Live data from Hacker News

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads [pdf]

cdn.sanity.io

71–80 of 200 posts

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

#71
post #28
post #3

Oh good grief. This is fair game, Mr. Musk. Scaling aside, Twitter is as simple an application as you could imagine.

The product is (deceptively) simple but the sheer scale makes it a very complex system.

I think the important bit is that it's relatively hard to argue that "how to scale up message passing infrastructure and process metadata like hashtags" is a Twitter trade secret rather than a general tech skillset useful across FAANG companies. I suspect Meta's implementation will be quite different from Twitter's under the hood, and rely quite a lot on Meta tech platforms.

If Meta was incubating a rocket ship division, it might be a little bit easier to demonstrate that former SpaceX employees were making non-obvious design choices based on SpaceX research and undisclosed features of SpaceX tech

Probably won't help that a lot of the more Twitter-specific knowledge around content recommendations and warning algorithms and scaling up moderation processes is stuff Elon's spent his time trashing Twitter's original implementations of anyway...

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

#72

Musk is such an idiot ... i was excited for him to buy Twitter and hopefully provide more of a balance of opinions but its all about him. He's like Trump .. a narcissitic ego maniac and suing FB for launching a Twitter competitor is more proof that he's just like Trump ... a whiney ego maniac sue happy multi-billionaire.

I mean if you dig it up, the guys controversies and shenanigans go back decades and most of it is preserved online. The Twitter purchase wasn't anything other than a blunder either. When he realised what he got himself into he wanted to nope out of it but this time that didn't work. Going back and seeing how badly he wanted to be a "co-founder" of Tesla even though he wasn't tells you all about his ego.

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

#73

Maybe the facts will bear out that there’s a case here, but my default position is one of skepticism. I guess one takeaway for me is if you don’t want your competitor to hire a bunch of your former employees, don’t make a bunch of your employees former employees.

If Musk were a little less obnoxious when talking about the people he fired, he might engender a little more goodwill on this type of suit.. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F0YH3xBaQAAjs3L?format=jpg&name=...

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

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s zero seeded content in threads and it would be stupid of meta to do so. They just needed to pay some influencers to get higher quality content cheaper then scraping it all.

I disagree... follower graph would be pretty important to bootstrap a Twitter like experience. My follower graph on Twitter looks quite different than Instagram or Facebook. The letter also explicitly calls out follower graph and following data which is why I mention it.

They used the followers from IG, not Twitter.

Considering who is making this claim and how much they've lied recently, I'd be hesitant to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Simply put, that which can be claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

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

#76
The following is a copy and paste of OCR of the pdf. There may be some transcription/OCR errors in the following text.

---

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:

I write on behalf of X Corp., as successor in interest to Twitter, Inc. ("Twitter"). Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched "Threads" app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms ("Meta") has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property.

Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices. With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta's copycat "Threads" app with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta's competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter.

Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information. Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.

Further, Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter's followers or following data. As set forth in Twitter's Terms of Service, crawling any Twitter services - including, but not limited to, any Twitter websites, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, ads, and commerce services - is permissible only "if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file" available at https://twitter.com/robots.txt. The robots.txt file specifically disallows crawling of Twitter's followers or following data. Scraping any Twitter services is expressly prohibited for any reason without Twitter's prior consent. Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seck both civil remedies or injunctive relief without further notice.

Please consider this letter a formal notice that Meta must preserve any documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter. Meta, and/or former Twitter employees who now work for Meta. That includes, but is not limited to, all documents related to the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of these former Twitter employees, the development of Meta's competing Threads app, and any communications between these former Twitter employees and any agent, representative, or employee or Meta.

Very truly yours,

(s)

Alex Spiro

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

#77

Musk is such an idiot ... i was excited for him to buy Twitter and hopefully provide more of a balance of opinions but its all about him. He's like Trump .. a narcissitic ego maniac and suing FB for launching a Twitter competitor is more proof that he's just like Trump ... a whiney ego maniac sue happy multi-billionaire.

There's no indication that Trump is a multi-billionaire but the rest of your comment is spot on.

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

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> locked garden Not to defend Meta, but this isn't true. Meta is embracing the fediverse protocol with Threads.

I used to be able to talk friends on AIM, Yahoo, and Messenger all through Pidgin too. "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.'"

It's kinda funny how Bush's fans back then tried to justify this, saying he was self-aware enough to dodge saying 'Shame on me' on tape. They thought he was trying to avoid giving his opponents some campaign ad material. Given the one being defended, I'm not so sure.

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

#79

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

A few hundreds working on a project within Meta. They won't have to take care of a lot of important things they'd have to if they were standalone.

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

#80
post #28
post #3

Oh good grief. This is fair game, Mr. Musk. Scaling aside, Twitter is as simple an application as you could imagine.

The product is (deceptively) simple but the sheer scale makes it a very complex system.

Scale isn't an issue for Meta.

While Bluesky has been having problems with their (invite-only) spike in signups from Twitter refugees, Threads has been chugging along with no issue.

Also, Zuckerberg made a post saying they got something like 5 million "signups" within the first few hours of launch.

Post reply on HN