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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 Co

• prithvip 3y ago
  Wow, this was prophetic. > they'll have a userbase in the millions within hours of launch that's able to hop over from IG. Well done on this prediction.
• IAmGraydon 3y ago
  Yeah this was good timing on the part of Meta. Twitter is done.
• babl-yc 3y ago
  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.
  • delecti 3y ago
    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.
    • skiman10 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        You arnt missing anything :-)
      • delecti 3y ago
        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 3y ago
          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.
          • depereo 3y ago
            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.
            • Semaphor 3y ago
              Gmail also had so much hype around it, invites were sold online (I paid ~1.10€ or something on eBay). ~~Blusky, not so much.~~
  • 1270018080 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      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.
  • solarkraft 3y ago
    > After trying Mastodon for a few months, it's certainly not it. Why?
    • babl-yc 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        The pure chronologic feed is why I used Tweetbot and is why I'm on Mastodon.
        • dbbk 3y ago
          Twitter has had a chronological feed for years
          • mjhagen 3y ago
            One that they actively discouraged users to use and reset every once in a while.
      • mrweasel 3y ago
        > 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 3y ago
          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.
  • rodgerd 3y ago
    If?
  • vlunkr 3y ago
    That’s the key thing for you, but reels are super popular, so I would expect cross promotion.
  • andsoitis 3y ago
    > text focused app what ratio of tweets are rich media vs. text?
    • mjhagen 3y ago
      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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • no_butterscotch 3y ago
    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.
• elwell 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    I felt like I needed to qualify it since I'm pretty aggressively claiming they're going to defenestrate twitter here.
    • tonymillion 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • gremlinsinc 3y ago
        [flagged]
• threeseed 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
• elforce002 3y ago
  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).
  • rchaud 3y ago
    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.
    • komali2 3y ago
      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.
    • astrange 3y ago
      I don't think "monetizing" is the right word because if that was happening, they'd be making money, which they aren't.
      • rchaud 3y ago
        Twitter was making $4bn a year, that they couldn't turn a profit on that doesn't mean it wasn't lucrative.
        • 3y ago
• bhouston 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    • bhouston 3y ago
      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.
    • moneywoes 3y ago
      Did that happen with substack notes?
      • chrjxnandns 3y ago
        [dead]
      • 1270018080 3y ago
        I don’t know anyone who left Twitter for substack
    • majani 3y ago
      Live streaming platforms poach all the time.
• shaunxcode 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        >Prior is one of the words I hear former more commonly than prior. Out of geo-curiosity, where is prior used?
        • meanmrmustard92 3y ago
          bayeslandia
      • heyoni 3y ago
        Geez yea I meant it the other way <_>
• partiallypro 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Making it harder to share Thread's Handles will only make people... want to share them.
• rayxi271828 3y ago
  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.)
  • frogulis 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      Given that Youtube copied it for their "shorts" clone of TikTok/Reels, it must be working for the platforms...
      • balder1991 3y ago
        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.
      • chromakode 3y ago
• 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
  Twitter will persist as long as Journalists stay on it, and everyone paying attention knows that, including Musk.
  • mellow-lake-day 3y ago
    Journalists are trying to find places to move over their audience since twitter put their audience behind a login screen
    • 111111IIIIIII 3y ago
      Don't believe everything journalists tell you. ;) Kidding aside, I do seriously question whether that move would ever happen without it being forced.
    • depereo 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        [dead]
      • cesarb 3y ago
        > 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/ https://social.heise.de/
  • astrange 3y ago
    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.
• gfodor 3y ago
  Twitter is the idea app, Instagram is the thirst trap app. It's not going to work.
  • ehnto 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Accusing someone of being naive is rude when it could be that you just missed the point.
      • ehnto 3y ago
        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 3y ago
          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.
          • ehnto 3y ago
            I didn't miss your point then. You've unfairly summarized one app as a thirst trap in spite of it's myriad other users, while underplaying the role of porn on another. Twitter is an app for thought in the same way Instagram is an app for photography. They both have cohorts of cheap thrill users and users who are being more thoughtful.
• Robotbeat 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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 https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/quote/meta
• interestica 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
    Nobody uses hashtags anymore. You can actually tell when someone is a clueless LinkedIn refugee because they hashtag random words in their sentences.
    • jeremyjh 3y ago
      Interest groups do.
      • sgc 3y ago
        It's a good way to follow Ukrainian news, for example (#ukraine, #ukrainewar). It definitely has its place.
        • astrange 3y ago
• sn_master 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Twitter does allow much more free speech than before the acquisition.
      • FranzFerdiNaN 3y ago
        Yes, Twitter does allow you to be racist and transphobic as fuck now. What a win.
        • cubefox 3y ago
          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 3y ago
            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/1676008389804019713 https://twitter.com/achenfinance/status/1676008389804019713
• TobyTheDog123 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • takeda 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
• dhruval 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Every day Musk brings Twitter closer and closer to 4chan. It's only a matter of time before the whole rotten house collapses.
      • rlt 3y ago
        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 3y ago
          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.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  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
• TechBro8615 3y ago
  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.
  • irishloop 3y ago
    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?
  • jimmySixDOF 3y ago
    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.
  • lapcat 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago
      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.
• afavour 3y ago
  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.
  • gochi 3y ago
    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.
    • hobo_mark 3y ago
      > 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.
• boringg 3y ago
  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.
  • hatsunearu 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
  • brigandish 3y ago
    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.
• subsistence234 3y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VdynwAkQy8
• duxup 3y ago
  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.
• sylens 3y ago
  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).
• sixQuarks 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    Threads can succeed on sports alone. NBA/NFL moving from Twitter to Threads will pull millions. And those users are IG friendly
• MarkMarine 3y ago
  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.
• pcchristie 3y ago
  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.
• tennisflyi 3y ago
  Threads will need porn.
• tantalor 3y ago
  Just like Google+
• russ 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    This would not be Meta killing Twitter, as much as Twitter doing a seppuku and Meta walking over Twitter's corprse.
    • silverlyra 3y ago
      except seppuku is considered an honorable death.
    • russ 3y ago
      Twitter has been and still is, its own worst enemy.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ChatGTP 3y ago
  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.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  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”
• pgayed 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.”)
• kylehotchkiss 3y ago
  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
• dotnet00 3y ago
  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.
  • wilg 3y ago
    > 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 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • wahahah 3y ago
    600 post views per day qualifies pretty close to "irrecoverably down" for me.
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      That's an odd definition of irrecoverable you have there.
  • danjac 3y ago
    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?
• nothrowaways 3y ago
  Sorry to say this but this is a premature conclusion. Facebook can't build a Twitter competitor.
• rvz 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
• spaceman_2020 3y ago
  I can’t imagine the people on my Twitter feed migrating to a Meta-owned app.
• foderking 3y ago
  lmao
• buro9 3y ago
  > 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.
• no2_fresh 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • joepie91_ 3y ago
    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".
• lynx23 3y ago
  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 :-)
• mezobeli 3y ago
  BS
• meerita 3y ago
  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.
• neximo64 3y ago
  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.
  • timeon 3y ago
    I though 'parents' were more like Facebook category. What I think holds Twitter in position are news and public orgs.
  • pferde 3y ago
    Arguably, Mastodon does not even want that shot. They've been perfectly happy even without last year's big influx of ex-twits.
  • vidarh 3y ago
    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.
  • dbbk 3y ago
    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.
• zpeti 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      > 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.
      • vidarh 3y ago
        I addressed that in the sentences immediately following what you quoted, but to clarify the point on algorithmic feeds: I think it is relevant to any new social media, because even with an algorithmic feed, unless it's really badly done, you'll first start to swamp out an increasing number of those you follow once you follow a large number and/or have given a strong signal about which of them you actually engage with, so you're likely to get a "honeymoon period" even with one where the need for a huge following seems less important because your followers are in that situation too.
• willhackett 3y ago
  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.
• irthomasthomas 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      You just woke up, or something? That was one of Musk's first innovations at twitter.
    • pjc50 3y ago
      Musk's open contempt for journalists is a key motivation. That's why he ruined the verification feature.
      • prox 3y ago
        That’s nuts. I guess not liking journalists is fine, but to shutdown your press department? That’s just juvenile.
• justinhj 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > Meanwhile Twitter’s popularity continues to grow According to notorious liar Elon Musk.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• renewiltord 3y ago
  How much and what timeline and define death? I'll do $1k to $10k bet depending on answers.
• madeofpalk 3y ago
  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-its-companion-app-threads-by-year-end/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
  • bleachedsleet 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
    • jtode 3y ago
      I wish you were right. People talk about it "failing" because it fails to meet the expectations set by capitalist platforms, and you are exactly correct - Mastodon is a throwback to the time before these beasts inundated the earth with their tidal wave enshittification. But I just closed my account this morning cause there is a large mob now who are quite determined that this will be twitter 2.0, and they are already bullying the culture in that direction. Once the schism comes I'll go back.
• methou 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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.
• nailer 3y ago
  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.
• 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Networks move when there is a general consensus that their future is at risk though.
    • 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
      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 3y ago
      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.
• smcl 3y ago
  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.
• qwertox 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > and Reddit via a 3rd party apps i have some bad news for you
• pjc50 3y ago
  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/ 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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
    >> 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.
  • dbbk 3y ago
    > 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/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/ No, they're not.
  • pjc50 3y ago
    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-threads-app-in-the-eu-irish-dpc-says-metas-new-twitter-rival-wont-be-launched-here/a1927220337.html https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/no-instagram-...
  • 3y ago
• russdpale 3y ago
  uh, threads is mastodon.
  • vidarh 3y ago
    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.
• dorkwood 3y ago
  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.
• api 3y ago
  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.
• DrBazza 3y ago
  > 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.
• py_rrho 3y ago
  [flagged]
• ipaddr 3y ago
  This reminds me of google+. RIP threads - 2023-2023 Twitter may die but this will not replace it.
• holoduke 3y ago
  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.
• overseer_dk 3y ago
  Saving this comment to laugh at later thanks
• scarab92 3y ago
  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.
• civilized 3y ago
  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).
• thesz 3y ago
  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.
• gofreddygo 3y ago
  > this is going to hollow out twitter should. I hope it does. Treating users like they are deserves much worse. > There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative Nope. If there was, we'd already have seen more attempts with some strong competition. Twitter has always struggled to make more money. Founding team and CEO are gone. Musk tried all he could to get himself out of buying it. Twitter board was desperate to sell it. Twitter's power users were happy with 140 chars and a textbox. They got there years ago. They're still there not because of what Twitter has become, but despite of it. Not many, not a growing community and they're not leaving. What kept it alive en-masse was celebs and politicians. They're seemingly not missing Twitter. Threads is about Ego. Musk burned $400 billion and Zuck $650 billion on shit ideas. This is them dueling, burning more money just to prove they know how to make popular products. In reality neither has a a fking clue about what people actually want. We'll see this burn to ashes after the elections.