Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf] • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by ericb » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 7:09 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #113

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.

Yeah, unfortunately Musk has done so much incompetent stuff that it's not as easy to make the case that the Twitter implosion is due to the staff reduction rather than one of the twenty other boneheaded things that have happened. The narrative could totally settle on: "The massive staff cuts would have worked out just fine if he hadn't also taken on too much debt in the financing and scared off advertisers with his o…

> Personally I think it is all of the above.

I don't know--based on the behavior observed from the client-side in chrome devtools, twitter seemed to be DDos-ing itself with no exponential backoff and no jitter.

That seems like exactly the kind of problem I'd expect if I fired all the senior people.

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

#192

Post by ericb » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 7:12 PM UTC

rhaway84773 wrote: post #177

quitit wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effecti…

In Musk’s defense, I think there is something to the idea that most tech companies were a little too bloated. Especially with the hiring during the pandemic based on unrealistic valuations and future expectations. But this is another area where Zuck beat Musk because Meta addressed this issue in a much more sensible way which involved considered changes in workforce as opposed to Musk’s impetuous unthought through sl…

I think they were bloated a bit, but that was mostly staffing for red herring projects and extra management layers.

The bloat was a mismanagement problem "solved" by cutting everything but management. That plus a bit of over-hiring from covid and cheap money. But that's also a management issue.

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

#193

Post by mandeepj » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:28 PM UTC

fennecfoxy wrote: post #187

LocalH wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, isn't the post you replied to essentially the clean room approach? One person/group does the actual reverse engineering and writes up the spec doc, and then a totally separate person/group takes that spec doc and produces code to implement it.

I think that was maybe applicable back in the Gates & Wozniak days but not so sure that approach would be considered "clean" now. It seems kind of ludicrous that one company can't look at another's product and create the same type of thing, just improved. That's how innovation works. It's just that in this case, apart from a handful of differences, the core innovation of threads seems to be that Twitter has been take…

> I'm sure that even the shortform that Twitter has enforced since its inception had been done long before.

Twitter's idea came from Text messages

https://www.lifewire.com/history-of-twitter-3288854

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

#194

Post by DuckFeathers » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 11:00 PM UTC

vintermann wrote: post #171

DuckFeathers wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade secrets is not code.

Fine. What is it then? Could you give a generic example of the sort of secret an employee might take out of Twitter and use to build a competing product? By the way, Musk didn't specify "code" either.

[dead]

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

#195

Post by tjalfi » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 11:17 PM UTC

blitzar wrote: post #51

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 this is supposedly from such a large law firm Is it the same law firm that went with the 'offering to buy twitter and signing a purchase agreement was just a prank bro ' defence? If you find yourself standing up in court making the prank bro argument, then I hope the amount of money you got was a fair price for your dignity.

> Is it the same law firm that went with the 'offering to buy twitter and signing a purchase agreement was just a prank bro' defence?

Yes. He was represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP for the Twitter lawsuit[0]. The threat was written by a Quinn Emanuel partner.

> If you find yourself standing up in court making the prank bro argument, then I hope the amount of money you got was a fair price for your dignity.

I'm not sure whether he has equity, but the average profits per equity partner at Quinn Emanuel are $5.22 million[1].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/07/twitter-gets-rea...

[1] https://www.law.com/law-firm-profile/?id=1830&name=Quinn-Ema...

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

#196

Post by adam_arthur » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 11:21 PM UTC

stubybubs wrote: post #145

adam_arthur wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most of those 7500 were not engineers. They were moderators, sales, support, HR, etc The moderation, whatever people personally think of it now, has certainly suffered from an advertiser perspective, which is why they left. It was a mistake to fire many of them. The sales people with relationships to advertisers left, and so again did many advertisers. It's apparently impossible to get your account reinstated if you…

Twitter layoffs will have only "failed" due to creating a cultural divide and driving people to other services. Not due to the mechanical aspect of them

Twitter laid off 80-90% of their people and the app functions the same. No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. Even if the features were in the pipeline already, none of them appeared over the 5-6 years preceding the acquisition. Highly coincidental, to the point of being suspect.

Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons, not because of moderation. The individuals behind advertising at many large corporations simply didn't want to help Elon. Would you want to give money to somebody you hated, and who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? This part is obvious to any objective observer.

It's clear at this point that net added value per Twitter employee was low or even negative for many. If a company can layoff 90% of the developers and have no material change in availability or development velocity, then it's really inarguable otherwise

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

#197

Post by stubybubs » Sat, Jul 08, 2023, 8:11 PM UTC

adam_arthur wrote: post #196

stubybubs wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those 7500 were not engineers. They were moderators, sales, support, HR, etc The moderation, whatever people personally think of it now, has certainly suffered from an advertiser perspective, which is why they left. It was a mistake to fire many of them. The sales people with relationships to advertisers left, and so again did many advertisers. It's apparently impossible to get your account reinstated if you…

Twitter layoffs will have only "failed" due to creating a cultural divide and driving people to other services. Not due to the mechanical aspect of them Twitter laid off 80-90% of their people and the app functions the same. No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. Even if the features were in the pipeline already, none of them appeared over the 5-6 years p…

> Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons

> who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles?

I mean, you're talking about moderation. It's always going to be based on where the culture is at the moment. 70 years ago, nobody cared about misogynistic ads, now they've fallen out of fashion. People don't want to advertise on a site flooded with posts that go against the values of their customers. You simply can't have it both ways, Elon's preferred kind of speech and having advertisers.

> No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased.

The downtime and strangeness has definitely increased. And the features aren't good! Blue was not good. It existed as a paid feature with edit capability. He added boosting for Blue and removed verification, and he fired all the product people who told him it was a terrible idea to convert to pay to win comments. They lost users, saw hate comments float to the top under ads etc. etc. Nobody wanted massive walls of text on Twitter, that's what made it different. Brevity is the soul of wit. And they put up a login wall because of scraping? It's a public site, you just have to live with that. If you're getting slammed, the solution is to increase your server availability, not take eyeballs of your content.

> If a company can layoff 90% of the developers

It wasn't 90% of developers. It wasn't even 90% of the company, if they really went from 7500 to 2000, which was the last count. Most of the layoffs/firing/quits were outside of development, in moderation, sales etc.

And after all this, their traffic has massively declined, and ad sales are down 60% YoY. It is absolutely spiraling. It is unreal how it can be seen as anything but.

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

#198

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

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

#199

Post by renegade-otter » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

chasing wrote: post #35

I'm curious what exactly X is claiming Meta stole? The interface and interaction model is basically just social media best practices that have been evolved by numerous people and companies over the past 20-30 years. Seemingly nothing so complex that it needs to be stolen from another company. Barely any art assets. Dirt-simple interfaces. Under-the-hood, I assume Meta was able to launch this quickly because it's larg…

Threads are Instagram-compatible. It's literally probably Instagram code, heavily modified.

Threads is written in Python, and Instagram is largely a Python monolith.

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

#200

Post by yowzadave » Sun, Jul 09, 2023, 10:20 PM UTC

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?

The lawsuit claims that Meta hired ex-Twitter employees to build Threads, which seems to be both factually untrue and not illegal even if it were true. Are you shifting the goalposts to a different claim?