A masterpiece of understatement. Is Lemmy often this witty?
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Musk is Musking: threatening to sue Meta over Threads.
- Will the world popcorn supply suffice?
- Is the cage match cancelled?
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That lawsuit smells of pounding the table. While I don’t doubt meta has hired ex-Twitter people[1], I’d be very surprised if they worked directly on this. I’m not actually sure what Twitter specific tech meta would want to steal, IG supports several times as many daily users than Twitter ever has, and dealing with text posts (and replies to them, etc) are what graphql was designed for.
[1] values of “don’t doubt” equal to “know at least one ex Twitter person at meta”.
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Yes - someone told their mums…
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I can’t help thinking of another historical example. In 1936 Werner Heisenberg was at risk of being purged for not being sufficiently Nazi, but Heisenberg’s mother talked to Himmler’s mother (they already knew each other) and Himmler told Heydrich to stop being an idiot…
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Trying to get courts to enforce no-compete agreements against staff who were fired in the early purges sounds hard.
I’ll bet Musk doesn’t know either.
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Lots of twitter’s people were in California, where non compete clauses are illegal contracts. But, even without a non-compete clause, the former employee does have obligations not to disclose proprietary information and possibly contact with clients.
All that said, the tech companies are all always poaching employees from each other, and they all have procedures and policies in place for this purpose. (The typical engineering empolyee at the FANGs has a tenure of about two years, and has worked at another one. that’s excluding new grads, but they move on after a couple years, often to another big tech firm.)
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Interesting summary of the letter here too (it’s from a UK lawyer so might not be accurate, but it’s mostly about “this phrase is legally really weak, you’ve got nothing”.) There’s lots of “We’ll enforce our rights” but nothing about actually suing, or when.
Are Facebook and Twitter appreciably different?
Aren’t they both “people post some stuff, and other people subscribe to that stuff”?
What are Facebook users going to get out of “Threads” that they don’t have already?
Different target audience, from my pov. Your normies and their dog goes to FB. The terminally online politics-obsessed grifter big-mouths have their terminally-online politics-obsessed audience on Twitter. Those people dont seem to go to FB. Either Twitter or Parler if you’re into Alt Right stuff (or is it Truth now? Whatever.)
I think Threads is meant to be “text Instagram”.
It’s not twitter or FB, its “an exciting new way to connect to the brands you love!” with influencers. (Although the public could come along and turn it into a chat site instead, who knows).
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Is that what Instagram is? It’s probably the one I’m least familiar with, never seems to intersect with anything I do online. (Facebook was “staying in touch” then “events”, Twitter started being embedded everywhere, TikTok likewise, Instagram I just never see anywhere.)
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how i see various services
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For me Facebook initially was “let’s see what people I know are up to”–I quit the moment the cost (aka my data) outweighed the (always dubious) benefit. Also my friends never turned up on facebook. My contacts were from school, distant family or colleagues. So leaving wasn’t really hard.
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I enjoyed Twitter for a while: first because hijacking hashtags with a small number of people was fun way back when German Twitter was tiny. The short format (I see the irony) was also fascinating. Then later, I liked following authors and politicians to stay on top of what they said directly vs just reading about what they said elsewhere. For a short while, it really felt like the global townsquare that people keep calling it. These days that is not a good thing. I have found a number of the authors I liked following on Mastodon and a number of my other follows have also moved so that’s great. Plus #boardgames is not bad at all on Mastodon
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Reddit was always just scrolling funny memes and occasionally reading some fascinating TIL, explainlikeiamfive or an AMA with someone interesting or some crazy long writeup by some expert from askhistorians or askscience and a bunch of links to obscure places (that usually got the reddit-hug-of-death). Or the occasional hivemind moment (like the recent beans craze on lemmy). Reddit was also a lot of politics but instead of politicians people were talking. Due to a lot of moderation it was the only platform where I found user comments largely readable. I am glad I got see this for a few years. A lot of that is now provided by lemmy–it has reached the necessary size (for me anyway) and has turned enough redditors into lemmings that quite a few of the reddit “traditions” have come along (mostly in the form of communities under similar names)
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Instagram is also the one I least used. I made an account for some photography challenge, followed a bunch of people, never completed the challenge and promptly never logged in again. Scrolling images is even more mindless than tweets or memes. I always felt that instagram was the one most filled with ads in one form or another (influencers IMO are just advertising through and through). The short time I was on there I felt like everyone was trying to monetize whatever they were doing. Meh.
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I have avoided Tiktok because I perceived it as another algorithmic surveillance tool from the start
PS: anyone remember google-plus? Yeah… I almost forgot about that one. (not to mention myspace, studivz (german fb clone), digg, livejournal and what not)
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I do. I held a grudge about it for ages, because google broke their search syntax in order to make the + character do a google+ thing. (They then changed double-quoting so that it also did what the + used to do, which meant it was no longer possible to double-quote without that behaviour, so the end result was objectively worse.) I’ve only used google’s search a handful of times in the past few years though, so it’s possible that they’ve fixed this since then.
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I find myself saying “I miss Livejournal” a LOT these days.
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i only used it a short time. so i am not missing it that much. but it reminds me…
for anyone with too much time: Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
Cat Valente got a bit angry there last Christmas. not quite new but I thought the essay might fit this thread. i just discovered it last night.
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Cat Valente was someone I met ON Livejournal (after reading her excellent “Palimpsest”) and other LJ folk include people who became real life friends, people who married each other because I introduced them (x2) and my future boss.
That essay blew me away when it came out, I agree with every word.
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Good read, thanks.
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It’s still there, although quite quiet. A lot of its users moved to Dreamwidth.
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What with the dodgy Russian firm that bought LJ, who immediately started censoring any mention of dangerous ideas like homosexuality… Dreamwidth is awkward (you can’t RSS-feed all comments on a blog) but seems to work.
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