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.
Of the three cohorots, the latter is by far the smallest (my own guess), and these are definitely (from my experience) finding homes on Mastodon (tribe-specific servers).
(A 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?)
plus ça change
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It was all there before and after Musk on Twitter. Post Musk you get the added overt racism as a bonus though. Choices choices...
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.
Incidentally, that is also the case on Bluesky and one reason I would not dare to invite anybody on there until they address it.
Seriously though, how did Spanish Inquisition levels of prudeness become the norm on the interwebs, of all things?
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?
Maybe if you're developing a spreadsheet app or some such, then sure.
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_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.
Unless you mean from an ads perspective, but there are many ad companies.
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?
I'm not American, but that doesn't reflect what I was seeing on Twitter before I closed my account (mid/late 2020).
I'm surprised to see a crowd that is supposed to see through the BS of the industry falling for Musk's neutrality and anti-censorship claims... https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...
This seems pretty self evident, since most of them left as soon as Musk took over with the promise to stop policing the platform.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/03/elon... is where a summary of the most neutral analysis on this "debate" can be found.
Everything we've seen from the Twitter threads suggests that they were working with both political parties, and that it's just reporting bias that we only got more details about their dealings with one of the parties. For example, the original data dumps mentioned in passing that there were similar requests coming from the Presidency (Trump, at the time), the "journalist" just chose to focus on the ones coming from Biden's campaign.
You're delusional. Twitter before the acquisition was extremely politically neutral and gave extremist right wing voices way more leeway than should be socially acceptable. Post-acquisition has turned it into the 'totalitarian political censorship and propaganda tool' that you're describing, for Musk's personal and political interests, which at the time seem to be ultra-far right.
LOL wow.. calling somebody else delusional is serious projection! Twitter was far from neutral. It was obvious to any objective skeptic in real-time then supporting evidence such as Twitter Files confirmed it. Twitter was far left of center and used constant censorship against opposing views.
