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The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

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11–20 of 45 posts

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#11

People are out of ideas. Twitter but for India. Twitter but not owned Elon Musk. Twitter but integrated with substack. Twitter but federated. Twitter but decentralized. Will any of these do better? Possibly the last two, if someone builts an innovative user experience on top of them.

And Twitter is just RSS with a textbox.

Here's a fun fact about federated Twitter by the way: ActivityPub is just a JSON-ified reinvention of SMTP.

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#12

Twitter dies as soon as free money stops. Many internet companies are zombies or even worse

Interest rates have been above guaranteed yields for some time now. When does the free money end?

Someone is still stuck owning the companies. There seems to be some inertia there. Our Benefactors don't always shut down a company the moment it becomes unprofitable, when it took 15 years to get to the position it's in today. If the tide reverses and the company becomes profitable again, they're not waiting another 15 years to restart it, if that's even possible.

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#13

Social media in subcontinent is really hard since the ARPU is really low compared to the cost required to sustain that scale. All the existing one prevail because most of their revenue comes from US + EU to balance out additional cost in resources.

[flagged]

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#14
Very unfortunate name for a company that wanted to expand in Brazil. In Portuguese, Koo is homophonous with the word for a**hole, so it's not a surprise it didn't stick.

Not to say it wasn't humorous though. People had a lot of fun talking about and asking others about their Koos.

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#15
post #11

People are out of ideas. Twitter but for India. Twitter but not owned Elon Musk. Twitter but integrated with substack. Twitter but federated. Twitter but decentralized. Will any of these do better? Possibly the last two, if someone builts an innovative user experience on top of them.

And Twitter is just RSS with a textbox. Here's a fun fact about federated Twitter by the way: ActivityPub is just a JSON-ified reinvention of SMTP.

Many twitter clones are almost pixel perfect. Twitter started with SMS support, and added many other unique things like @ mentions, threads that worked on mobile and the way you would see conversations between people if you followed both of them.

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#16
post #13

Social media in subcontinent is really hard since the ARPU is really low compared to the cost required to sustain that scale. All the existing one prevail because most of their revenue comes from US + EU to balance out additional cost in resources.

[flagged]

TikTok is Chinese.

When someone says subcontinent they usually mean the India and its neighbours Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#17

Very unfortunate name for a company that wanted to expand in Brazil. In Portuguese, Koo is homophonous with the word for a**hole, so it's not a surprise it didn't stick. Not to say it wasn't humorous though. People had a lot of fun talking about and asking others about their Koos.

Koo, I believe, is named after: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo#Calls

> People had a lot of fun talking about and asking others about their Koos.

You just might enjoy the opening sequence of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yek4hrl25qU&t=23

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#18
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

TikTok is Chinese. When someone says subcontinent they usually mean the India and its neighbours Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

And when they say Indochina, they mean neither India nor China.

Re: The rise and fall of Koo, India’s once-thriving Twitter alternative

#20
post #11

People are out of ideas. Twitter but for India. Twitter but not owned Elon Musk. Twitter but integrated with substack. Twitter but federated. Twitter but decentralized. Will any of these do better? Possibly the last two, if someone builts an innovative user experience on top of them.

And Twitter is just RSS with a textbox. Here's a fun fact about federated Twitter by the way: ActivityPub is just a JSON-ified reinvention of SMTP.

Where email only has inboxes and messages, ActivityPub also has HTTP-esque verbs. (Email can do everything ActivityPub can, in principle, but it has to send emails to do so. When an ActivityPub verb isn't understood, it's ignored, whereas when an email message isn't understood, it's presented to the user.)
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