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Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

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Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#161

Post by quitit »

While this works through the courts - it is kind of amusing to think that Elon is suggesting that Meta somehow needed Twitter's IP to build Threads.

Here are some monthly active user stats for social media/chat networks(1):

1. Facebook ~3B

...

3. WhatsApp ~2B

4. Instagram ~2B

...

7. Facebook Messenger ~0.93B

...

14. Twitter ~0.56B

I'm no fan of Meta, but it's plain to see that Meta have no problem or lack of talent with regards to scale.

(1) https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#162

Post by quitit »

odyssey7 wrote: post #26

Great news for tech workers imo. Part of the tech labor market downturn has been driven by skepticism over the costs: if Twitter can slash its workforce and keep running just fine, why can’t other companies? Well, Threads swooping in to rapidly drain Twitter’s market share might change that reasoning.

Reddit's CEO stated that what Elon did to Twitter was a model he'd like Reddit to follow.

Although Reddit's changes are fresh, it has declined both in quality and esteem from copying this business style. I expect further decline if they follow this road.

As for the companies that aren't following Elon's lead: they are flourishing. We have enough data points now to say it authoritatively.

Slash and burn is not effective, smart or conducive to the desired results.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#163

Post by quitit »

adam_arthur wrote: post #64
odyssey7 wrote: post #26

Great news for tech workers imo. Part of the tech labor market downturn has been driven by skepticism over the costs: if Twitter can slash its workforce and keep running just fine, why can’t other companies? Well, Threads swooping in to rapidly drain Twitter’s market share might change that reasoning.

Are there really more than a few hundred people working on Threads? I believe Twitter had ~7,500 at its peak. Even if Threads succeeds, its not going to be because they have meaningfully more employees. Cloning twitter is a fairly easy technical problem nowadays... in contrast to early 2010s era of no-cloud, poor infra management and so on

In addition to the other points made by others about sharing staff...

At their respective peaks Meta had around 12x the staff of peak Twitter despite not having 10x the user base (that said Meta towers heavily over Twitter in users and monthly accesses.)

Even today Meta still has more than 10x the staff of peak Twitter.

If anything you're highlighting that at ~7,500 staff Twitter was probably too thinly run.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#166

Post by danpalmer »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #155
danpalmer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer this doesn’t pass even a cursory look. Entirely different brands, tech stacks, and the products just work differently. What can they possibly have taken. I dislike Musk/Zuck as much as anyone, but I do believe that Meta can build a Twitter clone in 6 months on their infrastructure, and with their product folks.

You have to wonder about Elon Musk's "first principle" thinking if he lashes out in such basic ways that defy basic engineering intuition. Twitter's source code is valuable to Twitter, much like Twitter's engineers and their institutional knowhow were valuable to Twitter (before Musk fired them by the thousands). But outside Twitter, taking their code and assets and trying to awkwardly graft them onto Meta/Instagram'…

Musk doesn't value people – this is apparent from all of his businesses, he doesn't care about work life balance, inclusive hiring, etc.

From this, it does follow that if you've got some secret-sauce at your company, and it's NOT your employees and their experience, then it must be something else. If you're Twitter, then it's probably The Algorithm, or code printed out onto reams of paper. After all, that's what makes the money right?

Except as is obvious to most companies, it's not. The people, the shared understanding, the experience, the company culture, and even the context of the world that the product is a part of – these are all far more important than the actual code, and where any long-term successful company focuses their efforts.

To put it in terms Musk might understand, product and engineering teams are "stage 0" for a software company, they are the machine that builds the machine.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#167

Post by mandeepj »

quitit wrote: post #157
tehbeard wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, you know, handle their termination with some care to honouring their contracts if you expect them to honour anything NDA / no compete for a while after...

Meta have already stated that no former twitter employees worked on Threads. That's not all that surprising though, Meta could obviously build such a product from their own learnings and IP.

> That's not all that surprising though, Meta could obviously build such a product from their own learnings and IP.

Twitter is a public app. How hard it’s to keep the app open on one monitor and write a spec doc on another?

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#168

Post by nubinetwork »

fomine3 wrote: post #141
nubinetwork wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written a twitter clone in PHP once, it's not hard. Throw in some Ajax to auto refresh, and you'd have something similar to what they have been using this whole time.

It's easy to handle 100 users. It's difficult to make it (timeline, search, and other stuff) work for 10e7 users (though Meta already do).

Money and hardware. It's not like every other website doesn't have growing pains.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#169

Post by mandeepj »

denotational wrote: post #13

> Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets [...] This sentence is clearly trying to establish liability by accusing Meta of wilful infringement of Twitter’s rights (i.e. it acted in full knowledge of these fact, even though they may lead to violation of the employees’ restrictive covenants, etc.), as evidenced by t…

> As such, the first instance of “Twitter” is surely a mistake; shouldn’t it say “Meta”? This would make sense given the next sentence (“With that knowledge, Meta [...]”).

No! I think they wrote it correctly. The wording is confusing definitely as it’s written in first object. They are trying to tell them (Meta) - they (Twitter) are aware that they are hired our ex employees.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

#170

Post by fennecfoxy »

mandeepj wrote: post #167
quitit wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta have already stated that no former twitter employees worked on Threads. That's not all that surprising though, Meta could obviously build such a product from their own learnings and IP.

> That's not all that surprising though, Meta could obviously build such a product from their own learnings and IP. Twitter is a public app. How hard it’s to keep the app open on one monitor and write a spec doc on another?

Depends on what constitutes IP.

Is an artist with references open in another pane breaking copyright?

If we stoop to the rounded-corners Apple level then there's not really much point anyone making anything new anymore.

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