On the Twitter Hack

I would be highly surprised if world leaders communicated anything sensitive via DM on Twitter.

He specifically mentions world leaders. Also, tons of speculation in the article about things nobody is sure about yet and then extrapolating from there and proposing countermeasures that are off the scale. Security is important. But it wouldn't be the first time a communications service is hacked and assuming a nation state adversary you can consider every tech company in the world compromised to some degree by infiltrating employees into key positions. Those can play the long game and work at it for years to reach their destination.

I would consider anything you entrust to a keyboard or some internet or wireless medium to be in principle compromisable, an in practice most likely compromised in the sense that people that should not have access to that data probably do.

> Companies like Facebook and Twitter have so much power because they are so large, and they face no real competition.

I find it hard to take the rest of the article seriously when it's talking about Twitter as a giant monopoly that needs to be broken up...

But also the argument seems fundamentally wrong. Account security is a prime example of a place where economies of scale bring a lot of benefit. I would absolutely trust the security of say Facebook, Google or Microsoft above that of Twitter just due to the larger scale. They can afford to spend more on security, since they have more users, and their users are more valuable. Every dollar spent on security applies to the whole user base. And similarly I'd trust Twitter above a 100 person web startup.

If you start regulating for some kind of a minimum security bar, either you're going to be killing a lot of companies, or you're going to be setting the bar laughably low compared to what these companies already do.

> Were there 100 different Twitter-like companies

... they would all be bankrupt.

>> Were there 100 different Twitter-like companies

>... they would all be bankrupt.

Huh? There's over 2,000 Mastodon servers doing just fine

This is very typical of the libertarian streak that underpins HN. I'm always a little turned off by this strange dominate-the-world culture out of SV. I come from a culture that valued open source and interoperable open standards. Where did my people go?

Twitter is clearly and objectively a monopoly or in a duopoly with Facebook/Instagram. At my most charitable, I could include YouTube in the mix. But I'd still say monopoly.

Even though Google and Facebook are much bigger companies, Twitter has clearly cornered the market for online publishing of thoughts and opinions. Only Facebook/Instagram and Reddit come anywhere close, but those platforms are mostly for different types of content.

There's a reason that modern "news" publishes article after article that merely reports on whatever conversation is trending on Twitter. There's a reason that celebs on Reddit provide proof via tweet. There's a reason Trump's YouTube and Facebook accounts are run by staffers.

Could 100 Twitter-like companies all make it? Perhaps not, but we'd be in a better place. Twitter is poison and I'd not shed a tear if it went bankrupt.