9 ms·

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 absu

by 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.
  - DANmode 3y ago
    Kids with iPads.
- iopq 3y ago
  Do you have an invite for me? Tell me where you found all that porn so I can avoid it
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.

by gochi 3y ago

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.
- DANmode 3y ago
  Kids with iPads.
iopq 3y ago
Do you have an invite for me? Tell me where you found all that porn so I can avoid it

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.