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

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

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the twitter that’s not owned by musk? Because I’m surprised there isn’t a single twitter clone alternative.

BlueSky? Threads by Mark Zuckerberg?

They’re not true clones. Bluesky is decentralized something and threads is hidden away in instagram.

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

#32

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.

For targeting Brazil it seems like they didn't do the basic marketing 101 check to see if that one syllable words is by chance something to stay away from in that target market.

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

Probably helped with some initial hype with some people just to be able to joke about it. Is it a bit like Mastodon's "toots", I guess. It was funny for a bit, then it was just eye rolling.

On the other hand in Russian and ex-Soviet space, "koo" would a great reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin-dza-dza! a movie by Georgiy Daneliya.

> The natives of the planet appear human, with deceptively primitive-looking technology and a barbaric culture, which satirically resembles that of humans. They are telepathic; the only spoken words normally used in their culture are "ku" (koo) and "kyu" (kyoo), the former stands for everything good, the latter being a swear word that stands for every bad thing.

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

#33

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.

Variations on the same basic idea compete all the time, it doesn't mean people are out of ideas; it's literally the opposite.

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

#34
The biggest boost for the platform, however, came from the standoff between India’s ruling party and X. The latter was caught in a tough spot in early 2021, when it refused to give in to the government’s requests to remove certain posts and accounts that were critical of the Modi government.

Ahhh

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

#35

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

Perhaps this as well: https://youtu.be/hwRNWQ2FwvQ?si=aLE4F7VCmo5cEJNd

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

#36
Koo was started as a response to X/Twitter because the Indian R/W ecosystem couldn't stand the fact that Musk spoke against the rampant and one-sided censorship requests that Twitter was receiving from the Indian govt.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56007451

After koo was announced many of the supporters of India's R/W central govt switched over to Koo boosting its numbers.. but as with Meta's Threads, it was inevitable that the platform would lose its shine quickly

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

#38
post #19

SaaS companies rise and fall all the time. I didn't get any sense of what was special about this tale. A lot of "this happened, and then this happened," but I would have liked some more insight.

Koo was practically backed by the BJP, the dominant political party in India. It was the soft propaganda arm of the government.

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

#39

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

Surely twitter's value isn't in its revenue.... you can make a lot more money openly manipulating public opinion in a socially acceptable manner. See: why rich people buy newspapers.

Even GameStop makes more money than Twitter

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

#40

Koo was never thriving.

Yep.

That's the feeling I always got.

It was just a place for RWingers of India. Even that could be an interesting place. But it wasn’t.

I tried reading Koo once or twice, and I wasn’t interested in anything.

I don't have any preemptive beef against Commies or Indian RW or whoever, but that platform had more saffron color than the BJP party office. Saffron border, bland white background, and saffron checkmarks for verified accounts. Total UI design hell.

No wonder it failed.

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