Spaceman Spiff

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  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • The simple fact that they are former employees is meaningless. This is especially true in California (i.e. where Twitter HQ is, and presumably most of these employees) where non-competes are nearly completely unenforceable. Twitter will have to specifically show that it’s about their internal trade secrets, and not just the general experience they brought from their time at Twitter.

    But right now, it’s entirely Twitter doing the talking. We haven’t seen yet how Meta will respond. I predict there is a 0% chance that Threads gets shutdown any time soon.

    If you read the actual letter, it seems to paint a slightly different picture. They vaguely order Meta to stop using twitters trade secrets (whatever that may be), and serve notice to preserve communications. That’s fairly normal. But then they have an entire tangent about scraping Twitter’s publicly available data.


  • Possibly. I’m not entirely sure how to interpret that part.

    One plausible scenario is that they brought in a consultant, who said their data would be worth $XXXX on the open market. A common element of MBA thinking is that any potential profits are something you are entitled to, regardless of the consequences. It’s also pretty clear they don’t have a mature management team, or a viable path to realize those profits. But they had to stop someone else from getting it, so there was a rushed decision. I don’t quite know how it coincided with killing 3rd party apps, though, unless it was just more really incompetent management.










  • It’s true that porn is a big part of the internet at large. You can point to countless examples where a product (even social media) lived and died by porn.

    But there are also countless examples where porn was never a factor. Most of the major social platforms today have always had an anti-porn approach. It’s debatable whether that helped or hindered their growth, but it’s always been a thing.

    Now, I can’t think of any where porn was a big part of their platform that got removed, and they came out ok. Maybe that’s (part of) why Reddit has been downplaying porn for a while.

    Right now, there is plenty of porn in the fediverse. But there will be the same challenges as any user-submitted porn site. There’s currently a big discussion about categories that are unwanted, generally offensive, and illegal in certain jurisdictions. The fediverse makes all of that more complicated. There’s also a big concern about the content being uploaded directly, increasing the load on every instance that federates.

    There will definitely be porn here, but I don’t think it’s going to work the same as it did on Reddit.


  • Which part of the 90/9/1 are most of those users? Very few subs are truly back to business as usual, and it seems likely the rest will be forever weakened. Recovery would mean either existing users capitulate, or new users *filling the same role *taking their place.

    Reddit won’t disappear by any means, but it’s also unlikely to remain such a go-to resource. Once a social media platform loses critical mass, it’s easy to enter a death spiral.




  • The blackout was to show numbers- it was not a small minority of users that cared, but rather a significant majority. Pissing off most of your users, especially your most active users, is generally a bad business move.

    The real question is what people will do on July 1. Will those same users cave and switch to the official app? Reddit is counting on most users doing that, or at least enough to make it a profitable move. I personally will not.

    I will only see Reddit when it comes up from a Google search, and will not get involved in the conversations. Some of my communities are already permanently dead, and others severely weakened. But others are fine, since most users there are already on the official app.

    As the quality drops, more people leave, and fewer people join. Reddit could cease to be a central hub and become more niche. It could also turn into a cesspool. There are some signs that neo-nazis and otherwise shitty people will take over, not unlike we are seeing with Twitter. Or it could all blow over, and this was all just a bump in the road for Reddit.