Honestly I don't fuck with social media that much besides my private Instagram, but there's more to it than just viral marketing. It's a pretty smooth app that appeals to people like my 18-25-ish age that feels like Twitter has gotten super weird and toxic. The honeymoon effect won't last forever, but it has something that a lot of social media users are looking for.
The real market is for brands, they can't stand the insanity on Twitter.
I think of Musk's idea of turning Twitter into a super app. Well, if I go into a business and somebody asks me to pay with Twitter that business is going to be associated with Musk, Twitter, and all that. If the business is selling anti-woke razor blades it might be a good fit, but an ordinary business just doesn't want to be associated with that. Contrast that to Visa, Mastercard, or American Express, all of which have worked hard to be associated with a positive image.
I can just imagine it, “spend $500/month with Twitter Pay and you get a green checkmark, promoting your tweets even above the already promoted blue checkmark tweeters”
Meta isn’t that stupid. Messing with the verification system is one of the blunders that put Twitter in the position where Threads could eat its lunch.
The problem with blue checkmark wasn’t that it was paid for verification. The problem was that there was no verification. You paid to be verified as anybody you’d like.
I’m no twitter owner, but to me the reasonable thing would be to put the name on the credit card on the account along with the checkmark.
That would scale for personal accounts, but not businesses. They could be charged extra and manually verified against national business registries.
The comparables on my mind are the EV (Extended Validation) SSL certificates and the Legal Entity Identifier, both of which involve a lookup against business records for a corporation/LLC and have a sustainable cost of around $100 year.
EV failed in the marketplace. “No LEI, No Trade” made a lot of companies get an LEI but last time I looked it was widespread for companies to keep using their LEI without renewing it.
Instagram offered the same system (pay for blue check) shortly after twitter. But yes, they didn't revoke anyone's existing tick or make it a prerequisite for future "notable" people.
The problem is, it’s made by Meta. I remember when Facebook was a place you went to get in touch with friends. That was a long time ago now - at some point they stopped showing the feed in chronological order and I thought it was the worst change. They just kept making it worse. Now, if I go look, most of my feed is just random “viral” content and ads.
Meta takes a thing you find useful and gradually tweaks it until it no longer does what you originally wanted it for. I don’t trust them to run a service .
This is correct but it's helpful to specify how much more toxic twitter has become than other platforms.
For example anti-LGBT sentiments are common on other platforms just like they are common in society. But on twitter people like Jake Shields literally call for the murder of therapists, doctors, and teachers who are supportive of LGBT teens. How did twitter respond? First they let the tweets get thousands of engagements. Then they removed the tweets without banning Shields. Finally they removed other people's tweets, archive links, and screenshots documenting Shields' hate speech. Jake Shields is still on twitter pushing toxic lies and disinfo.
TL;DR: Elon Musk's twitter protects people who want to murder doctors and teachers.
I think it was a very deliberate ploy by Musk to shift the political Overton window to way to the right.
Unfortunately for him & his backers, the political shenanigans and general incompetence left Twitter vulnerable, with users seemingly choosing to trust Meta over it, of all fucking companies. This will be case study in business school for years.
Threads is polished in a way that Mastodon isn't. I'm part of a few Japanese subcultures and most of them couldn't make heads or tails of the Fediverse despite the existence of Misskey. Threads though? They signed up through Instagram and were posting in minutes. I really want Meta to commit to federation, even if existing Mastodon communities defederate so that techie weirdos like us can live their dreams of running custom clients and interfacing with regular folks (like XMPP federation with GChat back in the day.)
Yeah, Twitter is super big in Japan for mainstream teen and young adult users in the 18-25 city student/young professional demographic. Same with Instagram. Mastodon adjacent stuff like Misskey, Pawoo, and Mstdn got the reputation for being for hosting weird, niche, or pretty much illegal content, and nobody really understands the point of Fediverse.
Also, mastodon just isn't easy like twitter/reddit/insta is. There's hurdles you have to get past. It's to the degree that, despite being the target demo for masto, I still haven't really gotten into it. Too many hoops. Even a flippin' bbs seems to make more sense at this point
A friend of mine tried mastodon on my recommendation. But he couldn't find a "login with facebook" button, which is how he assesses whether a website is trustworthy. Mastodon to him is "like a scam version of threads". You'd be surprised how prevalent this view is with normal non-hn crowd.
A good chunk of them did, and some of them stuck around. I've had an account going back to 2017, and my feed is far more active today than it was before Elon purchased the site.
Honestly its amazing that as many people went with mastodon as they did.
Ideologically motivated (i.e. "federated-first") open source projects never succeed in attracting mainstream users. They have to make too many compromises, and inevitably prioritize their motivation (federation) over what is necessary to attract the mainstream (e.g. excellent UX).
The fact that mastadon is doing as well as it is, is sign number 1 that the market is begging for something like threads to happen.
On Twitter and other centralized social media this is very easy to do. On Mastodon, it is not. I have to copy the URL, paste it into a text field on my instance, and then like it.
