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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 Ins

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.
  - animuchan 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      Prude may be an unfair complaint. Being okay with the existence of pornography doesn't mean you want to see it all the time.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        > 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.
- dmix 3y ago
  > "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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 3y ago
    https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/5/9/facebook-has-3-billion-users-but-younger-users-quitting-platform 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.
    - dmix 3y ago
      Honestly FB being as successful as it was for so long should get some credit. Nothing sticks around forever and they generated massive amounts of wealth. It's wayyy bigger than Twitter still. As I say with Twitter even if they did lose 30% of their users that's still hundreds of millions of people using your website. > the big expensive Metaverse plan was cancelled. Has it really? Do you mean the scale/timing of their play (too much too early) or more generally.
  - yanderekko 3y ago
    >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.
- thrashh 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Might get big enough for antitrust.
    - l33t233372 3y ago
      Anti trust for a free service? Unless you mean from an ads perspective, but there are many ad companies.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        That’s interesting. I wonder what the legal arguments were
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      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_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... [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.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  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?
  - luuurker 3y ago
    > 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-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...
    - DANmode 3y ago
      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?
    - hersko 3y ago
      Did you read the Twitter files? Pretty wild stuff.
  - 1270018080 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
- phs318u 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 ça change
    - carlossouza 3y ago
      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.
  - iopq 3y ago
    My open source tribe switched to Mastodon, but not the pro-Ukraine tribe which relies on reporters to Tweet stuff from Ukraine
  - pjc50 3y ago
    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?)
- thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
  The branding and business might be what makes it great for businesses, but I'm not migrating so I can follow KFC on Meta.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  > "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.
rhaway84773 3y ago
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.
- foogazi 3y ago
  The influencers and brands are already there
  - dash2 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      > everyone is already on it and can start being fed notifications and UI for the other thing at a moment's notice.
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  so you think they're also aiming at reddit?
- mrweasel 3y ago
  > 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.
snowwrestler 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Haven't all this features been a thing since forever?
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      None of them were in the original product; they were essentially community-created.
    - nathell 3y ago
      As an example, RTs have been an official feature since late 2009 (https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2009/retweet-limited-rollout.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2009/retweet-limit...), more than three years after Twitter has first gone live.
irishloop 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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 3y ago
    Meta is an exceptional copier. They might not be coming up with many novel features but they are great at stealing from their competitors.
    - afavour 3y ago
      Are they? https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/
      - wilg 3y ago
        Yes
      - comte7092 3y ago
        Ah yes because stories wasn’t a massive success.
        afavour 3y ago
        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.
gremlinsinc 3y ago
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.
vansid 3y ago
> I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great What made Twitter great?
- jachee 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
ignoramous 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    This is why everyone should be following Hank Green on LinkedIn.
3rdrodeo 3y ago
`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.
ambyra 3y ago
100% agree with all this, 100% not going to use this until it until it shows up on instagram.
awill 3y ago
>>I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great Twitter/Elon no longer know what made Twitter great.
ymolodtsov 3y ago
> 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.
- alfiedotwtf 3y ago
  Beat me to it. Yeah, Twitter's toast after this Slashdot/Digg/Reddit migration
- zarzavat 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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
  - 3y ago
lopis 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - lopis 3y ago
    Right, that. I don't use Instagram so I might have confused the terms.
  - gureddio 3y ago
    That and Snapchat's entire UX is utterly unintuitive
Angostura 3y ago
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.
rsynnott 3y ago
> 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.
- version_five 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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.
    - lnxg33k1 3y ago
      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
christophilus 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Twitter is this anywhere you want it, no office visit required: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k
- inDigiNeous 3y ago
  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.
nonethewiser 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  > 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.
- afavour 3y ago
  > I think you’re missing the real reason they are leveraging instagram. Network effects. I’m not missing it, I’m saying this is the exact problem. My social graph on Twitter is totally different than my one on Instagram. So Threads will be “text posts with my Instagram friends”, which may be or may not be compelling. But it won’t replace Twitter.
bentt 3y ago
> The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it being where journalists and celebrities break news Nailed it.
travisgriggs 3y ago
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)
gemstones 3y ago
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 3y ago
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
ryukoposting 3y ago
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?
DANmode 3y ago
> 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 =]

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.
- animuchan 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Prude may be an unfair complaint. Being okay with the existence of pornography doesn't mean you want to see it all the time.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        > 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.
dmix 3y ago
> "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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 3y ago
  https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/5/9/facebook-has-3-billion-users-but-younger-users-quitting-platform 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.
  - dmix 3y ago
    Honestly FB being as successful as it was for so long should get some credit. Nothing sticks around forever and they generated massive amounts of wealth. It's wayyy bigger than Twitter still. As I say with Twitter even if they did lose 30% of their users that's still hundreds of millions of people using your website. > the big expensive Metaverse plan was cancelled. Has it really? Do you mean the scale/timing of their play (too much too early) or more generally.
- yanderekko 3y ago
  >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.
thrashh 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Might get big enough for antitrust.
  - l33t233372 3y ago
    Anti trust for a free service? Unless you mean from an ads perspective, but there are many ad companies.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        That’s interesting. I wonder what the legal arguments were
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    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_acquisitions_by_Meta_Platforms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... [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.
bboygravity 3y ago
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?
- luuurker 3y ago
  > 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-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...
  - DANmode 3y ago
    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?
  - hersko 3y ago
    Did you read the Twitter files? Pretty wild stuff.
- 1270018080 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
phs318u 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 ça change
  - carlossouza 3y ago
    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.
- iopq 3y ago
  My open source tribe switched to Mastodon, but not the pro-Ukraine tribe which relies on reporters to Tweet stuff from Ukraine
- pjc50 3y ago
  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?)
thatjoeoverthr 3y ago
The branding and business might be what makes it great for businesses, but I'm not migrating so I can follow KFC on Meta.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
> "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.

rhaway84773 3y ago

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.

foogazi 3y ago
The influencers and brands are already there
- dash2 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > everyone is already on it and can start being fed notifications and UI for the other thing at a moment's notice.
KeplerBoy 3y ago
so you think they're also aiming at reddit?
mrweasel 3y ago
> 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.

snowwrestler 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Haven't all this features been a thing since forever?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    None of them were in the original product; they were essentially community-created.
  - nathell 3y ago
    As an example, RTs have been an official feature since late 2009 (https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2009/retweet-limited-rollout.html https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2009/retweet-limit...), more than three years after Twitter has first gone live.

irishloop 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  Meta is an exceptional copier. They might not be coming up with many novel features but they are great at stealing from their competitors.
  - afavour 3y ago
    Are they? https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-app/
    - wilg 3y ago
      Yes
    - comte7092 3y ago
      Ah yes because stories wasn’t a massive success.
      - afavour 3y ago
        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.

gremlinsinc 3y ago

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.

vansid 3y ago

> I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great What made Twitter great?

jachee 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.

ignoramous 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  This is why everyone should be following Hank Green on LinkedIn.

3rdrodeo 3y ago

`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.

ambyra 3y ago

100% agree with all this, 100% not going to use this until it until it shows up on instagram.

awill 3y ago

>>I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great Twitter/Elon no longer know what made Twitter great.

ymolodtsov 3y ago

> 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.

alfiedotwtf 3y ago
Beat me to it. Yeah, Twitter's toast after this Slashdot/Digg/Reddit migration
zarzavat 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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
- 3y ago

lopis 3y ago

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 3y ago
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.
- lopis 3y ago
  Right, that. I don't use Instagram so I might have confused the terms.
- gureddio 3y ago
  That and Snapchat's entire UX is utterly unintuitive

Angostura 3y ago

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.

rsynnott 3y ago

> 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.

version_five 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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.
  - lnxg33k1 3y ago
    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

christophilus 3y ago

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 3y ago
Twitter is this anywhere you want it, no office visit required: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xpAvcGcEc0k
inDigiNeous 3y ago
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.

nonethewiser 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
> 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.
afavour 3y ago
> I think you’re missing the real reason they are leveraging instagram. Network effects. I’m not missing it, I’m saying this is the exact problem. My social graph on Twitter is totally different than my one on Instagram. So Threads will be “text posts with my Instagram friends”, which may be or may not be compelling. But it won’t replace Twitter.

bentt 3y ago

> The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it being where journalists and celebrities break news Nailed it.

travisgriggs 3y ago

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)

gemstones 3y ago

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 3y ago

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

ryukoposting 3y ago

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?

DANmode 3y ago

> 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 =]