprise has been discovering that the online
| parkour community mostly lives on Instagram. I'm not sure
| why I find that odd, but I do.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Beat me to it. Yeah, Twitter's toast after this
| Slashdot/Digg/Reddit migration
| zarzavat wrote:
| 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.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| 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
| kalleboo wrote:
| 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
| afavour wrote:
| > 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.
| DANmode wrote:
| If they separate and build it out sufficiently, it could
| look and feel like a different social space altogether.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| 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.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| 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?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| > I think you're missing the real reason they are
| leveraging instagram
|
| _Threads, a Facebook app_ - hel no. I would rather install
| the spying app TikTok on my phone than a Facebook branded
| property.
| vansid wrote:
| > I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter
| great
|
| What made Twitter great?
| jachee wrote:
| 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.
| csallen wrote:
| 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.
| christophilus wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| Twitter is this anywhere you want it, no office visit
| required:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| 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.
| ignoramous wrote:
| 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.
| techdragon wrote:
| 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.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| This is why everyone should be following Hank Green on
| LinkedIn.
| bentt wrote:
| > The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it
| being where journalists and celebrities break news
|
| Nailed it.
| awill wrote:
| >>I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter
| great
|
| Twitter/Elon no longer know what made Twitter great.
| 3rdrodeo wrote:
| `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.
| lopis wrote:
| 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.
| rcme wrote:
| 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.
| gureddio wrote:
| That and Snapchat's entire UX is utterly unintuitive
| lopis wrote:
| Right, that. I don't use Instagram so I might have
| confused the terms.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| HN needs a limited set of vote types:
|
| - 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)
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| brigandish wrote:
| 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.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| Except tiktok is actually trying, whereas twitter seems to be
| run by a person with an actual grudge to kill it as fast as
| possible.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| We keep hearing people say that yet engagement is up and
| plenty of the people who said they were leaving are
| complaining about hitting rate limits.
|
| How many years will Twitter have to still exist for some of
| us to admit he didn't kill it.
| subsistence234 wrote:
| Supercuts Deluxe, twitter edition:
|
| 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....
|
| and so on and so forth
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VdynwAkQy8
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I can't imagine the people on my Twitter feed migrating to a
| Meta-owned app.
| duxup wrote:
| Instagram has never really been great as far viewing content
| without being logged in.
|
| I'm not sure if matching twitter in that way is a recipe for
| growth.
| thesz wrote:
| This is interesting move of yours.
|
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| 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.
| proxyon wrote:
| 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.
| zpeti wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| zpeti wrote:
| > Typically people seem to largely get far more engagement
| with a far smaller number of followers on Mastodon
|
| Are we talking about mastodon or threads? Do you think
| Threads won't have an algorithmic feed?
|
| It obviously will, so this point is only relevant to
| mastodon, which is still 100x smaller than twitter.
| sylens wrote:
| 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).
| willhackett wrote:
| 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.
| tantalor wrote:
| Just like Google+
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You calling it for the likes on a chances that it may happen,
| there is zero substance in your prediction other than "pent up
| demand"
| 111111IIIIIII wrote:
| Twitter will persist as long as Journalists stay on it, and
| everyone paying attention knows that, including Musk.
| mellow-lake-day wrote:
| Journalists are trying to find places to move over their
| audience since twitter put their audience behind a login
| screen
| depereo wrote:
| Mastodon already has an instance that a lot of journalists
| have joined - journa.host.
|
| It's free and open to the world and they can just join any
| other server too if desirable.
|
| I'm still looking for major outlets to set up their own
| servers and be able to follow name@newsorg.com accounts for
| their staff.
| censor_me wrote:
| [dead]
| cesarb wrote:
| > I'm still looking for major outlets to set up their own
| servers and be able to follow name@newsorg.com accounts
| for their staff.
|
| I've already seen one: https://social.heise.de/
| 111111IIIIIII wrote:
| Don't believe everything journalists tell you. ;)
|
| Kidding aside, I do seriously question whether that move
| would ever happen without it being forced.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| I think you misread my post!
|
| 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.
| lynx23 wrote:
| > scammer presidential candidates who are all antivaxxers
|
| Uhu, borderline hysterical. What are you talking about,
| actually? Sounds like you have been confused by ongoing
| political wars...
| astrange wrote:
| Is this what you call gaslighting? Please don't do it,
| whatever it is.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I assume they mean RFK Jr and DeSantis; RFK Jr is a full-
| blown conspiracy theorist; DeSantis is at least a little
| anti-vax-y.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
| onychomys wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.salon.com/2011/01/16/dangerous_immunity/
| ehnto wrote:
| 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.
| publius_0xf3 wrote:
| I was never able to create an Instagram account because Instagram
| would just _instantly_ ban any account I created for paranoid
| anti-spam reasons. Apparently this is [a common problem](https://
| old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/85wbk1/banned_im...).
|
| So I'm not looking forward to trying to sign up with them.
| poly_morphis wrote:
| Had the same experience with Facebook. Looking back, I'm glad
| it happened that way.
| neop1x wrote:
| Same here. Banned instantly for no reason. The problem is that
| some official entities like Fire departments are using these
| closed for-profit services and at the same time those services
| are adding login screens even for just read access.
| iguana_lawyer wrote:
| I tried to join a few months ago and had the same problem. I
| couldn't join through the app no matter what I tried. Instant
| ban with no way to get unbanned. But I was able to sign up on
| the website without an issue. And once I had a working account,
| I could create multiple alternate accounts through the app.
|
| It's frustrating Instagram doesn't have lists so you need a
| separate account for every interest.
| gochi wrote:
| They also instantly reverse that if you follow the email
| prompt/mobile prompt. No idea why they decided to handle anti-
| spam that way.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Can you elaborate please? I verified the phone number to no
| avail
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Yeah but it feels a bit like being negged. Like they can't
| just say "this is the process to make an account". They have
| to say " you are faaaakkeee prove to me you're real!".
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Same for me. I created the account and got banned a few hours
| later.
| spike021 wrote:
| I have a few accounts for various things (personal account,
| hobby, another hobby).
|
| Recently I tried probably 10 separate times to create a fourth
| one not even linked to those three, and Instagram outright
| refused to let me do it with any email address. It even got to
| a point where on the browser I tried making the account it
| refuses to let me log in with my normal accounts these days.
| 12907835202 wrote:
| I find it funny that everyone's saying the screenshots look like
| a Twitter clone. It looks like Facebook to me.
|
| I imagine this is as much about capturing the young people not
| using Facebook as it is about rivaling Twitter, if not more.
| thih9 wrote:
| Looks like they're reusing the name of their messaging app (also
| "Threads"), that was live between 2019 [1] and 2021 [2].
|
| Nature abhors a vacuum, I guess.
|
| [1]:
| https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/introducing-t...
|
| [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/17/22787783/instagram-
| threa...
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| Not to mention this new Slack competitor: https://threads.com.
| If Instagram Threads takes off I fully expect this app will be
| forced to change its name by Meta.
| agilob wrote:
| Data Linked to You
|
| The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:
|
| Health & Fitness
|
| Purchases
|
| Financial Info
|
| Location
|
| Contact Info
|
| Contacts
|
| User Content
|
| Search History
|
| Browsing History
|
| Identifiers
|
| Usage Data
|
| Sensitive Info
|
| Diagnostics
|
| Other Data
|
| wow ok...
| nothrowaways wrote:
| The name "threads" doesn't sound catchy.
| dhruval wrote:
| Tried to install it but it was asking for too much irrelevant
| data so I decided not to.
|
| Maybe I am not the avenge user I don't need an IOS app for text,
| web is fine.
| granzymes wrote:
| I would've been impressed had you installed it considering it
| isn't available until July 6th.
| manzu wrote:
| The App Privacy Label on this is crazy It says it will collect
| and link health, fitness, financial, browsing history, usage
| data, purchases, search history, sensitive information etc
| Instagram doesn't track that much, but Facebook does
| sizzle wrote:
| The amount of user "app privacy data" listed on the App Store
| page is nauseating.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Currrently not available in my country or region (I'm in Europe)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| I think Facebook/Instagrams very "PC-model" of moderation will
| allow for Twitter to coexist with them.
|
| There's a tangible difference in Twitter now that Musk took over.
| Raunchy, sometimes offensive jokes are now actually possible on
| the site. I use Twitter a lot more than I ever did because of it.
| I don't want Instagram 2.0 with nothing but "models" and stolen
| videos.
| djur wrote:
| There have been raunchy, offensive jokes on Twitter for years.
| Nothing new there. What kind of kneeslappers have you found
| more of recently?
| [deleted]
| zht wrote:
| It's funny because below most trending tweets there's like 85
| only fans "models" writing clickbait comments
| sergiotapia wrote:
| True but the algorithm seems to be getting better at being
| filtered out entirely from my views on Twitter.
| chrjxnandns wrote:
| [dead]
| foooorsyth wrote:
| Anyone interested in talking about the product decisions instead
| of Musk/Zuck hate?
|
| - Interesting that they went with a stand-alone app instead of
| baking this into IG like they did with Stories (which killed Snap
| overnight). I wonder how much they'll advertise the download
| inside of IG.
|
| - Can't say I like the name. Doesn't evoke much emotion in me.
| The term "thread" is rarely used by normies without the word
| "Twitter" in front of it. And the choice of the plural form is
| interesting.
|
| - The logo looks like it belongs to an app that should start with
| the letter 'a'. Confusing that they go with a t-word like Twitter
| but then make the logo look like a different letter. Also, no
| color? Will it really stay black and white or will it adopt the
| IG gradient?
| dbish wrote:
| I think it's "@" not "a", like @<username>, which makes sense
| to me.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| I like the logo, a twisty line or thread forming an @atsign,
| which brings to my video game mind Rogue and Nethack :)
|
| Not a bad name, but the "th" in Threads can be problematic to
| pronounce in other languages.
|
| Good to have competition in this space.
| aio2 wrote:
| It reminds me of the social media BeReal.
|
| Similar logo, black and white.
| cubefox wrote:
| The logo looks like the letters C and a. I wonder whether this
| is intentional.
| tommit wrote:
| What would have been the intention?
| blurrybird wrote:
| The logo is an @ with a very strange choice of typeface.
|
| Probably a nod to the @username format that Twitter made so
| popular.
| skaushik92 wrote:
| There's also this symbol from a language called Tamil that
| looks similar:
|
| ku
| hagbarth wrote:
| I like the standalone app as a user. I don't have IG installed
| and I would not install it to get Threads. But I would install
| a standalone app.
|
| I'm sure I'm not in the majority though.
| lolsal wrote:
| Make sure you note all of the data they link to you in the
| privacy section. This app is no different from instagram or
| fb in that regard.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Is Twitter better?
| bertil wrote:
| It's a text-based app, which dramatically changes expectations.
| Instagram Stories was, like Instagram, photos and videos. That
| allows consistency in how things work (not that it does in
| practice because some gestures were based on shared
| expectations with Facebook Stories, others with TikTok or
| Snapchat, but... you get it).
|
| Facebook designers have suffered quite a bit from dealing with
| very inconsistent media format: comments on one photo in an
| album are one of the obvious ones, or a poster criticizing and
| sharing a video and comments assuming the author shot the video
| is familiar to anyone with less media-savvy friends. Limiting
| media forms to consistent sets makes sense to have a smoother
| experience.
|
| Facebook, and later Instagram once the first one was burned,
| has done a lot to have a social graph that makes sense: actual
| people and well-established pseudonyms, famous people and
| brands, etc. It's the Social part of what is known internally
| as "The Graph" and a very crucial asset, something that was
| expected to be shared across properties: Facebook and
| Instagram, of course (hence the horrifying confusing relation
| between your Facebook account with your civil name and your
| pseudonymous account on Instagram, outing a few people that
| way), but also the MetaVerse lately and yet again with some
| controversy. WhatsApp fought against having the Social part of
| the graph as a default because WA had its own graph; that was a
| tough battle. It's not fully isolated: WA Shopping leverages
| Inventory, the Things part of the graph, massively so.
|
| Despite all that drama, this confirms that Facebook wants to
| leverage its Graph further, specifically Instagram's--likely a
| victory from Ad Partners who want brands to feel comfortable
| early and spend fast.
|
| The spaghetti logo looks nothing like what I have on my screen,
| so I think it's a good one (Instagram gradient was to avoid
| having to deal with Facebook's curse of starting very distinct,
| to be one of the too many blue apps far too soon). The name
| starting with 't' could be a way to capitalize on people who
| search by app name and their muscle memory that the app with
| ranty posts is called t-something.
| geokon wrote:
| Do you have any thoughts on why they attached to the IG graph
| and not the FB graph?
|
| Maybe I'm in a bubble, IG seems very low text, low drama, low
| politics. Not very Twitter-y
| sangnoir wrote:
| Does Facebook have globally-unique user handles? Instagram
| seems to the the only Meta property where the handle is
| _not_ PII (real name or phone number).
|
| Among Meta properties, Instagram is also the closest to
| Twitter as an interest-based social network (rather than
| limited to people-you-already-know)
| omeid2 wrote:
| Any unique identifier assigned to an "identifiable"
| person is PII. It doesn't matter if it is an IRC or
| Instagram handler, or a twitter username. It is PII if it
| can be associated to a person.
|
| Euro/GDPR: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
|
| 'personal data' means any information relating to an
| identified or identifiable natural person ('data
| subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can
| be identified, directly or indirectly.
|
| The keyword here is indirectly.
|
| Australia:
| https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2019C00025
|
| personal information means information or an opinion
| about an identified individual, or an individual who is
| reasonably identifiable.
|
| (a) whether the information or opinion is true or not;
| and (b) whether the information or opinion is recorded in
| a material form or not.
|
| The keyword here "reasonably identifiable".
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| My guess is that facebook's real name policy wouldn't go
| well with this product
| bigyikes wrote:
| I think the IG graph is more similar to the Twitter graph
| than the FB graph. Also, IG has much more of a "cool
| factor" which they're hoping Threads will inherit.
|
| I follow my grandparents on FB, and I don't necessarily
| want that on my Threads.
| bertil wrote:
| There's drama on IG, but thankfully not among the people
| you follow.
|
| Why? Pseudonymous accounts. They are huge on Twitter,
| necessary, and Instagram supports them.
| netheril96 wrote:
| I don't like the name "Threads" either. Probably because I'm a
| programmer.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Should have called it coroutines
| thom wrote:
| I don't like the name. Probably because I'm from Sheffield.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)
| askvictor wrote:
| Cue the tailor/seamstress:
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| written in swift
| znep wrote:
| Does anyone have any insight into if this a respin of the same
| Threads app from 2019 or just the same name?
| https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/10/03/threads-instagram-f...
| faefox wrote:
| Different app altogether.
| eSandwich8 wrote:
| It looks like only the name was reused. All the functionality
| in the previous Threads app is now in the main Instagram app.
| minroot wrote:
| The way I like to see it, Facebook think of itself as a
| humanitarian company working mostly in the developing an
| underdeveloped countries providing them internet communication
| services.
| Mo7amedsd wrote:
| N
| bkishan wrote:
| The logo is eerily similar to the Tamil letter 'ku'. Can anyone
| confirm if thats the case or what the logo is supposed to mean?
| xixixao wrote:
| Looks like a play on @ sign
| rm206 wrote:
| Reminds me of the Koo app but this just seems like a '@' to me
| Torkel wrote:
| I don't get this at all. To me it seems like it will obviously
| fail.
|
| 1. Twitter is all about who is there. How will they make people
| start posting on this?
|
| 2. New platforms take off because they innovate, not because they
| do what others do but slightly tweaked.
|
| 3. I have a really hard time seeing people mass escaping twitter
| to this du to morals. Facebook/Zuck is just as reviled as
| Twitter/Musk. If not more reviled. Mastodon has the moral high
| ground, but still can't take off.
| captaincrowbar wrote:
| 1. Facebook has more than 10 times as many users as Twitter.
| They don't need to add new users, they just need to make it
| easy for FB users to also use Threads.
|
| 2. But the whole point here is that others aren't doing this
| any more. Threads isn't supposed to be an innovation, just a
| Twitter replacement. Twitter is dying, Mastodon is too
| complicated for non-geeks, BlueSky could have been a contender
| but they didn't get their act together quickly enough.
|
| 3. You're in a geek information bubble here. On the scale of
| social media, almost nobody cares about that sort of thing. I'd
| bet money that the overwhelming majority of FB users have never
| even heard of Zuckerberg.
| Torkel wrote:
| 1. The people who are possible users of something like this
| are already on Twitter. The target audience is not all of
| Facebook, so not 10x.
|
| 2. I have seen data that can be used to argue Twitter is
| slipping. But to claim Twitter is dying is a great
| exaggeration, based on data. There are perhaps cases where a
| company will totally mess up something and a replacement can
| take over, but this doesn't seem to be it.
|
| 3. Well, hard to tell. To me the geek information bubble is
| the conviction that Twitter is dying. Also, I think
| Zuckerberg is a lot more famous that you account for. But I
| could not find data on it.
| [deleted]
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Twitter competitor is the Facebook app. Everything you do on
| Twitter can be done on Facebook app.
|
| I don't see any use of the threads app.
|
| People don't come to Twitter because of the app.
| [deleted]
| KSPAtlas wrote:
| On the fediverse, there's already a huge number of instances
| planning to block this app when possible as it isn't really in
| the spirit of the fediverse - it's proprietary, owned by a large
| company and centralized
| timeon wrote:
| I thing privacy is bigger concern.
| dlivingston wrote:
| My knee-jerk reaction to this is that it's immature posturing.
| The internet is a decentralized protocol with centralized
| entities. Email is a decentralized protocol with centralized
| entities. But for this decentralized protocol
| (Mastodon/ActivityPub), centralized entities are a bridge too
| far?
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >. The internet is a decentralized protocol with centralized
| entities
|
| Maybe they're mature enough not to want that?
|
| Sign up to protonmail.com for some privacy, to have your
| emails not read by Proton Inc., and quickly realize that most
| - if not all - your contacts are receiving your messages
| @gmail.com. All your emails will still be exploited by Google
| Inc.
|
| There are good reasons to want the Fediverse to remain...
| diverse. Blocking isn't posturing, it's acting.
| protonmail wrote:
| Hi! Please note that you can send password-protected emails
| to your non-Proton recipients:
| https://proton.me/support/open-password-protected-emails.
| tedunangst wrote:
| The list: https://fedipact.online/
| mullingitover wrote:
| It kinda doesn't matter? I would wager this will likely eclipse
| the fediverse's total userbase in a day or two. They simply
| post a banner for logged-in IG users, "Tap here to get the new
| twitter-murdering app, no signup needed", and they have an
| instant eight-figure userbase.
| delecti wrote:
| Yep. Assuming this [1] site's count of 10m fediverse's
| _total_ users is accurate, Instagram would only need 2% of
| their ~500 DAU to sign up to surpass it; only 0.5% of their
| MAU.
|
| [1] https://the-federation.info/
| charcircuit wrote:
| >it's proprietary
|
| but uses an open standard
|
| >owned by a large company
|
| This doesn't contradict with the fediverse. Getting large
| companies on board is important for ActivityPub's adoption.
|
| >and centralized
|
| So is almost every other fediverse instance.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > by one of the most toxic and damaging tech companies
|
| I mean, this bits not great.
|
| Facebook didn't write a fediverse compatible app because of
| warm fuzzy good feelings and wanting to contribute back to
| the community, they wrote one so they could capitalise and
| absorb the existing user base. They'll do exactly the same
| thing they did with fb messenger at the beginning: massive
| interoperability with existing protocols and communities,
| followed by later deliberately breaking compat.
| iopq wrote:
| it stopped bridging XMPP so it already did the EEE strategy
| once
|
| fool me once, shame on me
|
| fool me twice, you can't fool me again
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| lol good thing they don't matter is the least. Most of them
| will reverse trend instantly once they start losing users over
| this issue.
| KSPAtlas wrote:
| Most don't have a profit incentive, in fact I'd guess that
| some would be happy to have the users who'd leave over this
| leave
| ko3us wrote:
| From the very limited screenshots, it looks like the IG team have
| done a great job with the UX. If they stay true to this and keep
| it focused, I think this will be the winner.
|
| Focused UX is something I feel has been really lost by many apps
| coming out today.
| amne wrote:
| I have only this to say: there are not photoshop nazis. But
| grammar nazis .. oh boy
| etchalon wrote:
| Who is the target audience for this app?
|
| Influence bloggers who need to issue public apologies?
| firebirdn99 wrote:
| Oh Zuck def sensed the opportunity!
| valeg wrote:
| I think, the time is right for Zuck's move. He's very determined.
| This social media space is getting competitive and interesting.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Interesting product moves.
|
| Reinforce insta as a "platform" where features are now labeled as
| "apps". Continues to reinforce engagement metrics at insta app
| level, so big win politically for the insta org inside meta. I'm
| sure a lot of promos coming down next cycle. Also very easy user
| acquisition since it piggy backs on existing insta user base.
|
| Insta maps more to the public facing vibe that Twitter does,
| whereas Facebook seems more for friends and family. Insta also
| more easily monetized than say WhatsApp, so the business moves
| all track.
|
| Overall curious to see what happens to the landscape. At a
| minimum it may leach away engagement from Twitter, so probably
| not very favorable for Twitter stock price.
| dlivingston wrote:
| > ...it may leach away engagement from Twitter, so probably not
| very favorable for Twitter stock price.
|
| Fortunately Twitter is privately owned, so I think they will
| escape the market reactions this time. :)
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Ah, right. Thanks for clarifying that
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| Really liked the last time they offered this app (only to
| subsequently pull it)
| aml702 wrote:
| [dead]
| steveBK123 wrote:
| A lot of people are going to have to think slightly more about
| their posturing.
|
| 2021-2023 social media rotating villain vs 2016-2020 social media
| rotating villain.
|
| Oh what's that, I'm hearing a new villain, Mr Chew has entered
| the stage?
| nothrowaways wrote:
| Facebook can't build a Twitter competitor
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| Reminds me of how Instagram absorbed Snapchat usecases with
| stories. Instagram tackled the competition for ephemeral stories
| simply by implementing Stories as a feature.
|
| This time, Threads is a fully fledged app. Getting users to adopt
| a new app might take as much time as getting Messenger installed.
| Still, Instagram has a robust social graph to lead users towards
| downloading it. In fact, they seem to have already onboarded
| users when they implemented part of Threads with the status
| update feature in the Instagram messages view.
|
| Twitter will probably remain used by relatively "anti-social"
| people. In the States, that may be by politicized users, fueled
| by Elon's freedom fighting. Here in Japan, Twitter is very
| popular because of the sense of anonymity, coupled with the use
| of Kanji characters that achieves concision within 140
| characters. Instagram might be too social for us (esp. male older
| than 25).
|
| It will probably pain me to see the diaspora of users among many
| microblogging services. The transition to a new microblogging hub
| may be painful for both Twitter Inc (ie. X Corp) and Twitter
| users.
|
| It's funny to see that Threads is the re-implementation of
| Facebook status updates before news articles swamped the
| Newsfeed. Meta's microblogging came back full circle.
| Brystephor wrote:
| Lol @ Instagram absorbing Snapchat usecases with just stories
| dahwolf wrote:
| "It will probably pain me to see the diaspora of users among
| many microblogging services."
|
| Not just you, every publisher, influencer, notable person,
| institute that uses social media to broadcast information to
| large groups of people.
| rcme wrote:
| It's funny that there is a narrative that Instagram killed
| Snapchat with their stories feature. Snapchat still has
| something like 383M DAU. That's a massive user base. Instagram
| Stories definitely blunted Snap's growth, especially with
| millennials and older.
| runeks wrote:
| Snapchat is losing $300M USD every quarter. Unless they find
| a solution they'll be gone soon.
| rcme wrote:
| Free cash flow is positive though
| spike021 wrote:
| I'm really interested in seeing what my Japanese friends do. I
| don't live in Japan but have made a bunch of friends there in
| my travels. They're super active on Twitter for baseball and
| car discussion.
|
| Hoping they make the jump, honestly.
|
| At least if this app is good.
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| Twitter is a much better social network in Japanese than in
| English. You are more likely to encounter people who want to
| discuss hobbies than being trolls. I think they'll stick to
| the end, just like the Titanic.
|
| Making the jump seems a little challenging right now. Some
| Japanese people have tried Truth Social, even dominating the
| trends with Japanese keywords. I'm not sure if they'll stick
| there given its context with American politics.
|
| As Twitter became popular in Japan with the 2011 Earthquake,
| the migration to Threads might be another earthquake away
| (which happens often here).[1]
|
| I wonder who will be the core users of Threads in Japan.
| Twitter was popular among nerdy "Otakus" who often engaged in
| anime, gaming, or electronics. Facebook/Instagram always
| tended to be avoided by that demographics. Instead, Instagram
| in Japan is popular among young women, who post selfies or
| food pics. However, I'm not sure if they'll be receptive to a
| text-focused service.
|
| [1] Side-anecdote: Twitter is the best earthquake detector.
| Whenever you feel a shake, Twitter users will confirm it
| sooner than traditional news sources.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| [1]There is an xkcd for that
|
| https://xkcd.com/723/
| spike021 wrote:
| For what it's worth, the same friends I refer to on Twitter
| (Japanese baseball fans and those into cars) are also even
| more active on Instagram. That's how I found many of them
| to begin with. I'd say 70/30 split of male/female in my
| experience at least.
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| That's interesting! I didn't expect some demographics of
| Twitter to transition to a photo-centric social network
| like Instagram. I guess watching baseball is a hobby that
| happens outside and is suitable for snaps.
|
| Are your friends mostly posting photos of baseball
| matches?
| spike021 wrote:
| For baseball generally photos of themselves from their
| seats and then photos of the ballpark/field, so not all
| that different from American friends on IG. Also
| sometimes just photos or videos from batting cages or
| pitching cages.
|
| For cars, typically group touring (basically group
| caravan drives to various landmarks and other places),
| photos of the cars with cool views or at interesting
| places, car shows, club meetings, etc.
| Lisieshy wrote:
| If you don't know about it, then https://misskey.io/ is an
| extremely good Twitter alternative that is almost
| exclusively used by Japanese people. A lot of Japanese
| artists and others are eager to make the switch from
| Twitter too.
|
| Also, Twitter isn't the best place to confirm if there is
| an earthquake anymore, since the website is completely
| private if you don't have an account. I use
| https://unnerv.jp/about/more instead now, since it's on
| Mastodon and can interop with misskey and other fediverse
| software easily.
| GenericDev wrote:
| Very interesting! I would like to join, but I need an
| invite code. Do you know where I can get one of these?
| rakoo wrote:
| Misskey is one fediverse software that can be used to
| host any instance. What you're seeing is one such
| instance. There are hundreds of others:
| https://www.fediverse.to/search/?sw=misskey
| [deleted]
| lofties wrote:
| There's also a large number of expats/lifers and English
| speaking Japanese on https://famichiki.jp
|
| Disclaimer: I run this instance
| varispeed wrote:
| It's game over for Twitter when they allow terrorist content and
| block people questioning and reporting it.
| noelrock wrote:
| I can definitely see a gap in the market for this now.
|
| The present Twitter alternatives (Mastodon, Bluesky, Spoutible)
| are just too hobbyist or finicky.
|
| Meta will presumably bring an ease-of-use to this service and,
| crucially, scale from minute 1. They're the building blocks of
| Twitter's current incumbency position, and Meta/Threads can
| replicate them straight out the gate.
|
| That is a huge advantage.
|
| On the other side of the ledger, the utility of Twitter keeps
| sliding. Not sure how many Hacker News users are Twitter users or
| what the crossover is, but the whole blue tick 'thing' has
| reduced the utility in one key surprising way: high quality
| replies under popular accounts are impossible to find. It's like
| if you could buy upvotes on Hacker News to get to the top almost.
| Secondarily to that is the stuff over the last few days with very
| low rate limits on how many tweets you can view - if you can't
| use a social network, it tends to stop being useful.
|
| While I wouldn't say Threads is a slam dunk guaranteed success, I
| would say it's the most probable contender of all the ones out
| there.
| roughly wrote:
| I'd really love to see some actual creativity out of the biggest
| names in the industry, instead of this endless regurgitation of
| whatever idea got the tiniest bit of traction most recently.
| tedunangst wrote:
| In this case, I think there was more than a little traction for
| a specific kind of social site, which turned into a crater, so
| it's not surprising somebody would build exactly what existed
| before.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| Creativity is for startups. If you run the 8th or so most
| valuable company on the planet, your competitive advantage is
| mostly your scale. You should mostly be using that to maximize
| return on proven stuff (either by buying or copying proven
| things), not pissing away billions of dollars on stuff that a
| startup can iterate on for a tiny fraction of that price.
| roughly wrote:
| That's an incredibly depressing way to run a world. What on
| earth is a billion dollars for if not doing something
| interesting?
| ramones13 wrote:
| Metaverse? Llama? They're doing both.
|
| How well they're doing those is up for debate, but they're
| doing interesting stuff too.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| Metaverse is exactly my point -- they've incinerated vast
| amounts of investor money with nothing to show for it.
| They could've and should've just plowed that money into
| hundreds of startups.
|
| LLAMA is also exactly my point -- LLMs are pretty well-
| proven at this point. If you spend $X on machine learning
| researchers, you can get an LLM with Y parameters that is
| useful for various tasks like sentiment analysis, machine
| translation, etc. Facebook should be spending money on
| that because they have lots of cash, data centers, and ML
| researchers so they can do this at scale that only a few
| others can (Google, Microsoft/OpenAI and maybe Amazon).
| ramones13 wrote:
| That seems like a lot of gross simplifications with
| hindsight bias.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| It's really about whether you can incrementally assess
| P&L.
|
| Facebook has epic amounts of user-generated imagery and
| text, and incremental improvements in NLP and computer
| vision generate incremental revenue (and profit) because
| you can put up better ads and introduce new features like
| translation. As an investor, that is very appealing.
|
| There's no incremental revenue from Metaverse. It's a
| huge money pit, with no obvious end date for when enough
| billions have been wasted to call it quits. It could well
| work out, but if I'm an investor why would I want to
| invest in this through Facebook rather than through a
| bunch of startups pursuing a diverse set of strategies.
| jdm2212 wrote:
| If you have a billion dollars and want to do something
| creative, invest it in 100 startups. But if you want to
| spend a billion dollars through a big corporation, you
| should use that corporation's comparative advantage --
| which is generally scale, not creativity.
| acherion wrote:
| Doing something interesting comes with risk. That billion
| dollars is likely cash from investors who want a return.
| They won't be happy if the interesting thing you want to do
| isn't going to return a profit, hence they stick with what
| they know best and is least risky.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Why would it be bad that all risky initiatives start small
| instead of eg accidentally ruining the whole healthcare,
| education or policing system with a single decision?
| zmmmmm wrote:
| Will be interesting to see how much this is a genuine business
| for Facebook vs just an opportunistic dig at Twitter/Musk. It's
| actually been kind of weird watching all the big tech just stand
| to the side while Twitter implodes.
| Banditoz wrote:
| I'm not too familiar with mobile app dev but why is the app 254
| MB? I just compiled a 3rd-party Android Reddit app with a
| different oauth client_id and the apk was 18 MB. What are they
| packing in there?!
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Android apps are significantly smaller than iOS apps.
| timeon wrote:
| Probably webapp.
| skydhash wrote:
| Assets and Libraries. I remember including the Firebase
| Libraries in your react native app more than double its size
| because of gRPC or something. Not a lot of places care about
| size optimization anymore (looking at MW Warzone and every
| electron apps)
| alphabet9000 wrote:
| nice, inspired me to write a guide on how to delete your threads
| account
|
| https://jollo.org/LNT/public/delete_threads_account.html
| lordgrenville wrote:
| A lot of discussion about whether Meta can execute or not.
| Regardless, if this does succeed, I hope the FTC will have
| something to say.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I'm so excited for this an advertiser. Twitter ads are so bad.
| Meta ads are the best in the industry.
| astrange wrote:
| I hope you're not the people constantly trying to sell me
| Viagra for millennials on Instagram.
| l33tc0de wrote:
| As OP said "best in the industry"
| theshrike79 wrote:
| "Not available in your country or region"
|
| Not a Twitter killer after all. Or any kind of killer.
| feldrim wrote:
| Reminds me of the times when Facebook acquired Friendfeed, a
| brilliant micro-blogging platform with real-time feed and "like"
| features before others. Back then, Twitter favs were anonymous
| while Friendfeed used usernames. It was innovative but it's left
| abandoned after acquisition until shutting off.
| encomiast wrote:
| I like that there's some competition in this space. I wish it was
| someone else because I will never have a Facebook-controlled app
| on any of my devices again. I simply don't trust them. If it's
| available on the web and it gains traction, maybe I will use it.
| rabuse wrote:
| I came across a smaller platform recently called Qwurty.
|
| https://qwurty.com
| ath0 wrote:
| If by any chance you're the graphic designer who picked South
| Williamsburg hotspots for the iOS preview screenshots... well, hi
| neighbor! Good choices.
| thefounder wrote:
| The app name is bad. It won't be succesful.
| thdespou wrote:
| I'm signing up. Twitter is a troll farm. Sick and tired of its
| mess.
| nsonha wrote:
| Some people have an opportunity to undo twitter's damage to the
| world and they just build another twitter? Lame.
| tommoor wrote:
| Seeing as it wasn't linked yet:
|
| https://www.threads.net looks like where this will live on the
| web
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| threads.com must have 100xed in value the past hour.
| owlbynight wrote:
| I won't be using this unless it has a web app, and without an
| Android app, they're freezing out a lot of people who could
| contribute. This won't go anywhere. BlueSky is just fine.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| There is an Android app in the pipes:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram....
| [deleted]
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| If this gains traction, how long will it take for Meta to
| enshittify Threads?
|
| Facebook and Instagram have been stable, if nothing else... But I
| feel like Meta is under immense pressure to monetize users as
| more and more see the "Facebook is for old people and TikTok is
| draining Instagram" writing on the wall.
| remote_phone wrote:
| I wish they would update their Hyperlapse app, it was the best at
| what it did but hasn't worked in years.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| I'm so tired of chat apps. Every chat app is the same crap done
| over and over again... But apparently its 'new' and you need to
| download it because its the only one X uses, yayyyy. It's like
| scheduling: the problem was solved already but everyones obsessed
| with redoing them.
|
| Does anyone who works on apps / software / whatever ever consider
| how tiring it is to have to adopt all this sheet? It's like the
| digital equivalent of fashion. Literally just waxes and wanes
| between apps that are all functionally the same based on trends.
| bruh2 wrote:
| This is extremely tiring, especially since:
|
| 1. Important info is hosted on these platforms
|
| 2. It's impossible to look this info up. Their internal search
| functions feel like their optimized for finding distracting
| shit rather than finding what you were actually looking for.
|
| I hate it with a burning passion, and I secretly wish for all
| of these companies to be nationalized and have like 90% of
| their features deprecated. I hate having my attention abused
| like that. It's too much hassle and FOMO to uninstall these
| apps, and I need like 3 external tools to limit my usage to
| sane volumes.
|
| This is not a top-priotity problem at all, nor one that I think
| of frequently (just an hour a day), yet I can't fathom how some
| higher-ups waste their lives thinking of these shticks
| fire wrote:
| Great, another social media platform that won't have any form of
| support team.
|
| Twitter at least had one you could actually talk to before Elon
| took over, but Instagram has lacked support contact methods for
| years at this point.
|
| Using a platform where you have no recourse or even method of
| reaching out if something goes awry is always a dangerous game to
| play :(
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| I already don't trust Meta. I'm not giving them more angles to
| accumulate personal data.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Circa 2006: OMG Facebook killed Myspace, Facebook is so great.
|
| Circa 2010's: Facebook sucks, let's all move to Twitter
|
| Circa 2023:OMG Threads killed Twitter, Threads is so great
|
| Circa 2030's: Threads is so lame, let's all move to something
| else
| andsoitis wrote:
| twitter is a feature
| [deleted]
| phtrivier wrote:
| From the bottom of my heart, I hope as many of us as possible
| will, someday, get a chance to replace the time spent either "on"
| or "thinking about" the Twitter kind of "addictive,
| adverstisement supported, high-engagement requiring, tribe re-
| inforcing, data-siphoning, public discourse worsening" kind of
| social media.
|
| (To be clear: I'm 100% expecting "Threads" to become that in the
| short-to-medium term, unless they have some specific moderation
| techniques in place.)
|
| This won't make your life "great", mind me. I'm pretty sure it
| will make it better.
|
| Good luck.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I have Threads on my phone. for a long time I was using it
| exclusively instead of the trash fire that is Instagram app.
|
| But for more than a year now it says it was discontinued at
| start, and I cannot login again.
|
| I am so likely to use Threads from Instagram /s
| didip wrote:
| Wow, the stars aligned and shined on Mark Zuckerberg. What a
| lucky break.
|
| Mark my words, the Meta revival story starts now thanks to
| Twitter and Reddit killing themselves.
|
| I think Meta will realize that it is best to stick with what they
| are good at: Building profitable apps via social interactions.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This page says "Android Coming Soon":
|
| https://www.threads.net/download
| robertwt7 wrote:
| Twitter will take a big hit from this.. given the current
| situation, will reddit take a big hit as well? it's definitely an
| interesting time where both blue bird and reddit users are
| looking for alternatives. Meta has a good track record of running
| social app, this can be a really successful product with the
| launch timing if the app fulfil the mass requirements from both
| sides
| gochi wrote:
| Reddit will continue to take several hits from their own weird
| decisions, I don't see how Threads will have much of an impact
| there. Not unless they start repurposing Facebook Groups
| features to encourage that same sort of community aspect to
| topics.
| modernerd wrote:
| "Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other
| fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find you with
| your full username @username@threads.net." [1]
|
| Did not expect Fediverse integration from Meta.
|
| [1] https://9to5google.com/2023/07/03/threads-instagram-app-
| coun...
| romilshah29 wrote:
| Adam mosseri clarified about one way vs two portability on his
| thread
| https://www.threads.net/t/CuRtcYTNY3J/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA...
| modernerd wrote:
| What did he say? I only see, "Sorry, this page isn't
| available".
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It won't last -- if it even launches with this feature --
| pretty sure.
|
| As others have pointed out, most hosts will simply de-federate
| them pretty quickly anyways, and then it will become a useless
| feature that they turn off.
|
| I suspect it will be one-way anyways, to capitalize on the
| existing content produced by Mastodon users out there already
| while they bootstrap. There's no way they'd offer their own
| content up into the fediverse without the ability to tie it to
| ads and engagement.
|
| Given the cold reception they've gotten, it will be interesting
| to see if this feature even makes launch.
| dahwolf wrote:
| The most realistic comment in the thread, you don't deserve
| these downvotes.
|
| Threads development started last January. Quite obviously
| it's a rush job to capitalize on the fall of Twitter before
| BlueSky does.
|
| They'll instantly fill it with a zillion Insta users to get a
| critical mass going and take things from there.
|
| Surely they don't give a crap about any fediverse.
| arianvanp wrote:
| They used to run an XMPP bridge on chat.facebook.com
| manojlds wrote:
| Used to being the keyword.
| sequoia wrote:
| Yeah talk about good old days. Pidgin or Adium (or Finch,
| in the terminal), I could have google chat, facebook chat,
| and even IRC in one app. Throw OTR plugin on that & I we
| had end to end chat encryption over google & facebook. Very
| sad day when they shut these down.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Agreed. As an interesting look at the human side of
| technology decisions, Google dropped XMPP federation the
| year after I graduated high school, leaving me extremely
| isolated from all my friends once we went our separate
| ways.
| luckystarr wrote:
| People on the Fediverse expected it very much. Meta already was
| trying to talk to the larger instances "off the record"[1].
| Fediverse users are already planning to boycott any instance
| which federates with Meta to block any Embrace, Extend and
| Extinguish moves.
|
| [1] https://fosstodon.org/@kev/110592625692688836
|
| edit: More info here:
| https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/fedipact-blocking-meta/
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If my current mastodon instance blocks Meta, I _will_ move to
| a different instance which federates with them. The entire
| point of federation in my eyes is that it lets me talk to as
| many people as possible.
| hrisng wrote:
| Why? I would love for the general public to be able to
| connect to Fediverse. I don't love Meta per se, but let be
| real here, the majority of people are not gonna sign up for
| random instances that run by someone they don' know, to
| interact with a very small and niche subset of people, with a
| risk of it being shut down by that said person due to
| whatever personal circumstances they may have. It's the
| biggest obstacles when convincing people to switch to
| Mastodon.
|
| If this rumor is real and Threads takes off, you can still
| stay in whichever instance that you like, but now be able to
| get updates from the artist, the experts, educators,
| politicians, the influencers that would not have joined the
| Fediverse otherwise. And more importantly, more people now
| can get updates from you. Reach might not be something you
| personally appreciate but it's very important for content
| creators.
| rektide wrote:
| The main reason why is that Meta is a colossal vast data
| gathering beast, that for example flagrantly fucks around
| bypassing the GDPR.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36583651
|
| Now, I personally I think it's trying to swim up the
| waterfall & ultimately worse for everyone, but: Mastadon
| specifically has had a strong history of being anti-search,
| anti-scraping. You aren't supposed to be surveiling folks
| at industrial scale on the fediverse.
|
| There's widespread skepticism about Meta respecting rules
| of the road. Having a huge giant shark join the pool of
| lots of little fish seems like a scary proposition. How we
| can still protect & have sovereignty over our different
| fedi-sites is a real question when there's a company with
| so much technical, economic, and popular leverages.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Mastodon's culture of anti-everything is naive. All posts
| (except "DMs") are public and can be scraped and made
| searchable at will for anyone mildly motivated to do so.
|
| I'm honestly pretty skeptical about the fediverse aspect
| of Threads. It suggests that if I open a new fediverse
| instance and follow their accounts, I can suck in their
| timeline and do with it whatever I want. In particular,
| to bypass ads.
|
| Hence, I could make a "best of Threads" fediverse
| instance without ads. Or maybe put my own ads on it.
|
| Or, I could build my own client on top of the Threads
| instance.
|
| None of this sounds very Meta to me.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Embrace, Extend and Extinguish fears seem like a good
| reason
| devnullbrain wrote:
| So does this mean independent email providers should
| block GMail?
| guerrilla wrote:
| It would have been a great idea in the beginning, yes,
| absolutely. It's too late now though.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Too late for that :-). But good example: gmail is
| gatekeeper for "deliverability". EEE doesn't have to be a
| malicious conspiracy. It can happen as an emergent
| property of consolidation.
| knubie wrote:
| There are also an increasing number of email clients that
| are "gmail only."
| _thisdot wrote:
| Interesting. Especially so considering that the Gmail app
| on mobile is not gmail-only!
| luckystarr wrote:
| The "general public" already can connect to the Fediverse,
| by making an account on a node in the Fediverse. See,
| simple. We don't need Meta for that. :)
| dahwolf wrote:
| It's because Mastodon is full of salty toxic doomers.
|
| Regardless, I'm predicting that if not for a cultural
| clash, many instances may de-federate due to the compute
| cost.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I'm with you here and really it's just a minority of fedi
| instances that are going to defederate and that's fine. I
| look forward to hopefully being able to follow creators
| once again without needing to use bots
| hhh wrote:
| This behavior is pathetic. As long as Meta is open to
| federation to other instances, this can only be a good thing
| for the entire ecosystem.
| luckystarr wrote:
| It's not pathetic. EEE has been shown time and time again
| (MS, Google, etc.). Also, Meta is a company known for
| dubious practices and anti-competitive behavior. So why
| trust them?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| There is a very real concern that there will be a flood of
| hate speech, scams, and ads. Meta has shown themselves to
| be absolutely terrible at moderation in recent years.
|
| Believe it or not, most Mastodon / Fediverse admins & users
| aren't interested in taking over the world and having a
| huge reach. They just want a nice community.
| joepie91_ wrote:
| It continues to boggle my mind how so many tech folks
| just don't seem to understand that "maximum scale" is not
| everybody's idea of success, and that not everything is
| built to "take over the world".
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| This behaviour is pragmatic.
| corobo wrote:
| Yeah, I do get the EEE angle people are worried about but
| that should really be halted from the Extend phase onwards
| if and when it comes up, otherwise people are just going to
| use the popular one - which will be Threads. It will start
| with an established userbase. It will start with the
| marketing Meta can throw at it.
|
| Nobody outside of the HN crowd gives half a fluff about
| distributed social. They'll use the one that lets them
| interact with people they know. If that means they can talk
| cross-instance, sweet, they will. If they can't, Mastodon
| and ActivityPub in general continues to be a pain that the
| majority wont bother with.
|
| If that's Mastodon's goal, fair enough. I think it's a bad
| goal.
| dahwolf wrote:
| Fully agree, been watching that space and it's insanely
| dysfunctional. It's a technical disaster as well as a
| cultural disaster.
|
| But indeed, if the goal is to self sabotage and remain an
| irrelevant corner of misfits, all good.
| luckystarr wrote:
| Care to elaborate? I haven't had the pleasure of checking
| Mastodon out. (You're talking about that, right?) And
| also, which instance are you talking about?
| iguana_lawyer wrote:
| The only pathetic behavior I see is the CEO who is so
| obsessed with Augustus Caesar he cuts his hair to look like
| him.
| iopq wrote:
| Just like when it embraced the XMPP chats?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| > As long as Meta is open to federation to other instances
|
| That's a pretty doubtful condition, especially if Threads
| becomes too successful for the Fediverse.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingui
| s...
|
| > Fediverse users are already planning to boycott any
| instance
|
| Though if this is true, yeah, I dislike that too. It should
| be individual admins' choices.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > if Threads becomes too successful for the Fediverse.
|
| I wager most Fediverse users aren't worried about this
| (at least speaking for myself). The status quo is 2 or 3
| big private companies and a few thousand federated
| alternatives. If Meta betrays the community, things will
| go back to square one and core functionality of their app
| will start to falter. They need the community more than
| the community needs them.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| When threads goes live there will be tens of millions of
| people with existing Meta user profiles entering it
| overnight. There are _currently_ ~13M Mastodon users,
| most of which I 'm sure are not really active. So
| depending on how federation into ActivtyPub is set up, it
| will be like Eternal September x 100. Their content will
| likely dwarf anything out in Mastodon land. And judging
| by what I see on Facebook and Instagram, I don't hold out
| high hopes for the quality of that content or the
| behaviour of those users.
|
| I'm not _worried_ about it really because I think the
| ethic of fediverse as such that they will be quickly de-
| federated. But it won 't be fun along the way.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Mastodon doesn't fill your timeline with content from
| other instances, by default. If 100 million Facebook
| users federated with Mastodon overnight, 0 organic Meta-
| related posts would make it into my timeline. Only
| content reposted from Meta by people I follow would show
| up.
|
| Defederated or not, Meta will have pretty much zero
| bearing on the instances outside their bubble.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This is true, though people from Threads will likely be
| able to follow, and comment on Mastodon profiles and
| posts and cause issues that way.
| dahwolf wrote:
| "They need the community more than the community needs
| them."
|
| You have to be kidding me. The entire fediverse is little
| over 1M MAU, almost all of them not monetizable.
| So...tiny and useless. Threads can launch whilst being
| fully defederated and instantly become the fediverse.
| yard2010 wrote:
| That's bs there's clearly no symmetry here
| runeks wrote:
| So they allow Threads-to-Mastodon, but they key question is
| whether they allow Mastodon-to-Threads. The former is just a
| way to recruit users to their platform, while the latter gives
| access to their platform without being a user.
| TobTobXX wrote:
| Read the parent quote again, it's quite clear it's 2-ways.
| api wrote:
| A large number of fediverse instances are defederating
| preemptively to prevent the obvious spam and embrace-extend-
| extinguish.
|
| The fediverse will never be as big as corporate social media,
| but that's a feature. Meta can keep the dopamine scrollers
| and influencers and ads.
| seydor wrote:
| Instagram 's ? Why not Facebook's?
|
| And why does Instagram need a whole new app for text posts?
|
| Are we about to see a hacker news for image posts?
| docmars wrote:
| I think in order for Threads to be successful and compete with
| Twitter, they will need to stop policing information so heavily
| as they do on Facebook. Most of my immediate circles left
| Facebook because of all the tyrannical fact checking notices,
| suspensions, and "misinfo" policing going on.
|
| Whereas Twitter now prides itself in being the free speech
| absolutist social media app, and information flows freely there.
| While they do have Community Notes to add context to potential
| (real) misinformation, at least it's guided by Twitter users and
| doesn't prevent people from seeing the original post without
| jumping through hoops, and there's no risk of being suspended for
| angering the Ministry of Truth, brought to you by government
| officials looking to cover-up inconvenient facts.
| web3-is-a-scam wrote:
| Twitter is terrible now but no way in hell am I jumping ship to a
| Meta product.
| sequoia wrote:
| Will I be able to click on a link to a "threads" post and view it
| in a browser without logging in?
| charles_f wrote:
| The metaverse revolutionized how we work and live. It completely
| transformed society as we know it, with the largest adoption of
| any software product known to humanity. People use it for
| multiple hours daily, and some even started working in it.
| Integrated with Facebook's metacurrency based on blockchain, the
| economy shifted towards decentraland, where the best memes and
| bored apes are exchanged on the marketplace in Dollzucks. The
| game changer was the integration with Meta's time machine, which
| allows me to comment in this thread. They're even talking of
| adding legs to avatars!
|
| It's only logical that meta now sets to take over Twitter, which
| will happen in a matter of months. Their product is superior and
| contains very few backdoors on its encryption.
|
| All hail Mark!
|
| _edit: I now realize that the time transportation function might
| also take you to an alternate time branch, disregard my comment
| if it 's irrelevant_
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Share ideas & trends with text
|
| The circle of Web 2.X (3.X?) progress continues! This was called
| the 'Facebook Wall' in 2007. You could write stories, post links,
| photos, etc. It worked and scaled. Not much longer until they
| progress into a 'student directory and message' app, exclusively
| for college and university students.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Facebook_features#Wall
| ljlolel wrote:
| Name overlaps with https://threads.com/ ?
| qingcharles wrote:
| It does. Meta product here: https://threads.net/
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Oh, wait, this feels like the start of a cyberpunk story.
|
| If TikTok gets banned, where to the users go? Instagram.
|
| Threads could replace Twitter.
|
| Reddit is going downhill... Maybe Meta could even buy it in a
| firesale?
|
| Outside of chat apps like Discord, Slack, Teams and Telegram
| (which compete with WhatsApp), Meta will have consolidated most
| of the world's social media under them. And that's assuming they
| dont buy out Discord.
| [deleted]
| esskay wrote:
| > Reddit is going downhill... Maybe Meta could even buy it in a
| firesale?
|
| The problem is Reddit has very little real value, and to get
| that value you'd have to go even further into pushing its users
| away from the platform as you'd need to be able to target and
| identify individuals.
|
| Unlike Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc the majority of Reddit
| is very intentionally anonymous, not even requiring an email
| address. A sizable portion still use 'old reddit' because of
| how awful and hostile the redesign was.
|
| To get it to a point of profitability it would need to be more
| viable for advertisers, and that only comes with forcing them
| down users throats, which traditionally is not a reddit thing
| and would alienate people even more than they've already done
| recently.
|
| It's also worth noting its 18 years old and still hasn't come
| remotely close to being profitable.
| n3m4c wrote:
| Reddit has a lot of value, just not people who can utilize
| it. Anonymous nature of Reddit doesn't matter when you have
| Meta's cookies while accessing it. Content is also nicely
| categorized so they can easily push, for example, insurance
| and credit card ads on r/PersonalFinance. It is pretty wild
| that Mark Zuckerberg is the only person to figure out how to
| make money off of social media after more than 20 years of
| social media existing.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| > The problem is Reddit has very little real value
|
| I think the fact that users already go looking for a specific
| thing at a specific subreddit makes the value instantly
| apparent.
|
| Being able to target users with an interest in your niche is
| infinitely valuable. Personalised ads are the entire business
| model of google and facebook to behemoths.
|
| The problem is reddit is led by the most unqualified
| management of any top 10 most visited world site and they
| spent 2 quarters developing NFT profile pictures instead of
| mod tools, or advertiser platforms.
|
| Having non intrusive ads, with good quality, that directly
| relate to what you care about? Is a dream of users and
| brands. Have an AMA with a movie start or a videogame
| developer and have them pay for it as marketing, or allow a
| weekly "share your news" from brands where they can talk new
| products, or versions of their thing.
|
| There are a million ways to monetise reddit, in ways that the
| community would not be angry. But making it look like tiktok,
| forcing a terrible app, spending billions hosting your own
| images and video, and having mods do free labour for you
| while you fight to get any money in... is not the best way to
| go about it.
| fassssst wrote:
| Reddit has real value if you wanted to build a search engine
| or train AI...
| The_Double wrote:
| Reddit going downhill is mostly because they are trying to
| become more like Meta. A competitor should be less meta, not
| more meta.
| giarc wrote:
| Imagine if Meta bought Reddit, pulled the need for ads and
| gave the volunteer moderators access to Meta's team of
| 50,000+ moderators. "You deal with the conversations and the
| messages from users, we'll take care of the taking down user
| content that is against the rules." Meta uses the content to
| train their AI models, removes API pricing (or reduces it
| greatly, no need to IPO and therefore no need to show
| revenue).
| rvz wrote:
| Such purchases of Reddit and Discord under Meta is just not
| going to be allowed to happen, for anti-trust reasons.
|
| Today, it's almost as everyone has forgotten about social media
| monopolization.
| aio2 wrote:
| You could honestly be right.
| ducharmdev wrote:
| The beginnings of a western WeChat?
| menshiki wrote:
| Meta does not have the support of legislators. The EU would
| regulate any service that would even aspire to become a
| Western WeChat way before they have any chance to succeed.
| jadtz wrote:
| Doesnt EU already have somewhat of a WeChat, everybody uses
| whatsapp there. Definitely Meta already won that market.
| Arkhaine_kupo wrote:
| The problem with wechat is not use, its how its embedded
| everywhere.
|
| Being able to do payments without a bank through whatsapp
| is way beyond the risk appetitte of european regulators
| for example.
|
| Plus forcing whatsapp to add e2e encryption already fixes
| most of the issues in terms of risk to privacy regardless
| of how big the userbase it.
| NovaDudely wrote:
| Ouch... yeah that sounds about right.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I hate how right you are. I do my best to stay out of the
| Facebook ecosystem (although I am sure they have an extensive
| profile of my web activities). I am surprised they have not
| tried to make their own non-crypto financial system. Could
| embed it into restaurant storefronts and the marketplace.
| amon22 wrote:
| Ironic because apparently that is the long-time strategy of
| Elon with Twitter (X app). Off course these plans seem pretty
| delusional now...
| bathtub365 wrote:
| I wonder how their logged out web experience will be. I think
| Twitter has historically (until recently) been very permissive
| about letting anyone view and embed content from the site and I
| think that's helped it become more socially pervasive. Instagram
| is really popular but has typically locked down the web
| experience unless you log in.
| MetricExpansion wrote:
| This was the social network that was supposed to support
| ActivityPub, right? So... maybe logged out support will be
| good? I'm still not holding my breath though.
| lefrenchy wrote:
| So it begins...
| ethanbond wrote:
| Seems closer to the ending at this point (for Twitter).
| elforce002 wrote:
| So, the ending of twitter is to switch to Threads with FB's
| content moderation guidelines? I don't think so. We have
| social media fatigue rn. Twitter is is ok to get info really
| fast, rarely goes down, you have access to all kind of views
| (from extreme left to extreme right). This is the main reason
| gab, truth social, etc... won't be mainstream.
|
| Fb hasn't been original from a long time. From trying to
| launch a substack competitor, stealing snapchat features,
| creating reels, etc. Now, developer wise, is a different
| game. React, Pytorch, Prophet, etc... hit after hit.
|
| Twitter can be a "cesspool" but I don't trust fb at all.
| astrange wrote:
| The only "extreme left" account I followed on Twitter (Chad
| Loder) was personally banned by Elon because his #1
| priority post-Grimes breakup has been trying to become a
| made man so the internet fascists will let him into their
| gang.
|
| There are certainly tankies on there, which is a kind of
| person that claims to be left but is actually a
| reactionary.
| clipsy wrote:
| > Twitter is is ok to get info really fast, rarely goes
| down, you have access to all kind of views (from extreme
| left to extreme right).
|
| Twitter _was_ ok to get (and, equally important in my
| opinion, _share_ ) info really fast; now you need to have
| an account, be logged in, and be under your meager daily
| quota to even be allowed to see anything. And everyone you
| want to share info with needs to do the same. The recent
| changes have pretty severely undermined what made Twitter
| stand out among its larger competitors.
| elforce002 wrote:
| The quota is temporary. I agree with you that latest
| changes have been crazy,but it 's not the end of the
| world. I much rather prefer Twitter than give Zuckerberg
| more power.
|
| Now, I see them winning if they go Twitter's route and
| nuke their content moderation guidelines but since that
| won't happen, I doubt you'll see mass migration from the
| freedom fighters, hehe.
|
| Reality is they need each other. Conflict is what gets
| Twitter going. That and memes.
| ethanbond wrote:
| I think the vast majority of people don't care much about
| what happens at the outer bounds of content moderation.
| Most people go to Twitter for pretty normal internet
| conversations, which are increasingly difficult to have
| there: the Blue buffoons being at the top of every thread
| with nothing worthwhile to say, the constant spotlight on
| Elon drama, _rate limiting_ , huge jump in bugginess, etc.
|
| FB allows a sufficiently diverse, extreme, and even toxic
| political environment on FB for most everyone. What kind of
| content would Threads forbid that is more crucial to
| Twitter users than a functional service?
|
| Putting the content of people who have to pay for
| engagement above everyone else was one of the most
| heroically dumb product decisions I've ever heard. I was
| fine putting up with everything else but then the service
| just became legitimately not compelling because of that.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > rarely goes down
|
| This would be the site that has been effectively largely
| down for the last three days?
| elforce002 wrote:
| Well, I said rarely, not never, hehe.
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| I fear that they make you sign-in in order to view content. This
| wouldn't make it better than Twitter, as it is now.
| nmcela wrote:
| I hate everything about this. Everything Meta touches turns to
| dystopian shit.
| vollkornbrot wrote:
| Might elon be damagin twitter to help mark push this?
| duncan-donuts wrote:
| Why would he do that?
| willmeyers wrote:
| Looks good and clean. I'll probably use it over Twitter/Reddit.
| erremerre wrote:
| My question is, after the twitter fiasco, there is a number of
| competitors, like skyblue or this threads that have been created
| to remplace it (I dont count Mastodon, because it was not created
| to remplaced, but as an open alternative).
|
| Why absolutely no big company (MS, facebook, google, amazon,
| etc...) is attempting the same with Reddit? Not even discord has
| done any single change to try to steal any userbase from it.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Facebook Groups competes with Reddit, I think.
| PossiblyKyle wrote:
| It is, and it's even more popular than reddit in my local
| communities. The problem is the lack of anonymity
| erremerre wrote:
| Do you mind to prove some example of communities popular?
| Sorry but I haven't had facebook since 2016 and I literally
| have no idea what is going on with it.
| PossiblyKyle wrote:
| I don't live in the US. We have groups for uni, the tech
| sector (in general, kind of like /r/programming in a
| way), ML&DL, dating, sales (alongside Facebook
| Marketplace). We also have groups for towns and
| neighborhoods as the prime way for the locals to
| communicate. It is de-facto reddit here
| erremerre wrote:
| Kind of, but you need to identify yourself with a facebook
| account that is linked to your name. Probably not the best
| idea if you are trying to form a community like r/piracy or
| r/watches where you could remain unidentified
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Not to be confused with the 1984 film, Threads.
|
| A film about life before, during and after a fictional nuclear
| attack.
| duncan-donuts wrote:
| Big signals that Musk made a lot of mistakes with twitter if Meta
| scrambled to ship a competitor like this. I don't use Twitter so
| I won't use this either but it'll be interesting to see if the
| instagram folks can take this market from twitter.
| rvz wrote:
| > if Meta scrambled to ship a competitor like this..
|
| More like the 'fediverse' is scrambling [0] to block Threads
| before it has even launched.
|
| [0] https://fedipact.online/
| quadcore wrote:
| _Musk made a lot of mistakes with twitter_
|
| Now call me crazy but I disagree. I think - or rather I feel -
| he's doing an excelent job somehow. He's doing what other
| executives are afraid to do: he's building and building
| requires some walls to be hammered down ; and yeah this makes
| some noise and smoke. He's moving fast and breaking things (if
| you'd excuse the easy punt). To me, what he's doing is exciting
| and I think twitter is gonna thrive once the big work is done.
| djur wrote:
| I can't think of a single improvement to Twitter in the past
| 9 months. What changes I have noticed have ranged from
| annoying (extra-long tweets, a lot more white supremacist
| content to block) to destructive (boosting paid users, recent
| usage restrictions).
| [deleted]
| faefox wrote:
| What is it that you think he's building?
| sen wrote:
| Debt.
| berberous wrote:
| I take no view on whether Elon will be successful on making
| Twitter more profitable. But as a user -- and someone that
| typically supports Elon -- I have to say he's made the app
| subjectively worse IMO. I find the "For You" page and
| algorithm to boost more "junk" content than before. I used to
| find it interesting, now it feels like scrolling through
| Instagram meme pages. I'm at the point where I am thinking of
| uninstalling it.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Sorry your For You page sucks, but that's a you problem. My
| For You page is excellent - I see mostly the kind of tweets
| I like, and when I see a tweet I don't like I tap the not
| interested button. I actually love the new FYP way more
| than the old home feed, and the option to switch to the
| chronological "Followed" feed is more visible than before.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Why are you apoligising for Twitter? What are _you_ sorry
| for?
| lapcat wrote:
| > Sorry your For You page sucks, but that's a you
| problem.
|
| How so? You're blaming the user for a feature that the
| user didn't design.
|
| If the commenter complained about their own chronological
| Followed feed, _that_ would be a "you problem".
| astrange wrote:
| The only reason my FYP is good is because I blocked all
| the different meme accounts they added. A good
| algorithmic feed for a power user is one that 1. shows
| people you follow but 2. in relevance order not
| chronological order.
|
| The current one is half trying to be the new Reddit
| account experience and half trying to show you politics
| news you'll get mad about for engagement.
| omni wrote:
| This is complete bullshit. I have the exact same
| experience Parent has, my feed used to be full of
| interesting people from tech, science, and journalism.
| Now it's ~80% meme feeds sprinkled with a small helping
| of what I actually care about. How is that my fault, as a
| user that had a perfectly good curated feed prior to For
| You existing?
| publius_0xf3 wrote:
| My "For You" page is filled with my own Tweets. Why would
| I ever want to see my own Tweets?
| imustbeevil wrote:
| As someone who wants all of the other things he's supposed to
| be building, I can't imagine how you would not see Twitter as
| an objective step back.
|
| Every single change he has made to Twitter is exclusively to
| claw back income from users because he made all of the
| advertisers leave. Anyone competent would have just added the
| features they wanted without burning 80% of the company's
| income and staff.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| The cherry (or turd?) on top is that the platform is manned
| by a skeleton crew.
|
| I kid you not: I recently saw a screenshot of a post by an
| engineer asking ex-Twitter engineers for help debugging an
| issue.. on Blind. Mind you, I don't blame the engineer at
| all: it just gives you an idea of the mess Musk has made
| for himself.
|
| I think the fact that the platform is still running is a
| testament to those who built & documented the infra. It's
| also a feather on the cap for those who remain to man the
| ship, particularly if there was no other choice.
|
| One catastrophic outage is all it really takes at this
| point.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I can confirm this is true. Both that Twitter is running
| on a skeleton crew and that engineers are asking ex-
| engineers for help.
| abledon wrote:
| Elon has said he's ok losing money on Twitter. Its about
| providing a free speech platform where people with opposing
| views are allowed to express them.
| nharada wrote:
| Please, his actions make it clear that it's his views he
| cares about and anyone opposing them is not welcome.
| abledon wrote:
| > his actions make it clear
|
| I haven't seen any actions where he has prevented people
| from discussions on the platform within the laws of the
| United States.
| luuurker wrote:
| They literally banned journalists reporting on his plane,
| easily gave in to the Turkish government, tried to ban
| links to other platforms, etc.
|
| It's okay to support someone, but at least do it without
| filtering out everything that doesn't fit your narrative.
| abledon wrote:
| For the Turkish Gov thing, I should've specified US
| citizens on US Soil. The argument he claims is that a
| country can decide how they want to operate businesses
| inside their own borders. Twitter must comply. Its better
| to be allowed to operate in another country than be
| kicked out and have another more government subservient
| tech company replacement step in. If you believe
| otherwise, I think I would need to hear a strong argument
| that its the better alternative.
|
| If someone is one of the most highly influential people
| on the planet managing gigantic marketcap companies like
| Tesla/Spacex, It makes sense from a personal safety
| standpoint not to dox their location each time they
| travel. Doxing people fits whose narrative again? I'm not
| convinced thats a 'narrative'.
|
| Banning links to substack was temporary. Substack
| released a competitor and was scraping their contact
| data. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/apr/11/row-
| between-tw.... How would you handle the situation where
| you have a company losing money and competitors are
| sucking your data dry?
| partiallypro wrote:
| Elon has chased off all the biggest advertisers, turned into
| an abrasive online personality that elevates insane
| conspiracy theories, and now you can only view 800 tweets a
| day. That doesn't sound like an "excellent job." I had some
| hope for when he took over Twitter, because Twitter was not
| well run...but he's made the previous CEO (who was not a good
| CEO) look like a genius. He even failed to lure Donald Trump
| back...I mean. The only reason people are still on Twitter is
| because there is no alternative, and there are still very
| valuable voices on Twitter. Once or if they leave, it's all
| over.
| astrange wrote:
| Parag was a great CEO because he got Elon to buy out all
| the shareholders at above market price.
|
| Jack was a bad CEO because he's even more gullible than
| Elon and fried his brain with psychedelics, but he's not as
| bad as the current one.
| danShumway wrote:
| I don't like to use insults around mental health, or I
| totally would ;) Musk wants to build an "everything app"
| where people conduct business and accept payments. And he's
| shown over the past weekend that he is fully willing on
| impulse to literally just stop everyone from using the
| website.
|
| So who on earth would be irresponsible enough to trust
| Twitter with anything essential or important after this? Who
| is going to build a storefront on a platform where they might
| wake up one day and find out that all of their customers are
| rate-limited from using the platform? And then the CEO jokes
| that he's doing people a favor by making them touch grass?
|
| A bunch of artists who had (shortsightedly) built their
| business models around using Twitter as an art platform woke
| up one day to find out that their artwork can no longer be
| embedded in other websites. A bunch of government agencies
| and public services just found out that "check our Twitter
| for updates" no longer works. With no warning and with no
| announcement, all because Elon is mad that OpenAI hasn't cut
| him a check.
|
| That is a business-destroying decision. Other executives are
| afraid of doing this because it's the kind of thing that
| permanently hinders your platform from ever being treated
| like a reliable place to do business or build on top of. It
| puts a mark on your businesses reputation that will never go
| away. And it's not a tech issue, it's a trust issue. Finish
| the big work and make something exciting, sure, but nobody
| with an ounce of sense would ever trust Elon not to pull the
| rug out from under them now.
|
| You're going to build a business on a platform that might
| randomly decide to effectively shut itself down on a whim?
| Imagine if you had an Amazon shop and Amazon decided tomorrow
| with no warning that every customer on the platform is
| limited to buying at most one item per day, and also external
| links to Amazon no longer work for guest checkout unless your
| customer makes an account. How are people defending this? It
| makes no sense.
| astrange wrote:
| > Musk wants to build an "everything app" where people
| conduct business and accept payments.
|
| Which is a bad idea. China has everything apps like WeChat
| because monopolies are easier to regulate, but customers
| don't actually like them, which is why we don't have them
| elsewhere.
| Sai_ wrote:
| India has payment apps which are going the way of super
| apps by allowing you to
|
| 1. Make p2p payments
|
| 2. Pay utility bills
|
| 3. Pay credit card charges
|
| 4. Buy insurance
|
| 5. Get loans
|
| 6. Make charitable donations
|
| 7. Book travel tickets
|
| 8. Find nearby stores, store timings, get directions, and
| see their ratings
|
| 9. Send and receive short messages
|
| Unless "we" and "elsewhere" doesn't include India, I'd
| say superapps are more common than you think.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Maybe I don't know what an 'everything' app is, but this
| just sounds like a banking app to me (with the exception
| of the last 'feature').
| photonerd wrote:
| This has been known to be coming for quite a while, so it's
| probably just opportune timing on their part being close enough
| to ready to ship.
|
| But _hooooly crap_ does it underscore how much of a catastrophe
| Musk's actions are.
| duncan-donuts wrote:
| Oh I didn't know that. At any rate those product folks at
| instagram have likely been salivating for the last couple
| months. Probably would be an extremely fun team to be on
| right now.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| [flagged]
| photonerd wrote:
| His actions make zero financial sense. He bought it 30-40%
| overvalued, has tanked its income, destroyed its brand
| reputation, absolutely set fire to advertiser trust &
| safety.
|
| Most estimates put it at ~25% of the value he paid 7 months
| ago.
|
| All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that. That
| was t there until he came along. Another failure.
|
| About the only positive financial thing you can say he did
| is cut payroll costs. Unfortunately he did that at the
| expense of site stability & reliability.
|
| It will be studied in MBA programs as an example of what
| NOT to do
| BasedAnon wrote:
| >has tanked its income
|
| Income doesn't matter if you're not profitable.
|
| >All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that.
|
| No, Twitter was already in debt. The alternative was
| letting it die, which mind you I don't think would have
| been a bad idea, but if Musk's goal is to keep it alive
| then the huge amounts of debt would certainly do that.
|
| >Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site
| stability & reliability.
|
| The site did not have the efficiency or importance to
| warrant the number of employees it had.
| richbell wrote:
| > No, Twitter was already in debt.
|
| Twitter had around 5.5 billion in debt prior to the
| buyout. Elon added approximately 13 billion to that.
|
| No rational person would look at his actions and claim
| they "[made] a lot of financial sense".
| jitl wrote:
| The new Twitter Blue subscription revenue is a tiny drop in
| the bucket compared to the advertising loss and the debt he
| saddled the company with.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| Perhaps, but Twitter blue is a more reliable stream of
| income.
| richbell wrote:
| > Musk's actions generally speaking make a lot of financial
| sense, it's just that he bought a company that wasn't
| founded on financial sense...
|
| He bought it for ~40% more than it was valued and then
| scared away a lot of advertisers. That does not make
| financial sense, and is in large part the root of
| Twitter/his money problems.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| Advertisement is not a sustainable business model
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| Google has done pretty well
| astrange wrote:
| The economy is in great shape despite how many people try
| to cope a recession into existence. ("Inflation" is a bad
| thing that can only happen in a good economy.)
|
| He bought the company because he was mad they banned a hate
| speech account he thought was funny, unbanned them and
| brought all the other racists back to juice the numbers and
| so he could reply-guy them, and instantly lost all the
| advertisers because they don't want to be associated with
| statue avatar Nazis. That was not good business sense.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| >The economy is in great shape despite how many people
| try to cope a recession into existence
|
| sure it's not like several banks have collapsed or
| anything...
|
| >That was not good business sense.
|
| I'm not in favor of letting nazis on platforms, but
| having your business decisions be beholden to advertisers
| is always a disaster in the making.
| astrange wrote:
| > sure it's not like several banks have collapsed or
| anything...
|
| That's too bad for the shareholders of the banks but it
| doesn't matter for anyone else.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I agree with you in part: Twitter needed its costs slashed
| even before the acquisition, and the post-acquisition debt
| load made it into a crisis.
|
| But on top of cutting costs, Musk has also made terrible
| product and communication decisions that killed significant
| amounts of revenue and audience.
| BasedAnon wrote:
| Killed audience? Most certainly, but as far as revenue I
| do think he's making headway. The fact is once you start
| demanding money for things people leave. The idea that
| users = money has never been true.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| Buying Twitter at the price he bought it at made no sense
| once the market turned. It would have made financial sense
| to structure the deal in a way that it was easy for him to
| get out of, but he didn't. Twitter has also now been
| saddled with additional debt with interest that needs to be
| paid on a regular basis since it was a leveraged buyout.
| I've been thinking about the deal since it happened and it
| certainly doesn't seem to make financial sense to me.
| heartbreak wrote:
| Where do you think the debt came from?!
| BasedAnon wrote:
| Alot of it was from the acquisition yes, but Twitter was
| already in debt.
| notatoad wrote:
| >This has been known to be coming for quite a while
|
| since before the acquisition closed? i thought i heard
| somewhere they started working on this january-ish.
| adventured wrote:
| > But hooooly crap does it underscore how much of a
| catastrophe Musk's actions are
|
| I think that pretty much nails it. This is Zuckerberg's life
| - social media & nearby segments - and he's still in his
| prime (very active, attentive to threats / paranoid) as a
| competitor in the business sphere. If you give him an opening
| to cripple Twitter opportunistically, he's going to take a
| shot.
|
| Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't
| have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking
| the ship)? It would be hilariously delusional if so.
| photonerd wrote:
| > Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat
|
| It kind of did, just by network effects, but he's spent the
| last 6+ months systematically filling it in. This last
| weekend might be the walls crumbling down
| data-ottawa wrote:
| Twitter was great because you could broadcast and get
| picked up by news orgs and viewed by everyone for years.
| And it didn't need a CRM or IT staff to deal with, just
| someone with a phone.
|
| Now that that's over it can't meet the needs of services
| like my local power company pushing updates.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| _Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn
| 't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly
| sinking the ship)? It would be hilariously delusional if
| so. _
|
| Of course it had a moat, wow.
| abledon wrote:
| > Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat
|
| Yes, first mover advantage. I don't think normal non-
| technically inclined people are going to move their twitter
| activities to "Threads".
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I don't think normal non-technically inclined people
| are going to move their twitter activities to "Threads".
|
| Normal, non-technical users (including the key ones that
| produce a lot of content that other people come for) are
| often already on Instagram, and many are moving more of
| their presence their recently even without a Twitter-like
| UI in response to changes on Twitter. So, that's
| something Meta can leverage to build Threads if they
| manage it well.
| abledon wrote:
| Place your bets here https://manifold.markets/Alice/will-
| threads-have-more-daily-...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he
| didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions
| promptly sinking the ship)?
|
| I don't think he cared [0], because he's always wanted to
| gut Twitter and remake it as a a very different service
| that is not really in the same market (very different
| substantive functions and revenue model.)
|
| On the other hand he seems to have very not-evidence-based
| and turns-out-to-be-wrong-at-every-step map of how to get
| from a ad-supported microblogging platform to a user-pays
| long-form-content-and-financial-services platform.
|
| [0] It did, through network effexts, but his plans were
| incompatible with focussing on preserving it.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| - Monopolistic apps are problematic and unreliable for users -
| Need for an open standard for communication on these apps,
| similar to UPI in India for transactions - These apps are used
| like utilities but governed as services. It is effectively
| impossible to exist without big tech products right now, as an
| individual and as a business. We need to fight for digital
| rights. - Communication should be as essential a utility, like
| water and electricity. - Centralized apps have too much power
| over the internet - Google was useless when Reddit went down -
| one clown (Musk) should not have an outsized control on the means
| of communication. He can't cut my water, and he shouldn't be
| allowed to cut my communication. - alternatives are impractical
| and small and as long as big tech is allowed to throw money and
| kill/acquire/impede smaller apps we have a problem - A
| democratised communication standard would eliminate the need to
| use specific apps like WhatsApp or Twitter for communication and
| information. - this will allow the web to fulfill one of its most
| important functions, which is, being searchable and archivable. -
| profit incentives do not align for big tech to make the internet
| we want. Small tech will make the internet we deserve.
| zenmaster10665 wrote:
| The issue with this theory is that there is no obvious way to
| have both deep interoperability between apps as well as
| innovation.
|
| Interoperability is a contract,and that contract will slow down
| product evolution and lead to worse consumer products.
| lopis wrote:
| Maybe it's time we decide what's better for us in the long
| term, and accept slower innovation?
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| That's certainly not true. Interoperability for basic
| features such as text, photos, videos, posts and comments
| doesn't mean apps are not free to add more features. Also,
| having an extendable framework will easily account for this
| zenmaster10665 wrote:
| some form of interoperability is already happening for some
| of those data types (or at least starting with
| portability). See the Data Transfer Initiative (dti.org)
|
| The issue is that forced interoperability will lead to
| platforms creating an interoperable (and less fully-
| featured) version of their app to suit the regulations.
|
| I do think that interop is important, but I think it is a
| harder problem than most people think.
| jug wrote:
| This is going to be very interesting to watch, and I honestly...
| For all I think about Meta as a company, I have to congratulate
| them on the timing. They probably pushed hard to meet this
| deadline the past few weeks in order to coincide with the
| controversial Twitter decisions lately. Elon Musk is rolling out
| the red mat for Zuckerberg. It's fun to see tech giants fight it
| out like this! Reminds me of the Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs days!
|
| Having said that, the cultures on Instagram and Twitter are no
| doubt different. So it's hard for me to tell what will transpire
| here. However, how much of these cultural differences are due to
| Instagram not having had a live text feed for breaking news etc.
| before? And how malleable is social network culture?
|
| Threads will also move Instagram closer to Twitter with this. I
| think how well Meta suceeeds at this is vital to how much of a
| threat to Twitter this is going to be. Not only this app itself
| needs to find users; for a real threat they also need to use it
| for similar things as on Twitter, e.g. politics, a controversial
| celebrity post here and there, breaking news on the Ukrainian
| war, earthquakes, imploding submarines...
|
| Finally, I wonder how this will affect Facebook! With both a
| photo feed, a TikTok-style reels feed, Snapchat-like stories, and
| Twitter-like Threads... This app that is NOT Facebook is
| certainly starting to look very complete indeed. Facebook is big
| where I live so I "need" to be on it to stay in touch, but I can
| see myself residing more and more on Messages and Marketplace
| alone, now more than ever.
| blinky88 wrote:
| Great timing, given Twitter's situation
| imbnwa wrote:
| Is Instagram still the place for amateur and pro photography? Has
| something else emerged I don't know about?
| exabrial wrote:
| lol right like I'm signing up for another Zuck platform.
|
| I unfortunately am stuck with the ones I have because of their
| ubiquity. I would jump ship in a heartbeat if a viable
| alternative actually took off.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| An app I have to install is not going to be a twitter killer. If
| you want to kill twitter, you have to be more open in every way
| than twitter.
| zzzeek wrote:
| im there. Twitter just announced that they are going to force
| people to pay for a disgusting "im an idiot" blue checkmark to
| use tweetdeck, and that is it, we all hate Facebook and Meta but
| after what Twitter has become, a total cesspool of right wing
| hatebot accounts and Elon-fellating, Zuck is like a welcome
| sight.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Any word on character limit? So tired of aggregating 1/50 threads
| using threadreader.
| slimebot80 wrote:
| I get it: Twitter is under pressure
|
| Love it.
|
| But, I generally feel social media is dying in far bigger ways
| thank just these dilutions.
|
| People don't trust it, and are caring far less.
|
| They hey-day and the novelty has completely worn of for the
| majority who are not narcissistic enough to put the energy in to
| arguing or self-promoting.
|
| Reality is here to stay!
| ChatGTP wrote:
| The only reason I like anything on Instagram anymore is because
| I feel sorry for my friends who are on their honeymoon and
| think anyone cares about their posts. They're my friends so I
| just randomly click like on their posts while inside I think to
| myself, why the fuck don't you just get off your phone and
| enjoy your holiday? I mean, I'm obviously happy their having
| fun, but I'm sad they think it's important to show everyone
| what they're doing 5 times a day.
|
| I have some other friends who are semi-pro athletes and the
| same thing, I "like" their posts only really because they want
| people to care. Aside from that, it's something I look at while
| on the toilet for 5 minutes and then put it away.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| If people didn't abandon Twitter for Facebook posts, why would
| they flee to Instagram Threads?
| vegcel wrote:
| A few reasons I could see
|
| 1.) Instagram brand is much stronger than Facebooks 2.)
| Instagram follows some similar design and user experience
| patterns to twitter, i.e. username based account, people using
| stories a lot of times as mostly a text based posting platform,
| etc 3.) Celebrities and newspeople already use instagram for
| updates, so the transition would be natural 4.) Twitter has
| never been in a weaker position with the site being limited
| dstaley wrote:
| As a Mastodon/Fediverse user, I hope the rumors that this is
| based on ActivityPub are true. I'd love for there to be an easy-
| to-use interface for everyone that brings more people and content
| into the Fediverse.
| ori_b wrote:
| Indeed. Like facebook chat was XMPP based. If the rumors are
| even true, let's see how long until the rug pull.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Most big servers seem to be in a pact to defederate from
| Facebook before it even goes online.
|
| I also remember the rumours stating that the Federation part
| was exclusively targeting large Mastodon servers, and also
| mostly unidirectional (from Mastodon to Threads).
|
| I don't think the federation support will be all that great
| from what I've heard. But who knows, maybe it'll bring the
| Fediverse to the mainstream.
| dstaley wrote:
| What's great is I can easily swap to an instance that is
| federating!
|
| Unidirectional federation sounds like a nightmare on the UX
| side, so if that's the case I imagine it'd be Threads to
| Mastodon, enabling you to follow (but not interact) with
| Threads users.
| bogwog wrote:
| > Unidirectional federation sounds like a nightmare on the
| UX side
|
| What do you mean by this? If you're a Mastodon user, you'd
| just see Threads users on your feed, and be able to
| reply/boost/etc their posts normally.
| meragrin_ wrote:
| > What's great is I can easily swap to an instance that is
| federating!
|
| Define swap. I'm hearing instances which federate with FB
| will be defederated as well. If instances need to be
| federated to "swap", it likely won't be easy.
| lutoma wrote:
| That doesn't seem to be true. There are a lot of instances
| that have signed the 'pact' to defederate Threads right away,
| but those tend to be mostly small instances.
|
| Looking at the largest 30 or so instances by users most of
| them seem to have a 'wait and see' approach, which seems much
| more reasonable to me.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| So for the record, the author of the "pact" has been
| publishing blatant fiction under the guises of "unverified
| rumors" and nearly everything you said here falls into that.
| All of it has been confirmed false by either Meta or
| representatives of the fediverse who met with Meta.
|
| Meta isn't making any special deals with large servers and
| basically no large servers have signed the pact. Most of the
| pact signatories are single user servers or similar, there's
| a handful of small to medium sized ones, and even those who
| are defederating Meta will not defederate the servers that do
| federate with Meta.
| Xeophon wrote:
| There are already some instances which are defederating, see
| [0] for a write-up
|
| [0]
| https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_bloc...
| aendruk wrote:
| This instance has a good write-up of their position:
|
| https://about.scicomm.xyz/doku.php?id=blog:2023:0625_meta_on.
| ..
| barathr wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with Elk.zone on the web and Ivory on
| iOS. Both are sleek and usable, as much as any commercial app.
| bogwog wrote:
| You should look into the story of XMPP and how it got killed by
| Google. The situation is pretty much identical to what Facebook
| is doing here, and the ending will likely be the same: once
| Meta gets enough users, they'll subtly break federation with
| ActivityPub, and everyone will just move to Threads because
| that's where all the content is. So, in the end, we end up with
| just another centralized app owned by a tech giant.
| luckystarr wrote:
| This will not benefit Mastodon/Fediverse, but it will benefit
| Meta because of the already available content. It's basically
| solving their chicken-or-egg problem for them.
|
| I'm not at all sure this will be good for the Fediverse. I
| already see Meta "improving" upon ActivityPub in incompatible
| ways, urging people to just use their app (potential quote:
| "you can see all of the Fediverse anyways") and in the long run
| (when their own "instance" is big enough) will pull the plug
| again and be on its own.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Free Software isn't about picking and choosing who gets to
| run your program or interact with your protocol. _Federation
| is_ , but the concept of Meta using ActivityPub has nothing
| inherently wrong with it.
|
| If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things
| will just return to the same status quo they are today.
| Multiple content silos with thousands of freely-federating
| alternative platforms. As a Mastodon user I can't say I'm
| very scared of it, such a decision would hurt Meta more than
| it helps them.
| luckystarr wrote:
| > Free Software isn't about picking and choosing who gets
| to run your program or interact with your protocol.
| Federation is, but the concept of Meta using ActivityPub
| has nothing inherently wrong with it.
|
| Meta can ActivityPub themselves all day long, as far as I'm
| concerned. If I were a server operator, I wouldn't let them
| anywhere NEAR my users though, so no federation with them.
|
| > If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse,
| things will just return to the same status quo they are
| today.
|
| This is very optimistic. EEE in the past didn't turn out
| that way. I can imagine the Fediverse being an empty husk
| with no (significant) life left, but that's just my fears.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Many people already imagine the Fediverse being an empty
| husk with no significant life left. I'm using the
| platform today, and I'm perfectly happy.
|
| The EEE attempts on a major open platform haven't even
| reached step 3, arguably. ActiveX, XServe, Flash and
| Silverlight all failed spectacularly at their goal of co-
| opting and extinguishing the concept of the internet.
| Considering how Meta has no meaningful leverage over the
| Fediverse community, I think your fears are unwarranted.
| Best case scenario, Meta plays by the rules and federates
| well-regulated content into everyone's feeds like Twitter
| with less extremism. Worst-case scenario, Meta goes crazy
| and takes all the normies with them to their closed
| Threads landscape, returning things to how they are now
| (dense with nerds and misfits). I don't think Meta
| enthusiasts or current Fediverse denizens would care
| either way.
| jdworrells wrote:
| From a user on a small mastodon instance, no thank you. Admins
| of the smaller, more colorful, and technical instances are
| already getting ready to actively block and defederate as
| necessary. We don't want or need Meta bringing their digital
| typhoid to the fediverse.
| astrange wrote:
| One reason I haven't started Mastodon is that I don't want my
| experience to be ruled by self-righteous egotistical reddit
| mods. It's better for users when the admins are professional
| and checked out.
| dahwolf wrote:
| If only you were so lucky, Mastodon admins are way worse.
|
| Not only might they mod at will in the way reddit mods do,
| Mastodon admins take it several steps further by bothering
| other instance mods about their moderation. And then yet
| another step: whom they federate with. They'll form little
| secret discord channels where they gather and form
| cancellation pacts on entire instances, based on a whim.
| est wrote:
| > I hope the rumors that this is based on ActivityPub are true.
|
| Like how GTalk use XMPP, the port 5222 opens, but with tons of
| customizations and extensions that 3rd-party program can only
| use the basics?
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Facebook Chat worked just fine with Jabber just like Gmail
| Chat. Until it didn't.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Not really rumors. it's already in the code!
|
| "Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on
| other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon" Found in the app
| strings.
| warning26 wrote:
| "Soon" -- wonder how long that'll take.
|
| While I'm really looking forward to is being able to follow
| Threads users with any Mastodon client.
| luckystarr wrote:
| Not sure they want that. That would copy over content from
| their server to the outside and this will be a nightmare
| for their lawyers. :)
| shinratdr wrote:
| Seriously, no need for 3rd party app support, simple on-
| boarding of users and I can still follow everyone with Mastodon
| & Ivory?
|
| Sign me up. Or rather, sign up everyone I know besides me :)
| tomger wrote:
| You probably don't want this as that would end in Embrace,
| extend, and extinguish.
| irishloop wrote:
| React?
| thereare5lights wrote:
| This could spin off into its own post.
|
| My own thoughts on this is that React has morphed into a
| something is even harder to use than Angular 1.0
| smoldesu wrote:
| How, exactly? What control does Meta exert over the Fediverse
| that the users cannot resist?
| majormajor wrote:
| If you want to leave Twitter cause it keeps breaking
| there's a few groups you might fall into:
|
| a) you don't give a damn about openness or tech or any of
| that but just want something that works
|
| b) your first priorities are "where the people are" and "it
| works" but federated and open protocols are a big bonus
|
| c) you absolutely want to go somewhere more open instead of
| another centralized service
|
| Group A is big, and generally folks not on HN. HN itself
| splits between groups B and C.
|
| If you think group B is a fair bit bigger than group C, but
| want the open stuff to thrive in the long term, then an
| initially-"friendly" Meta controlled app can harm you by
| attracting a big part of the people in group B and then
| slowly degrading the experience for folks using open
| clients over time until finally cutting it off. Most of
| group B won't migrate again at that point as long as they
| don't fuck up the experience completely.
|
| Whereas if the Meta version wasn't "friendly" at first,
| much more of that group B might move straight to open
| things, and then stay there, creating a larger long-term
| userbase.
|
| It's a way to keep people from fully jumping ship to open
| solutions by offering short-term openness that will dwindle
| over time.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Meta has money to pay app developers to develop a good app.
|
| Most ActivityPub services have taken ages to get decent
| apps and even now Mastodon has some obvious problems.
| Opening someone else's profile if nobody on your server
| follows them shows you a barren timeline with no history
| and there's still no way to tell Mastodon "go fetch toots
| from this user's outbox".
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| "ActivityPub with Meta extensions"
|
| If there are more Threads users than non-Threads users then
| non-Threads instance admins have to choose between adapt or
| risk emigration. EEE is a consolidation tactic after all.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Many of the people on Mastodon today are perfectly happy
| without Meta users on it, myself included. If they try to
| hard-fork, I'm fairly certain the self-hosters would just
| walk away and let the links/outgoing support break on
| Meta's app. They need peering networks more than peering
| networks need them.
| yborg wrote:
| >They need peering networks more than peering networks
| need them.
|
| Explain how a peer that is >100x the size of the
| Fediverse needs it at all.
| luckystarr wrote:
| They don't have a diverse content-base yet. The Fediverse
| "shall provide it" to them if it goes according to their
| plans. Once this deed is done, the Fediverse is no longer
| valuable to them.
| astrange wrote:
| The EU believes social networks and messaging apps should
| all connect to each other. This is a bad idea (it makes
| spam filtering impossible) but nevertheless it's in the
| DMA.
|
| Mastodon admins might find that law applies to them too.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I'd wager Mastodon is ready for this.
| Abhorrent/illegal/spamming/offensive/offending instances
| can be defederated from to remove liability at a server-
| level, and users can self-moderate with "block instance"
| functionality from their client. Both sides are
| sufficiently equipped to filter their respective feeds.
|
| It's the realm of pure fantasy to envision a world where
| the EU bans an original community project to force
| everyone into a Meta-designed fork. Mastodon users should
| be safe as long as they're free to run their own server
| and client software.
| astrange wrote:
| My point is that Mastodon admins may not be allowed to
| defederate or block Meta, any more than Meta is allowed
| to not connect to them.
| smoldesu wrote:
| That's fine. Blocking their entire website from ever
| hitting your feed takes 2 clicks.
|
| _My point_ is that this really doesn 't matter. If they
| use ActivityPub as-written, both clients and servers can
| stop Meta content from reaching their feed. If you just
| find Threads content annoying, you long-press the post
| and tap "Block Instance". If you're a site admin and have
| been given a legitimate reason to block Meta for API
| abuse (eg. poorly-moderated content, spam, advertisement)
| _then_ you can exercise your defederation power and be
| within your right.
| dahwolf wrote:
| DMA applies only to gatekeeper companies, of which
| there's less than 20. It doesn't apply to Mastodon
| instances.
|
| Further, interoperability concerns messaging apps, not
| social media apps.
| Hamcha wrote:
| Masto hosts already chose emigration once, that's why
| they are on masto. I don't see the mastodon crown
| adapting.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Yes but this taking off will cannibalise widespread
| adoption of fediverse things.
| rvz wrote:
| Meta has lots of money, which the Fediverse does not and
| needs money to stay online. This is why admins of very
| large instances signed NDA with Meta to federate with them.
|
| Money is power.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| Mastodon don't have a functional search. So we start there
| lol
| Thalarg wrote:
| Considering the awful state of instagram I have zero hope and try
| to avoid it at all costs. They have the tech but not the ethics.
| zui wrote:
| Also on Android:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instagram....
| [deleted]
| silisili wrote:
| Hrm...mine tells me something went wrong when clicking. Is it a
| beta or something?
| zui wrote:
| That's strange, worked for me. Probably some A/B testing ...
| bdd wrote:
| Seems like only available in certain locations.
|
| You can play with the `gl` query parameter in the URL.
| Yours is for Italy ("it"). It's available in other
| continental Europe locations like: de, fr, be, es, pt, at,
| cz, pl. While not yet released for majority English
| speaking countries (us, ca, uk, au, nz) with the exception
| of Ireland (ie).
|
| I don't have any insider information even though my
| employer is Meta. I learned about this release from HN.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| I'm guessing that the territories served by Meta
| Platforms Ireland Ltd have had the publication approved
| but the ones served by Meta Platforms, Inc haven't...
| proxy9 wrote:
| What I dislike about Twitter lately: - overarching political
| propaganda - crypto bros - AI bros - profit chads - constant
| fighting over idiotic topics, some driven by Musk itself
|
| What I care for when I open Twitter: - news - hearing from other
| people from the dev community
|
| If Threads can deliver this, I will be hooked
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Which means a lot will be censored, if they don't censor you
| end up with the same convo people want to talk about in the
| current times
| proxy9 wrote:
| If we look at the current situation on Twitter, a lot of
| content that gets pushed by the algo is dumpster fire. Not
| sure how that benefits society
| hklgny wrote:
| Remember when we used to call that filtering and it was a
| feature and not a con?
|
| Not for actual censuring in cases where it's demonstrably
| harmful - but I'm not required to give attention to someone's
| opinion just cause they feel like blasting it into the void.
| Twitters gone too far the other way.
| [deleted]
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i look for the same things and i get that out of twitter, its
| pretty satisfying
|
| you have to engage with what you want to see, if you join in
| arguments or constantly like posts of a political viewpoint
| then you'll never find peace
|
| ie, look inward
| giarc wrote:
| Threads need to realize the importance of the blue check and
| implement it. Prior to Musk, I would see a tweet, open the
| replies and look for the blue checks to see what "prominent"
| people were responding. Now that the blue check means nothing,
| that's impossible and you have to weed through all the content.
|
| You can argue that's a good thing, that a person with 10
| followers might be as interesting as someone with 100,000
| followers, but it's not for me.
| proxy9 wrote:
| They are already doing it via Meta Verified, which is already
| a big step us vs Blue since they actually check your id
| giarc wrote:
| But you still have to pay don't you? I like verified users,
| but I also want to know who is prominent user. So maybe two
| badges? One just for verified ID and one for prominent user
| (the old blue check).
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| No web version?
|
| I guess it makes sense to launch iOS first since those are
| usually regarded as the highest status users / demographic.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| There's an Android version as well.
|
| https://www.threads.net/ shows a blank page titled "Instagram"
| but I'm guessing it'll soon show some kind of website once the
| server goes live.
| slimsag wrote:
| It shows a countdown timer with a QR code now.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Aka the most valuable to collect data from and advertise to.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It's a mistake to relate it to other meta products like
| inatagramz
| hiisukun wrote:
| Maybe I missed something, but what's the equivalent of subreddits
| on Threads? I can see how I might discover posts from users that
| I follow or like -- but I actually don't ever do that on reddit.
| I just occasionally visit subreddits of topics that interest me,
| and that's a loose collection of users/content based on geography
| or interest or otherwise.
|
| I feel like hashtags (where you can put them on any message you
| want) aren't quite the same thing, but maybe that's just because
| it makes cross-posting more of a blended experience, where I
| can't tell if replies are linked to the #localcitynearme or the
| #coffee tag. Their example post about the coffee shop is a great
| example -- I might be interested in the discussion if it was near
| me, in which case comments of other coffee shops around the
| corner might be fantastic. But if I was reading the post because
| I follow that user for their singing in a jazz band that I listen
| to, and I live in a different country, it's just total noise that
| I wouldn't want to read.
|
| I've only viewed the 'web app store' page and not the real app
| store page, maybe there are more details there.
| nemothekid wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Threads is a replacement for Twitter, not
| Reddit
| hiisukun wrote:
| How silly of me! I guess I was hoping for both, somehow. A
| kind of fever dream where adding
| site:threads.fediverse.instagram.com to searches works for
| finding useful human generated content..
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW, I feel like that's the next step: there is a natural
| mapping from Twitter's data model to reddit's and Meta
| already has experience handing over the moderation keys to
| sub-communities from Groups on Facebook; that will also
| make the existence of this separate app really become
| powerful.
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Can I just say: I _love_ that logo. It 's an @ but it's not. Well
| done.
| bin_bash wrote:
| WSJ really did a great job with this headline:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/mark-zuckerberg-looks-to-delive...
| acover wrote:
| > Mark Zuckerberg Looks to Deliver Hit to Elon Musk With
| Upcoming Twitter Clone Named Threads
|
| Seems normal with a reference to the potential fight.
| xu_ituairo wrote:
| What's the joke?
| jadamson wrote:
| Probably a reference to the cage fight that's totally going
| to happen:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/technology/elon-musk-
| mark...
| [deleted]
| timeon wrote:
| Why app in Twitter domain needs my health & fitness data?
| kadomony wrote:
| Maybe it's me, but I would have just made this a core expansion
| of Instagram and had a photo feed and a thread feed that you can
| easily change between. Pick your default. Seems dumb to have two
| different apps, both branded "Instagram".
| hbn wrote:
| Eh I prefer their approach. Instagram already has too much crap
| in it, so adding a twitter clone into it would just be one more
| thing to bulk up Instagram, and from the Threads point of view,
| I'd like a new Twitter clone to be simple and dedicated, not a
| feature slapped onto the side of the Instagram app.
|
| It seems this thing's only real association to Instagram is
| that you use your IG account to login, and they already have
| your social graph to import if you want to.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| As opposed to "A Facebook App"
| sneak wrote:
| That app privacy label is a doozy.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| _Mark Zuckerberg would like to know your... everything._
| JadoJodo wrote:
| I saw that, as well. Makes the TikTok one look better.
| avinoth wrote:
| As others here pointed out, Meta does not have a good history of
| launching completely new products separately and succeeding in it
| (except FB ofc). So it's a wait and see.
|
| If they're going to ride on the coattails of the existing
| influencers, might make more sense to keep it a feature than a
| brand new app. The existing influencers would have no extra
| incentive to spend efforts on a whole new app if they're
| addressing the same audience and won't be gaining new set of
| audience.
|
| Or keep it completely new to excite new wannabe influencers and
| they will put in the extra effort and drive activity at the
| beginning.
| xyst wrote:
| Bye bye Twitter.
|
| Personally I would not use Threads because of association to
| FB/Meta. But likely many others will.
|
| The only real users left on Twitter will be bots and Musk rats
| moralestapia wrote:
| Usually these things take time to ship for a company the size of
| Meta right ... or ... not?
|
| Could it be that this was put in together in a couple sprints as
| they saw Twitter in a weak position?
|
| Or maybe they have a lot of products like this on the bench and
| release them when the time is right?
| photonerd wrote:
| This has been scuttlebutt (inc the name) for at least a few
| months. The big thing was the ActivityPub compatibility
| doctoboggan wrote:
| Is the activitypub compatibility confirmed?
| lutoma wrote:
| There was a Mastodon thread by someone who had decompiled
| the leaked Android APK for Threads the other day. There
| were a few strings in there talking about the fediverse and
| federation with other servers, so it seems like they at
| least planned to add it at some point.
| photonerd wrote:
| Not officially, but it's about as unofficially confirmed as
| it's possible to be. Though I have no idea if it'll be
| available at launch.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Well, it was announced that naughty old mr car would be buying
| twitter in about April last year. From then, there was enough
| chance it might all go horribly wrong that maybe they could
| justify this project.
| astrea wrote:
| Facebook buys Instagram then make a Facebook knockoff by
| Instagram
| doctoboggan wrote:
| I feel like the people who are concerned enough to leave twitter
| over the direction it's going will not jump straight into another
| app completely controlled by a single person.
|
| My guess is they will possibly see some growth from instagram
| power users who are convinced to try it, but I don't anticipate a
| mass diaspora from twitter to threads.
|
| EDIT: others in this thread are claiming that it may be
| compatible with activity pub. If that is the case then it may
| look a little more interesting to those leaving twitter.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| Twitter's gonna be a ghost town soon the way it's trending.
| Instagram is providing a lifeboat, and it's a known quantity of
| "evil". Compared to whatever the heck Musk is doing.
| elforce002 wrote:
| So, on one side we have twitter with its crazy policies and
| on the other side we have fb with its "content moderation
| guidelines". I don't think you'll see much change since
| Twitter is twitter because of conflict. That's the reason
| twitter "replacements" aren't successful: Echo chambers for
| each faction.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I do wonder if Threads will allow rather graphic videos
| like Twitter does. If it doesn't it will not do well. War
| videos from Ukraine have been extremely important, and
| Facebook will need to allow much raunchier and sometimes
| downright NSFL content to truly be a replacement especially
| to be relevant to current events which is the main selling
| point of Twitter for most people.
| anitil wrote:
| What is the trend? Downwards in the sense of a few percent a
| year? Or a week?
| ciabattabread wrote:
| A view quota is not a feature. Especially when the site was
| acceptably functional the day before.
| epc wrote:
| Completely anecdotal but: "views" as reported by Twitter of
| tweets on my private account are down roughly 80% YOY. My
| follower count has dropped slightly. I've been on Twitter
| since 2007. It's been a roller coaster of fun, annoying,
| vaguely threatening and the company's
| love/hate/begging/hate relationship with API developers has
| been maddening. It has the feel of every private equity
| takeover of a previously popular business, except that Musk
| and Co. failed to extract any value from the company before
| saddling it with untenable debt.
| cypress66 wrote:
| That's most likely due to changes in the algorithm.
| Especially if you're not verified.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Value prop: operated by an adult
| foderking wrote:
| yep. The same it became a "ghost town" after everyone
| migrated to mastadon, hive, tumblr, truth social, bluesky,
| post and the rest of the other meme "twitter killers"
| rchaud wrote:
| People never left MySpace or Digg either, they just stopped
| visiting as frequently as the content dried up and one day
| stopped visiting entirely.
| irishloop wrote:
| But Twitter is just so much objectively worse than it used to
| be, the user experience is mostly a nightmare for the very
| people who made Twitter so fun to begin with. The posters have
| to go somewhere.
|
| Its not that anybody likes Zuck, but they also don't think Zuck
| will cozy up with Nazis quite so... obviously?
|
| We all make choices every day about choosing the lesser of two
| evils. That's all this is.
| tw04 wrote:
| The average Instagram user doesn't know or care that zuckerberg
| runs the show. They know it works all the time and isn't
| constantly making changes that are annoying to deal with.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > I feel like the people who are concerned enough to leave
| twitter over the direction it's going will not jump straight
| into another app completely controlled by a single person.
|
| I think you vastly overestimate twitter users.
| photonerd wrote:
| The average person doesn't really care about that. They care if
| the site is functional & can other people see their posts.
|
| Right now _neither of those are true of Twitter._
| netheril96 wrote:
| Purely from self interest, I hope this wins over Twitter. So I
| installed it and made an account.
|
| When Elon Musk laid off more than 80% of Twitter's workforce (or
| maybe 90%, the number is quickly increasing), many people said
| this would prove that a company needed only a handle of software
| engineers to be successful. If they are correct, it paints a
| bleak future where software engineer jobs will be forever cut
| down. I hope Twitter falls so it proves the reverse: a software
| company cannot survive without enough engineers.
|
| While Facebook also laid people off, the percentage is much lower
| than Twitter. It will be even better if Facebook has to recruit
| people to win this battle.
| greyman wrote:
| Interestingly, it seems to me Elon was mostly right. Overall,
| twitter is doing just fine, everything runs for me, influencers
| from the fields I follow like AI or software engineering are
| still there, still posting regularly. From people I follow, I
| didn't notice anyone leaving.
| dzink wrote:
| The privacy listing is once again atrocious and a deal breaker
| for me. Health data? Browsing history? Financial Info? Purchases?
| Location? Sensitive info? Hell no!!!
| eldenring wrote:
| I'd be surprised if 99.9% of the targeted userbase of this app
| cares about this. I don't.
| jokoon wrote:
| They need a new name, that thing is not going to be popular
| john_max_1 wrote:
| When was the last time, Facebook launched a successful standalone
| product? - WhatsApp - acqusition -
| Instagram - acquistion - Messenger - acquisition -
| Oculus - acquisition
|
| Facebook has DNA to optimize feeds. It, simply, lack the DNA to
| build good products from scratch. My gut feeling no one will care
| about Threads, 6 months from now.
|
| EDIT: - Facebook was all-in on cryptocurrencies.
| The project is fully gone. - Facebook was all-in on
| Messenger as a platform. The project is gone as well. -
| Facebook also launched dating a few years back. That project is
| dead too. - Someone pointed out in comments that Feed &
| Like as a concept was also based out of an acquisition called
| FriendFeed - https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-
| friendfeed/
| ulfw wrote:
| In fairness, the same can be said about Google.
|
| Google Maps - acquisition Ads - acquisition Youtube -
| acquisition Android - acquisition
|
| I don't need to list all the failed products (included the 285
| different kind of messengers), do I?
| john_max_1 wrote:
| Here are a few massively successful standalone projects built
| inside Google 1. Google Cloud - 50+ services
| with varying degress of success 2. Gmail 3.
| Google Apps for work 4. Google Chrome
| chupchap wrote:
| You forgot Friendfeed which I believe was the engine behind
| Facebook feed when it shifted to auto-pull.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| Thanks. TIL. Updated my comment.
| 22c wrote:
| Reels and Stories, while directly ripped from TikTok and
| Snapchat have probably taken quite a bit of market share from
| each of those apps from people who already use Instagram as
| their main platform.
|
| I suspect this has some potential to keep users who were
| getting FOMO on Instagram from signing up to Twitter.
| carstenhag wrote:
| In my social circle (Germany), Snapchat is completely gone,
| Instagram stories dominate. Some people use Instagram reels,
| but most use TikTok.
| stubybubs wrote:
| Marketplace dominates used goods in my area. I don't think it
| matters that it's not "standalone," it was a new area and they
| grabbed the market share.
|
| Running threads off IG has a good shot too.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Marketplace is so horrible on so many fronts that it's
| unimaginable that it's successful, but it is. Most likely
| thanks to the network effect. It's a good target for
| disruption IMHO.
| danaw wrote:
| I mean, compared to what, Craigslist and eBay?
| warning26 wrote:
| Yup, despite Facebook's best attempts to ruin it.
|
| _(No one wants to have products shipped from scammy sellers,
| Facebook, please stop making that the default search
| option.)_
| tjpnz wrote:
| In my area it's also what you use if you want to lose your
| stuff and get the shit beaten out of you.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| That was a natural extension to Facebook conversations and
| was not a standalone product.
| okwubodu wrote:
| This is functionally an extension of Instagram. It's no
| more standalone than, say, Messenger.
| Tepix wrote:
| Here in Germany, it's a non factor. Most people below 25 or
| 30 don't even have facebook any more.
| flakeoil wrote:
| It's not Facebook, it's Instagram. And you don't need any
| of them to use Threads.
| Tepix wrote:
| I was referring to Marketplace.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Groups has also slowly become a killer feature of FB. There
| are very strong niche communities there; it's a direct
| competitor to Reddit in that way. It's pretty much the only
| reason I keep opening the FB app, but it is enough to keep me
| opening it.
| fy20 wrote:
| Groups +1
|
| As well as local area groups there are quite a few niche
| hobby groups on Facebook. I'm converting a van into a
| campervan and on Facebook there are groups specific to
| converting my van that have the same number of users as the
| whole vanlife subreddit.
|
| The only thing I don't like is it is tied to my real name
| and friend circle... I see in my feed friends posts in
| groups I am not a member of, so I guess it does the same
| for me. In my recommendations was a BDSM group... Yeah not
| on Facebook :D
| moneywoes wrote:
| Buy sell groups or niche interest groups? Do you discover
| them from search
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| I wouldn't call them "niche" interest groups.
|
| Facebook Groups are very popular in the country I live.
| (Reddit is too American-centric to have ever really
| caught on.)
|
| I'm in groups on legal stuff (19,000 members), boardgames
| (16,000 members), family stuff likes activities for kids
| (9,000 members), roadtrips (5,000 members), camping
| (9,000 members), food (41,000 members), dog lovers
| (14,000 members), and a general city group (150,000
| members), a group for my neighborhood (22,000 members), a
| musicians network (3,300 members), pens (montblanc, etc;
| 8,800 members)
|
| Most those groups are just for my city (i.e. the dog
| lovers is just for dog lovers in my city).
| magic123_ wrote:
| On french facebook there's a whole community that's
| actually exactly subreddits, it's called "neurchi de
| [...]" ("neurchi" is "chineur" reversed, which translates
| to "bargain hunter"). Any niche, or not niche, topic has
| its neurchi group that range from low hundreds to
| 100,000+ for some.
| niels_bom wrote:
| I love verlan
| devnullbrain wrote:
| When I read others on HN talk about the Facebook experience
| it often feels like they have a completely foreign
| viewpoint to you and me.
|
| When I open Facebook, I don't see ranting family members. I
| see half a dozen groups and pages full of or operated by
| people I don't know.
| ncann wrote:
| I tried Marketplace a few times but always gave up because
| the search filter was so bad. There was no way to force it to
| include a particular search term, e.g. searching for "rtx
| 3060" would return tons of posts without "3060" or even "rtx"
| anywhere in the title/body. The distance search was also
| useless, since no matter how I tried to restrict the search
| to around my city, it would just randomly return posts from
| cities hundreds of kilometers away.
|
| Perhaps the bad search was by design to show you as many
| posts as possible? Either way, it's worse than reddit search,
| which is saying something...
| ihateolives wrote:
| Maybe it's specific to numbers or tech or something, but in
| our area fb marketplace is THE place to sell/buy used
| baby/kids clothes. It's mindbogglingly high traffic. Put up
| used but decent looking item from sought after brand and
| you get literally tens of requests in minutes. If you're
| looking to buy then good stuff is gone like in half an
| hour. And were not even a big city.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's a terrible product on many levels but is clearly
| successful because it uses all the usual Meta dark UX
| patterns to hack attention and engagement. I (horrifyingly)
| find myself clicking on marketplace and just browsing all
| the time.
|
| More so, as a seller... it gets far more leads than the
| other classifieds options around here. We've been casually
| selling berries and misc produce off our small farm on it,
| and it's kinda crazy how many people reach out for random
| $10 containers of red currants or fresh garlic scapes, etc.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| My gut tells me you're quite wrong about this one. I'm quite
| the cynic, but I think this is a lovely confluence indeed. It
| feels like when you can tell that the batter is about the hit
| the ball out of the park just a second before the bat has even
| made contact with the ball.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| I gave several examples of standalone apps from Facebook. I
| can count at least 10. And none of them exist today.
| tedunangst wrote:
| What was Messenger before acquisition?
| john_max_1 wrote:
| https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/01/facebook-beluga/
| schultzie wrote:
| > Facebook was all-in on cryptocurrencies. The project is fully
| gone.
|
| For what it's worth, their cryptocurrency project is absolutely
| NOT gone. It's gone in the Facebook-ownership sense (in that it
| was barred from continuing the project by the SEC (?)), but the
| code and teams are absolutely still iterating on what began at
| Facebook. Aptos, Sui, and 0L are all projects that have
| launched to fanfare within the last year.
|
| I'm up for lambasting Facebook as much as the next guy, but I
| don't think government blocking their projects existence counts
| as failing.
| rurp wrote:
| Getting blocked by the government was hardly a black swan
| event; it was a major risk factor. Facebook absolutely has
| the lobbyists and political connections to have a good
| understanding of the risk, as well as have some influence on
| it.
|
| They got it wrong in this case. It happens, but Facebook
| doesn't deserve a complete pass for chasing a high profile
| project that ended up being a dead end for them.
| tharax wrote:
| I think a government blocking a project from existing is by
| definition a failure.
|
| And it also shows that cryptocurrency projects will always be
| at the mercy of the whims of government(s).
| brian_cloutier wrote:
| This feature is not unique to cryptocurrency. Governments
| are our mechanism for deciding what is and is not allowed.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| How was messenger an acquisition? wasn't it simply taking
| FaceBook Chats and making it a standalone app? It seems that
| meta just has a very curated list of products, and most seem to
| be hits, and most seem to be regularly iterated upon.
|
| > Facebook has DNA to optimize feeds.
|
| Isn't that the exact thing that Threads would need to succeed?
| It's a new feeds-based app, piggybacking their existing social
| graph. That means you have followers/following immediately.
|
| They even have the market opportunity as twitter stumbles.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| Facebook Messnger was a service named Beluga -
| https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/01/facebook-beluga/
| frankacter wrote:
| >Facebook Messnger was a service named Beluga
|
| Facebook Messenger existed prior to the acquisition. Beluga
| was a mobile only product that was essentially an acquihire
| of the 3 member team to work on the existing Messenger
| mobile platform.
|
| >Facebook was all-in on Messenger as a platform. The
| project is gone as well.
|
| Facebook Messenger platform is still very much alive and
| well in both the games and the support / chat bot /
| reservations space.
| archerx wrote:
| They have pretty much killed messenger for me, I used it
| everyday to chat with most of my friends but now its
| bloated and filled with ads so we moved on to different
| platforms. Its too bad because I loved messenger but now
| I only open it once a week.
|
| > games / chat bot / reservation space
|
| Yea thats the bloat that killed it for me, I just wanted
| something that lets me send messages to my close friends,
| nothing more, nothing less.
| lmm wrote:
| I could believe that they slapped too many ads on it
| (though I've never seen them?), but I struggle to believe
| that adding games/chatbot/reservation integration bloated
| messenger on your end. Isn't that all purely server-side
| integration that doesn't affect you if you're not using
| it?
| [deleted]
| toastal wrote:
| Similar happened with LINE. They _used to have_ a Lite
| app that _only_ had the ability to encrypted chat + send
| files + make voice /video calls (& had a dark theme with
| no trackers). But they killed it off last year to make
| everyone 'upgrade' to the full app which is packed to the
| gills with games, trackers, delivery, etc. & the download
| is tenfold+ larger. When I didn't upgrade they swept my
| account under the rug & despite a supporting
| Win/Mac/Chromium apps, your primary device _must_ be
| Android /iOS or they won't let you access the account
| (similar to Signal's shenanigans).
| umanwizard wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen ads on messenger. Where do
| you see them?
| metamet wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen an ad in Messenger. Curious
| about where you're seeing them? Desktop? Android/iPhone?
| permo-w wrote:
| if you scroll through your list of conversations on iOS
| you'll see one
| davidcbc wrote:
| I don't, I looked everywhere I could in the app and don't
| see a single ad
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Just tried, no ads anywhere. I wonder why.
| permo-w wrote:
| weird I get them every time. maybe it's a regional thing?
| john_max_1 wrote:
| > Isn't that the exact thing that Threads would need to
| succeed? It's a new feeds-based app, piggybacking their
| existing social graph. That means you have
| followers/following immediately.
|
| Remember Facebook Watch (videos) -
| https://www.facebook.com/help/609563009232602
| polote wrote:
| Workplace https://www.workplace.com/
| john_max_1 wrote:
| And how successful has Workplace been compared to Microsoft
| Teams or Slack?
| Remmy wrote:
| Threads isn't even a new app from them. It was discontinued
| just a few years ago. This is a relaunch with a more Twitter
| like experience.
| dbbk wrote:
| It is a new app, it's just reusing a previous brand name, it
| has nothing to do with the previous app.
| HenriTEL wrote:
| Come on, the previous Threads was also Instagram's
| standalone messaging service.
| dbbk wrote:
| This isn't a messaging service and there's no shared
| codebase
| abledon wrote:
| React & LLAMA are their best products, ironically only for
| developers, not the general population.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| IMHO, Angular was superior to React.
|
| However, Google being Google, they shot themselves in the
| foot with Angular 2.
| ygouzerh wrote:
| I will do the counter-argument: this app is from Instagram, so
| it might have an higher success rate. To have worked in big
| corporate, new products are often entirely managed by a
| division, and only a reporting is done to the central entity.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| Instagram is good at improving their app experience by
| incorporating features. However, it is not good at launching
| standalone apps either.
|
| Consider 1. Boomerang -
| https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/instagram-launches-a-
| standalone-app-boomerang-that-turns-photos-into-a-1-second-
| video-loop/ 2. Shopping app that was never launched? -
| https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/4/17819766/instagram-
| shopping-app-e-commerce 3. Layout - photo collage app
| https://www.stuff.tv/news/instagram-launches-layout-
| standalone-app-your-photo-collages/
| jackbrookes wrote:
| Also IGTV standalone app
| anileated wrote:
| Also Threads (yes, Instagram killed Threads once already:
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/17/22787783/instagram-
| threa...).
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| Also worth nothing Instagram has been pretty good at eating
| other apps's lunch, specifically Snapchat and later TikTok.
| Obviously Snapchat and TikTok are still things and are quite
| popular but the instagram versions of those features are
| quite good and the network effect is important.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| Instagram is good at improving their app experience by
| incorporating features. However, it is not good at
| launching standalone apps either. Consider
| 1. Boomerang - https://www.niemanlab.org/reading/instagram-
| launches-a-standalone-app-boomerang-that-turns-photos-
| into-a-1-second-video-loop/ 2. Shopping app that was
| never launched? -
| https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/4/17819766/instagram-
| shopping-app-e-commerce 3. Layout - photo collage app
| https://www.stuff.tv/news/instagram-launches-layout-
| standalone-app-your-photo-collages/
| Shawnj2 wrote:
| That is true, I'm a bit baffled they didn't integrate
| this in some capacity into instagram itself. With that
| said I think this has a higher likelihood of success than
| instagram apps made for instagram users since this is an
| Instagram app using Instagram to launch a twitter
| replacement.
| frankacter wrote:
| > However, it is not good at launching standalone apps
| either.
|
| That's ok, and in many ways preferable and transparently
| communicated in many cases. They spin off an independent
| application, build an audience, figure out what features
| best convert and migrate those to the primary platform
| and transition the userbase over to it. Rinse and repeat.
|
| It allows them to try, learn and refine in a sandboxed
| environment and bring the best over.
|
| They often talk of this process in terms of their
| "experiments"
| mmcnl wrote:
| Instagram obliterated Snapchat with Stories.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| Read my comment again, I am asking for a single standalone
| product that's fully incubated inside Facebook and that's
| successful.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| You won't find one because you've given an arbitrary
| limitation that is contrary to how Meta do business.
| Threads is not even standalone because it uses the
| Instagram graph.
| balaji1 wrote:
| Facebook should make a LinkedIn copy. LI has taken the majority
| of the feed eyeball time.
|
| LI must have more DAU/MAU than Twitter - most people are just
| scrolling the LI feed, adding random people to their network
| (better than adding "friends" on FB), posting/re-sharing longer
| text+image content.
| worksonmine wrote:
| I'm not the target audience for either, but how is your
| LinkedIn feed even remotely similar to Facebook? On Facebook
| I see what my grandmother does, on LinkedIn I see female
| recruiters posting pictures of themselves with some text
| about some position they're recruiting for, or how to
| leverage AI from the same people people who used to push
| growth-hacking. Completely useless as social media.
| balaji1 wrote:
| LI and FB def not similar. just that whatever is on the LI
| feed is consumed more.
| JCharante wrote:
| How is Dating dead? They launched a new feature 3 months ago
| jeron wrote:
| Do you know anyone in America who genuinely uses FB Dating
| and met people from it?
| JCharante wrote:
| I've never used it in the US, mainly because not many
| people in the US use FB so the user base for that feature
| would be dead. Abroad it's pretty popular.
| dbbk wrote:
| America doesn't even account for the majority of Facebook's
| traffic
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| > Someone pointed out in comments that Feed & Like as a concept
| was also based out of an acquisition called FriendFeed
|
| Nonsense. Facebook added the news feed in 2006. FriendFeed was
| founded in 2007. Facebook acqui-hired them for employees, in
| particular to hire Bret Taylor as CTO, nothing else.
| jonesnc wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean that Messenger as a platform is
| gone. I still use their messaging app all the time, is that not
| the same thing?
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| anecdote: a straight lawyer friend of mine found his MD partner
| on FB dating, THEY certainly can't make fun of FB dating
| john_max_1 wrote:
| To add more examples of standalone apps that failed
| 1. Facebook Gaming app -
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/meta-shutting-down-facebook-
| gaming-app/ 2. Facebook livestreaming app -
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/meta-testing-livestreaming-
| platform-influencers-super/ 3. Facebook Events -
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/7/13192918/facebook-events-
| app-ios-android
| frankacter wrote:
| Facebook gaming is huge platform that exists within the
| Messaging platform. While they may have consolidated from a
| standalone app to a service in an existing platform, that is
| not a "fail" by any measure.
|
| The same goes for Facebook Events, which is hugely popular
| within the Facebook platform.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| Read my original comment again. I asked for successful
| standalone products.
| frankacter wrote:
| I understand what you asked for, but it's a distinction
| without a purpose as indicated and just by that measure
| is misleading.
|
| Many of these experiments are intended to start out as
| standalone apps that have their best features folded back
| into the main product and the user's transitioned over.
| That's by design. Framing it as a failure is not
| reasonable from that perspective.
|
| This is especially true of many of the products you
| listed that are arguably some of the most used function
| of the main platform like messaging, gaming, and events.
| They all contribute a significant amount to the DAU for
| Facebook.
| mtrpcic wrote:
| All of your examples are unique, distinct separate product and
| problem spaces, whereas Threads is pretty aligned with
| Instagram as-is. A lot of the plumbing for Instagram is likely
| reusable for threads, and a lot of the same optimization
| techniques might apply just as well (or with minor tweaks). I
| don't think this is as much "launch something new" as it is
| "instagram with a mask on".
| john_max_1 wrote:
| So. multiple attempts at cloning Snap, HouseParty, IRL etc.
| into standalone products were unique. And this one is just a
| minor tweak on Instagram? Let's discuss this in another 6
| months. I can't predict what the future of Twitter is, but
| Threads would have been shuttered by then.
| mtrpcic wrote:
| What apps are you referencing that Meta/Facebook launched
| and failed to clone Snap/Houseparty/IRL? Their snap
| competitor is Instagram, and it's still doing very well.
| Instagram is _also_ their TikTok competitor, and Reels has
| done a solid job in that space as well.
| john_max_1 wrote:
| 1. Bonfire - HouseParty clone
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/3/18528317/facebook-
| bonfire-shutdown-group-video-chat-houseparty-clone
| 2. Poke - Snap clone
| https://www.vox.com/2018/2/17/17022586/facebook-snapchat-
| poke-clone-mark-zuckerberg-evan-spiegel-billy-gallagher
| 3. Slingshot - Snap clone https://www.theguardian.com/tec
| hnology/2017/mar/10/snapchat-clones-facebook-copies
|
| Note: Can't seem to find the one for IRL
| pavlov wrote:
| Thing is, these were intentionally created as experiments
| with the expectation that they would be eventually shut
| down, with whatever learnings integrated into the
| mainline apps.
|
| Since about 2017-18 there has been a unit at Facebook
| called NPE, New Product Experimentation, tasked with
| producing these.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Snap was cloned extremely effectively within Instagram
| (stories). So was TikTok (reels). I'm actually surprised
| they aren't taking the same strategy here. Why create a new
| app? Why not add Threads to the existing Instagram, in the
| same way as Stories and Reels?
| jadtz wrote:
| Instagram would get too bloated if they do that, but
| Reels + Instagram makes sense.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| No mention of federation or Mastodon in the description. I wonder
| how their negotiations with large Fediverse servers are going.
|
| Is there anything else that distinguishes this from existing
| Facebook products?
| akavi wrote:
| The number of people who have even heard of "federation" or
| "Mastodon" is a vanishingly small fraction of the target
| audience for this app. Why waste precious page space on it?
| ciabattabread wrote:
| And if it is compatible with Mastodon, that audience will do
| all the advertising themselves.
| iopq wrote:
| Our audience will advertise defederating from it
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Even if barely anyone even considered using it, social media
| users will have heard the name "Mastodon" in the news. Even
| normal people news covered it during the start of Twitter's
| slow collapse.
|
| To be honest, I fail to see the value of Threads considering
| both Facebook and Instagram already exist. Is this just
| "Instagram but the image posts are optional"?
|
| Some kind of "explore not just Instagram but also the rest of
| the world" take could work to advertise their new network,
| maybe painting their shitty company in a better light.
| w-m wrote:
| Any guesses on how much you'll be able to read, when following a
| link with a Desktop browser? Half a thread, or more? Before the
| inevitable full-page login overlay hits you straight in the face,
| as they always tend to do.
| mattl wrote:
| Threads.net might just work in a browser. You may need to login
| to your Instagram account however.
| tedunangst wrote:
| When, or if, they support activitypub you'll be able to read
| posts in the json viewer of your choice.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I don't know much about how ActivityPub actually works, is it
| possible that Threads could provide too much content to the
| network and DoS smaller instances from building feeds?
| wraptile wrote:
| Or any custom front-end! Honestly if threads supports
| activitypub then Twitter is gone just like that - they show
| that they can afford to do everything Twitter does and
| without the lockdowns, whining and negging.
| guybedo wrote:
| as much as i dislike Facebook/Meta and its galaxy, there's a need
| for a viable alternative to Twitter especially now with this rate
| limit debacle.
|
| Not only there's this limit but they also broke Tweetdeck which
| is the only way to really use Twitter
| silisili wrote:
| I'm not into FB/IG, but I'm curious why this was launched as 'an
| Instagram App', rather than 'by Facebook' or 'by Meta' or
| something similar?
| mrfox321 wrote:
| Because "Instagram is cool"
|
| Joking aside, this is a branding decision.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| Instagram's brand name is much less tarnished than fb/meta.
| doctoboggan wrote:
| I suspect it's because instagram is their brand with the most
| positive perceptions. FB is seen as old and meta is all about
| the metaverse.
| [deleted]
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Simple: Facebook and Meta have garbage reputation compared to
| Instagram brand.
|
| The public associates Facebook/Meta with excessive data
| collection, overhyped VR, intrusive tracking, etc. That
| association is much weaker with Instagram.
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| Funnily enough, I scrolled to the "Data Linked to You"
| section and was not disappointed.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| To be clear, I'm not saying that Instagram actually is any
| better than Meta/Facebook - but that their public
| perception isn't as disasterously tainted.
| LeoNatan25 wrote:
| It's interesting. In media, Instagram is often portrayed
| as a device for young teens to feel insecure about
| themselves, leading to suicides and depressions, and the
| lack of any meaningful intervention by Meta/Instagram. Is
| that really a better public perception than privacy
| violations? Realistically looking at this, I doubt they'd
| get much of the Mastodon crowd, which is, grossly
| exaggerating, mostly tech and LGBTQ. So what remains is
| "normal" people who care about "normal" topics. I doubt
| these people care much about privacy (most of them are
| already on FB and Instagram).
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| Everything but your DNA, and if they could ask for that I'm
| sure they would
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| They wouldn't need to ask for it, they'd just buy one of
| those diy-gene-test/family-history companies.
| iopq wrote:
| 10% off if you use your IG handle
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| But that's spending money. Easier if users give it away
| for free without a second's thought
| fhrow4484 wrote:
| Seems like the Instagram handle will be the Threads handle. IG,
| like Twitter rely on the handle concept, whereas Facebook never
| really did in the same manner.
| wilg wrote:
| Yes, this is the answer for sure. You can get a good username
| on it, because you have one on Instagram. That's a big deal
| for a lot of people, I think.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Also makes verification mean a lot more
| threeseed wrote:
| Because Twitter is a pseudo-anonymous service similar to
| Instagram unlike Facebook.
|
| Also it uses the Instagram infrastructure e.g. auth and design
| language.
| mattl wrote:
| It uses the existing Instagram user database. No need to get a
| new username.
| markdown wrote:
| What a shame. The biggest benefit of being an early adopter
| is reserving a username you've used for years or decades on
| other platforms.
| mattl wrote:
| You had that chance when Instagram launched I guess? I
| missed out but got my domain name instead
| squokko wrote:
| "Instagram" and "WhatsApp" are their brands that have positive
| perception. "Facebook," "Meta," and "Mark Zuckerberg" have
| negative perception.
| dbbk wrote:
| The following social graph of Instagram is much more skewed
| toward celebrities than on Facebook I'm guessing
| astrange wrote:
| On Instagram your social graph is already about following
| people you don't know.
|
| On Facebook your experience is mainly your grandmother trying
| to write messages to you by typing them into any random thread
| or text box she sees.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| As someone who doesn't have an Instagram or Facebook account,
| it'd be DoA for me right? Or the shadow account counts?
| lqs469 wrote:
| If this new app support Web platform perfectly as well like
| twitter, It could be a bomb. Can't deny that, Previous Twitter
| devs built the Twitter Web app at a really high level in some way
| (eg. whatever the PWA tech or UX/UI details). But backwards to
| today, this previous creature is dying for some reason or
| someone's reason.
| u2077 wrote:
| Look at that app privacy report. I didn't expect anything less
| from Meta. Let's hope they aren't using all our Mastodon accounts
| for advertising too.
| seaal wrote:
| Every possible category of information for a Twitter clone?
| Impressive.
| threeseed wrote:
| Well I for one am actually looking forward to relevant ads.
|
| On Twitter I've been shown everything from industrial mining
| supplies, nipple covers, psychology research papers, super
| yachts, home shopping network junk and just now an ad for an
| oral dosing technology conference.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I'm finding Apple News actually provides me ads I click, and
| Reddit did briefly too. Neither of those apps ask nearly what
| Threads is asking. They are more tailored towards the content
| being shown though, and I turn down permissions whenever I
| can.
|
| Anecdotally I've never purposefully clicked an ad on Twitter,
| I think either the buyers or the algorithms are off there.
| aniforprez wrote:
| Twitter is positively inundating me with "ads" from people
| boosting their twitter profiles, all dedicated to crypto,
| health "hacks", finance gurus, yoga teachers etc etc. I feel
| like Apple ads were the ones I saw most and now I've not seen
| an Apple ad in over a week. It really feels like advertisers
| are all pulling out
| astrange wrote:
| That's always happened to me; I think if you follow any
| doctors, it shows you ads for medical conferences, but I
| can't tell if that's Twitter messing up or the people placing
| the ads setting the display audiences wrong.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Did Twitter always show you the same drop-shipper ad
| _multiple_ times on the same thread? I 'd be mad if I were
| an advertiser on Twitter, some of those ad impressions feel
| fraudulent to me, as a user.
| astrange wrote:
| It didn't have ads in threads before, did it? So I think
| no because there were fewer spots.
| iopq wrote:
| You get ads on Twitter? Strange, my adblocker still works on
| the web version
| arbus5672 wrote:
| This seems like a largely lost cause.
|
| I appreciate that Apple has their privacy practices highlighted
| in a easy to read card so that developers don't get to hide it
| in legalease and a click away in a privacy policy.
|
| The next step would be to actually prompt users about this, in
| the same way that you would get a prompt confirming that if you
| would like to download a large app when on mobile data. "It
| looks like you are trying to install the app Threads which
| reads the following information about you. Are you sure you
| would like to proceed?"
|
| This would be a natural progressing of the "Ask not to track"
| dialog that they implemented awhile ago
| bogwog wrote:
| or simply add a colored indicator next to the download
| button. If an app collects too much info, it shows a glowing
| red exclamation mark; if it collects nothing, it's a green
| smiley face.
| jacooper wrote:
| Its not like twitter is any better.
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