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

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#91

Post by TechnicolorByte » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 1:15 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #22

iamdelirium wrote: post #6

This is literally one of the worst moves Twitter could have made to combat Threads or any of their copies. They're literally giving more eyes and coverage to Threads and painting them as a real contender.

- The entire Zuck fight saga. - Limiting access to Twitter. - Tweeting incessantly about the Threads launch. - Threatening to sue Meta. Musk can't stay out of the limelight, for better or worse, and in this case it is definitely for the worse. Threads would have had a tiny fraction of the hype it does had it not been for his antics these last few weeks.

Your last sentence makes me wonder when Meta decided on the launch date for Threads. Were they always planning to launch it early summer timeframe or they seized on the recent Zuck/Musk fight drama + twitter rate limiting to maximize eyeballs? Threads is far from feature complete.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#92

Post by danShumway » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 1:47 AM UTC

housemusicfan wrote: post #82

bagels wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At scale? Not in a few weeks, and not with all the features, but the core features don't seem like a stretch for a small team, without scale in a couple months. Meta/Instagram luckily already have a large scale social network, tons of money, and tons of engineers and a codebase that deals in users and text and images already, so it's a pretty good head start.

Twitter's search works pretty well at scale; you can search for detailed Tweet content fairly accurately. That doesn't happen overnight.

Do Facebook and Instagram not have search?

I don't really understand what you're getting at here. I don't see how indexing is a "special sauce"; Facebook has a larger network size than Twitter does and as far as I can tell it indexes all of its posts. What major social sites other than Tumblr/Mastodon don't have functioning search?

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#93

Post by danShumway » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 1:56 AM UTC

veec_cas_tant wrote: post #78

rtsil wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None. There is no trade secret in building something like Twitter. Anyone on this site can probably make a clone of it. The real secrets are the massive money needed to promote the network and to pay for the infrastructure, the massive social reach to attract top posters, the massive networking effect needed to make it a must-have app. Meta already have all of those.

I’m very confident that not everyone on this site could make it work at such a massive scale

People on HN in particular tend to oversimplify large projects. Trying to build and maintain an app the size of Twitter would be hard. Trying to tie it into a functional advertising network would be harder. HN just tends to be brightly cynical about complexity in general; in reality there would be very significant challenges (as Musk is discovering now).

But do I buy that specifically Facebook could do it? Yeah, obviously they could. It's not at all surprising that Facebook could quickly launch a Twitter clone. This isn't like the "metaverse", Facebook already runs social networks that are larger and more complicated than Twitter is, and Threads looks to be highly tied into their existing infrastructure.

I could not build a Twitter clone in my free time, but I also don't currently run Instagram.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#94

Post by alimov » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

Sunspark wrote: post #72

edavis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the arrival of Threads is definitely an existential threat for Twitter I had a similar thought when I joined Threads last night and within 30 seconds saw the accounts of Adam Schefter, Adrian Wojnarowski, and Shams Charania all actively posting. If you follow NFL and NBA news you'll know these names but for anybody that doesn't, these insider accounts are firmly at the center of the NFL and NBA breaking news univer…

I have no Meta corp apps installed on my phone. Not Facebook, Instagram nor Whatsapp, and Threads will join that list. The reason for this is because Zuck and Meta corp are hostile to user privacy (and drain batteries). Threads can't even launch in the European Union because of it. Have fun paying $12 a month to be Threads-verified. Thankfully day-to-day life isn't yet dependent on Meta corp as a necessity.

Ok, good to know. Have fun fighting the good fight.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#95

Post by meepmorp » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 2:24 AM UTC

TechnicolorByte wrote: post #90

meepmorp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's been talking to advertisers, trying to convince them that Twitter is a good, stable place to work with and they can resume/expand their ad buys. I don't know that she's achieved anything specifically, but I do know that if she has, it's dead now. Musk hired her to help improve revenue, and then basically made it impossible for her to ever achieve that goal.

Yup. Her strategy was reported last week: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/linda-yaccarinos...

That article is amazing to read with the benefit of a week's hindsight.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#96

Post by Tempest1981 » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 3:58 AM UTC

paxys wrote: post #21

An entirely predictable turn of events. Next up: - The lawsuit is never actually filed. Turns out just like Delaware (and unlike the SEC), California courts aren't going to bend to Musk's will. - Twitter continues to bleed users and advertisers. Musk continues to double and triple down on his failed policies. - Musk declares that this was his intention all along with the purchase, and killing Twitter was a "5D chess…

What if he moves Twitter to Texas?

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#97

Post by blitzar » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:58 AM UTC

angry_moose wrote: post #29

tw04 wrote: post #14

>Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.” So you fire 80% of your workforce claiming they're dead weight and completely unnecessary, while simultaneously suing their new employer because apparently they were vital cogs who somehow "continue to have access to trade secrets"? So vital you'r…

> ....former Twitter employees....continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets. I don't think I've ever seen anyone admit to major organizational failings like that. I haven't worked for a company in at least 15 years where every single bit of access I had wasn't revoked within minutes. When I last changed jobs in 2021 I watched the Outlook app on my phone. My boss walked me out of the building at 1:00pm, took…

Its more distopian than that. The "trade secrets" are pieces of knowlege inside peoples brains.

They are suing on the basis that someone somewhere said "when I was at twitter we used tabs not spaces in our code"

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#98

Post by meindnoch » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 9:20 AM UTC

Mere mortals cannot comprehend what kind of secret, arcane knowledge is necessary to display 140-character messages on a website.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#99

Post by AlexandrB » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 11:07 AM UTC

goodbyesf wrote: post #64

perlgeek wrote: post #39

So was the unauthenticated read block related to Twitter being afraid that Meta scrapes their user base for easier migration?

Makes you wonder. Imagine if Meta was literally cloning twitter to make it easier for twitter users to migrate to threads.

Seems wholly unnecessary. I imagine a majority of Twitter users also have an Instagram or Facebook account. Sure the social graph is not identical, but it's probably more than good enough. Especially since Threads only has an algorithmic feed and follows are less important to what you see.

Re: Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

#100

Post by tmottabr » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 1:15 PM UTC

housemusicfan wrote: post #87

AlotOfReading wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How important is refined search to a social network with no legacy content to search through? Surely that's something they can put off for N months and just accept whatever caption and relevancy limitations Instagram search imposes?

Functioning search for a Twitter clone is absolutely essential.

not necessarily on day one.. this is why threads only have search for users at the moment..

that is what everyone is doing now.. search for the people they care to follow..

They can work a few more days on that and add it in a update down the line.. by the time thread has enough content that search is important you can bet that search will be there..

i like the theory that they lunched now, sooner then originally planned, to surf on the mess that twitter made on the last few days. This would explain why threads is so incomplete in some areas, but probably will match all twitter features soon enough..