Not saying you’re wrong. But perhaps changing the question might clarify.
Instead of. “Could they build a twitter”
Perhaps its
Do they think they could build a twitter better than anyone else (including current twitter, struggling tho it is)
Would building a Twitter give better financial returns than their other uses of capital and skilled labor?
Would a successful twitter clone offer synergies with their other products
Would a failed twitter damage their brand?
They already tried to create a social network called Google+ and it was a complete failure.
I don’t think anybody knows how to build a successful social networking site. Which ones succeed or fail seems pretty random. Zuck buys all his competition. Google seems to have given up trying.
Right, but ChrisV is talking specifically about the pool of people who might be willing to pay $8 for twitter - ie the terminally online.
The number of Twitter users who know who he is and don’t like him is enormous, though.
The people willing to pay are the trolls, so he should just charge people to get out of Twitter jail.
I’m not sure that it’s random but just kind of subject to finicky users that tend to age out of the app as it matures - plus the things users tend to like can change on a dime. look at how popular snapchat was, they had one goofy UI update and afaik they never recovered.
myspace got nuked by fb - i predicted a long long time ago that fb would become the new myspace. everyone laughed at me. now, tiktok is the juggernaut, and what they’ve figured out is just crushing everything right now. tiktok isnt just entertainment to its users, like, I’ve had some younger people tell me some extraordinarily stupid medical advice they followed and I asked where they saw that and they said tiktok. it’s like harry potter’s mirror of desire or whatever, it’s built to show you exactly what you want to see and it’s extraordinarily good at it. kids are using it like google now.
zuck’s big fuck up with facebook/ig was when they tried to tailor your feeds towards what zuck thought you wanted to see. I think a few years ago they realized it and IG’s random feed is becoming decent but tiktok’s experience is just so far and beyond a better one.
tiktok’s experience is also highly customizable, which I think its competitors don’t understand.
I am constantly amazed how good TikTok is at populating my feed with stuff I actually like.
Google failed hard with their Facebook imitator. I think they are nervous of the social media space outside of what they can do with video and YouTube (ie shorts to compete w tiktok). Google spaces was a whole failure.
I think there is only enough room for one of Facebook or Twitter type social media sites. Challenging the current king of the hill is very expensive and risky. Being the next Facebook would obviously be sweet but Twitter has been losing money.
The serious people who post on twitter will move over and then the people who want to follow them will move over - this is the “public service” aspect of twitter. Im talking about AOC tweets/etc
The political capital would be worth it for google/microsoft/apple and it seems simple enough.
it creeps me out. A hobby I have is polluting my feed algorithm’s data or whatever it uses. I answer wrong on surveys and some other tricks to confuse the hell out of google’s stuff, and facebook’s pretty confused as well, but tiktok’s spot on. like crazy good. they’re abusing the crap out of your data to do it and people better hope they’re trustworthy, but it’s like the borg, or like what facebook kinda is, it almost doesnt even matter if you use it or not, it already knows about you so people just assimilate because why not.
My friend’s kind of a china xenophobe and rails on tiktok and how the CCP seems to have a bit of a say in its ownership and when I told him a little what they do with data he freaked out, deleted everything, but within a month he was back using it. lol.
China’s ability to shape what users see on that is a bit concerning. The hilarious part is even if it’s full blown pro-chinese propaganda it’s still a better experience than anything else.
Yeah I don’t use a lot of other social media but I find the algorithm on tiktok to be amazing. If I could get that on twitter it would be awesome.
Instead I just get right wing woman wackos at the top of my feed every day.
For me, Twitter functions mainly as a replacement for an RSS reader.
dont wanna add a huge edit but at the risk of spreading misinfo i want to clarify that i don’t know how strong the evidence is that the ccp is involved anything with tiktok, but there’s been smoke. They’ve been forthcoming about the steps they’re taking for data privacy, but like, there’s probably pretty good reasons to raise an eyebrow at them. laws about data in china are very very specific. for instance, if your website deploys in china and you use aws guess what, no you’re not, you’re using aws but china’s aws, which is exactly like aws except it resides physically in china and the govt regulates it. you also must store chinese user data on chinese soil. stuff like that. like me as an american engineer even getting access to that stuff is tricky. it’s a weird dynamic online between china and the rest of the world at the moment.
i created a twitter once but did not use it because of all the shitty ads.
I still use RSS as my main feed but have always seen Twitter as a mini-rss - a really simple way for people to publish and/or subscribe. I have less than 100 rss feeds and probably follow ~30 properly.
I think my adblocker works on my desktop but not my phone. I use a browser for tabbed browsing.
