Maybe the facts will bear out that there’s a case here, but my default position is one of skepticism.
I guess one takeaway for me is if you don’t want your competitor to hire a bunch of your former employees, don’t make a bunch of your employees former employees.
Or, you know, handle their termination with some care to honouring their contracts if you expect them to honour anything NDA / no compete for a while after...
I mean, isn't the post you replied to essentially the clean room approach? One person/group does the actual reverse engineering and writes up the spec doc, and then a totally separate person/group takes that spec doc and produces code to implement it.
I think that was maybe applicable back in the Gates & Wozniak days but not so sure that approach would be considered "clean" now.
It seems kind of ludicrous that one company can't look at another's product and create the same type of thing, just improved. That's how innovation works.
It's just that in this case, apart from a handful of differences, the core innovation of threads seems to be that Twitter has been taken over by an egotistical maniac and while Zuck is still a billionaire he seems wholly less concerned with tooting his own horn in public as Elon is.
I don't think Elon/Twitter has a leg to stand on, they don't own the concept of a public forum/social media platform, I'm sure that even the shortform that Twitter has enforced since its inception had been done long before.
The lawsuit claims that Meta hired ex-Twitter employees to build Threads, which seems to be both factually untrue and not illegal even if it were true. Are you shifting the goalposts to a different claim?
The likelihood of "stolen codebases and assets" is zero. Meta has an existing infrastructure that can handle 10x the traffic that Twitter has, and which is completely different than Twitter's stack.
As for the Threads app, that's a job any average web dev can have a rough prototype of in a day. The rest is iteration and refinement.
The entire mail is 100% BS. Also, there's no suit. There's a threat of a suit, which will likely not materialize as there's no chance of winning it.
I've written a twitter clone in PHP once, it's not hard. Throw in some Ajax to auto refresh, and you'd have something similar to what they have been using this whole time.
As an engineer this doesn’t pass even a cursory look. Entirely different brands, tech stacks, and the products just work differently. What can they possibly have taken.
I dislike Musk/Zuck as much as anyone, but I do believe that Meta can build a Twitter clone in 6 months on their infrastructure, and with their product folks.
You have to wonder about Elon Musk's "first principle" thinking if he lashes out in such basic ways that defy basic engineering intuition.
Twitter's source code is valuable to Twitter, much like Twitter's engineers and their institutional knowhow were valuable to Twitter (before Musk fired them by the thousands).
But outside Twitter, taking their code and assets and trying to awkwardly graft them onto Meta/Instagram's stacks would not only not help, but actually slow them down and cause the product's functionality and stability to suffer.
Twitter's layoffs represent pure loss to Twitter, and much less gain to anyone else. Trying to spin it as if the nature of Twitter's operation is some big valuable secret is such cringe coming from leadership that supposedly prides itself on being technical and hands-on.
Musk doesn't value people – this is apparent from all of his businesses, he doesn't care about work life balance, inclusive hiring, etc.
From this, it does follow that if you've got some secret-sauce at your company, and it's NOT your employees and their experience, then it must be something else. If you're Twitter, then it's probably The Algorithm, or code printed out onto reams of paper. After all, that's what makes the money right?
Except as is obvious to most companies, it's not. The people, the shared understanding, the experience, the company culture, and even the context of the world that the product is a part of – these are all far more important than the actual code, and where any long-term successful company focuses their efforts.
To put it in terms Musk might understand, product and engineering teams are "stage 0" for a software company, they are the machine that builds the machine.
Nah, they released a bunch of the piping that goes around an ML model, but that's very boilerplate stuff to anyone with python data science experience. It's like if you made calculators and "open sourced" one by releasing the code that reads keypresses and does CPU scheduling. Like yeah, those are things a calculator does but not only is it code everyone else in the business could expect to write themselves in a couple sprints but it's also exactly NOT the magic sauce.
I don't know the specifics, but the license included with that code will specify what can and can't be done with it. ~~Not all open source is free to use in your own code base. Sometimes it is open sourced for review purposes.~~
> Sometimes it is open sourced for review purposes.
Huh? I'm not aware that it's possible to open source something without, you know, making it OSS. Am I mistaken, or are we talking about two different meanings for "open source"?
Sorry, you are right. The issue I was thinking about is that there are different OSS licenses, and they have different requirements for use. Attribution and open sourcing any changes you make to the original code base are an examples.
The agreements for opening code up for review purposes only is indeed not OSS, despite the word 'open' often being used there.
I started off sound, then diverged. The part of Twitter that was open sourced will have a license spelling out what you need to do (if anything) in order to use the code. The review part is a different thing.
I assume OP was referring to “source available” schemes where the source is published or sometimes selectively disclosed but not licensed for anything other than review, ie you lack the right to run or copy it.
Needless to say, it’s not accurate to call that “open source”.
It also doesn't help that the basic functionality of Twitter can be duplicated in a weekend by a junior dev, and has been many times. What novel idea can be stolen from Twitter? Everyone already lifted the hashtag idea ~15 years ago.
It gives people a choice, if they want the more moderated experience they can go with threads, if they want a more free for all then Twitter. Competition is a good thing.
Stolen secrets is a weird one as Elon has said patents are for cowards and kept SpaceX tech out of patents for fear of nation-state actors stealing secrets.
He knows how to keep a secret from another countries' spies and then wants to also play legal hardball in murkey waters between Meta and Twitter?
It's the same attitude Steve Jobs had about former employees going to Google to make Chrome. What makes Jobs and Musk such effective CEOs is they're very possessive and vindicative.
Musk was an effective CEO for Tesla and SpaceX because he didn’t care that people thought he couldn’t succeed in doing what he was trying to do. Based on his personality, I suspect his success is in no small part due to those people saying he would fail. He’s a total failure as Twitter’s pretend not-CEO because he’s allowed his mind to be infected with culture war politics.
> Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets [...]
This sentence is clearly trying to establish liability by accusing Meta of wilful infringement of Twitter’s rights (i.e. it acted in full knowledge of these fact, even though they may lead to violation of the employees’ restrictive covenants, etc.), as evidenced by the context and indeed the rest of the letter.
As such, the first instance of “Twitter” is surely a mistake; shouldn’t it say “Meta”? This would make sense given the next sentence (“With that knowledge, Meta [...]”).
As this is supposedly from such a large law firm, I’m amazed a mistake like this could slip through; it completely changes the meaning of the entire sentence, even if the intent is recoverable from context.
Does no one proofread Letters before Action? Am I misreading it? Is this fake?
> Is it the same law firm that went with the 'offering to buy twitter and signing a purchase agreement was just a prank bro' defence?
Yes. He was represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP for the Twitter lawsuit[0]. The threat was written by a Quinn Emanuel partner.
> If you find yourself standing up in court making the prank bro argument, then I hope the amount of money you got was a fair price for your dignity.
I'm not sure whether he has equity, but the average profits per equity partner at Quinn Emanuel are $5.22 million[1].
The next sentence is “With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat Threads app.” This sentence doesn’t follow logically unless it was Meta who had the knowledge in the previous sentence.
I think it's supposed to be saying "With that knowledge, [we are claiming that] Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat Threads app."
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon insisted on more aggressive language and it was hastily edited.
Maybe, but in that case the writer should just state it as a fact rather that saying that their client knows something.
Whether Twitter knows that employees previously worked for Twitter (etc.) should not have any bearing on Meta’s liability; whether Meta knew this or not absolutely has an impact on liability.
The fact that the next sentence refers to Meta’s knowledge of the the facts in the preceding sentence seems to justify my reading.
> As such, the first instance of “Twitter” is surely a mistake; shouldn’t it say “Meta”? This would make sense given the next sentence (“With that knowledge, Meta [...]”).
No! I think they wrote it correctly. The wording is confusing definitely as it’s written in first object. They are trying to tell them (Meta) - they (Twitter) are aware that they are hired our ex employees.
I'm curious what exactly X is claiming Meta stole? The interface and interaction model is basically just social media best practices that have been evolved by numerous people and companies over the past 20-30 years. Seemingly nothing so complex that it needs to be stolen from another company. Barely any art assets. Dirt-simple interfaces.
Under-the-hood, I assume Meta was able to launch this quickly because it's largely built on existing tech.
Anyway, sounds petty and short-sighted. So. Totally on-brand!
I would imagine a majority of hours on this were product managers doing evaluation rather than engineers writing code. Even if those PMs came from Twitter I can't imagine their insights being particularly proprietary.
> accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees
I loathe Meta as much, if not more, than the next person.
However, if upon the events at twitter a little over 6 months ago, they decided then to build a competitor and the result of that decision is Threads ... I have to congratulate them on a job well done.
If they did what Twitter is claiming, then I applaud them even more.
Part of the tech labor market downturn has been driven by skepticism over the costs: if Twitter can slash its workforce and keep running just fine, why can’t other companies?
Well, Threads swooping in to rapidly drain Twitter’s market share might change that reasoning.
Yeah, unfortunately Musk has done so much incompetent stuff that it's not as easy to make the case that the Twitter implosion is due to the staff reduction rather than one of the twenty other boneheaded things that have happened. The narrative could totally settle on: "The massive staff cuts would have worked out just fine if he hadn't also taken on too much debt in the financing and scared off advertisers with his own personal tweeting and gotten rid of verification and started promoting the replies of paying customers and turned off non-logged-in access and search engine visibility." Personally I think it is all of the above.
I don't know--based on the behavior observed from the client-side in chrome devtools, twitter seemed to be DDos-ing itself with no exponential backoff and no jitter.
That seems like exactly the kind of problem I'd expect if I fired all the senior people.
Very clearly Twitter has not been able to run fine since firing so much of their workforce. The confusion here is because of 2 things:
1. Many people who were commenting on how this would adversely affect Twitter were doing it solely because they didn’t like Musk, as opposed to an understanding of how software development works. So these people were basically predicting that Twitter would stop working entirely in 2 weeks. But that’s not how software is developed. If it was, engineers would never be able to take a vacation and major web apps would all start failing on Jan 1.
Those who understood how software development worked recognized that what we would see instead is a slow decay in software quality where things would consistently become slightly worse. Also, we’d see a complete inability to change major functionality without causing problems. Finally, there might be a few big bang failures (eg the domain name expires, but no one with access to the domain is still hired by Twitter anymore) but those would be few and far in between and would take time to uncover (although it does appear Twitter has faced at least one such situation).
Twitter is indeed facing these situations.
2. The real threat to Twitter was always competition. In a competitive environment staying still is a death trap since your competitors will outpace you. There are a few reasons why Twitter has largely escaped this so far. (a) Twitter’s business is a fundamentally bad business model with a lot of hassles most businesses simply don’t want to deal with. (b) a misconception by many competitors that there was something fundamentally wrong with Twitter that needed to be addressed.
(b) is why Bluesky and Threads have been the most successful Twitter alternatives. They’ve basically been Twitter clones and are not trying to fundamentally change the model. Of course, Bluesky is now basically getting crushed by Meta’s resources and existing user base, but they were fundamentally ok the right track and could have been competitive if they were able to reach technical parity earlier.
Reddit's CEO stated that what Elon did to Twitter was a model he'd like Reddit to follow.
Although Reddit's changes are fresh, it has declined both in quality and esteem from copying this business style. I expect further decline if they follow this road.
As for the companies that aren't following Elon's lead: they are flourishing. We have enough data points now to say it authoritatively.
Slash and burn is not effective, smart or conducive to the desired results.
In Musk’s defense, I think there is something to the idea that most tech companies were a little too bloated. Especially with the hiring during the pandemic based on unrealistic valuations and future expectations.
But this is another area where Zuck beat Musk because Meta addressed this issue in a much more sensible way which involved considered changes in workforce as opposed to Musk’s impetuous unthought through slash and burn style.
I think they were bloated a bit, but that was mostly staffing for red herring projects and extra management layers.
The bloat was a mismanagement problem "solved" by cutting everything but management. That plus a bit of over-hiring from covid and cheap money. But that's also a management issue.
Are there really more than a few hundred people working on Threads?
I believe Twitter had ~7,500 at its peak. Even if Threads succeeds, its not going to be because they have meaningfully more employees. Cloning twitter is a fairly easy technical problem nowadays... in contrast to early 2010s era of no-cloud, poor infra management and so on
Most of those 7500 were not engineers. They were moderators, sales, support, HR, etc
The moderation, whatever people personally think of it now, has certainly suffered from an advertiser perspective, which is why they left. It was a mistake to fire many of them.
The sales people with relationships to advertisers left, and so again did many advertisers.
It's apparently impossible to get your account reinstated if you were banned, because there is no more support.
People had pay issues due to lack of HR and also lost benefits, so they left.
On top of that, almost all the features they shipped were in the works before the company was bought, so they didn't really ship anything. Stability was worse and users left. They are flocking to Threads because it's stable. Remaining devs continued to trickle away as the work environment became intolerable.
Basically every aspect of his experiment was a failure. I'm sure Twitter could have cut 10-15% and been okay but what Musk did absolutely did not work. All those things managers talk about, those reasons to treat your people well: cratering morale after layoffs, increasing attrition, dead sea effect, loss of institutional knowledge, it's all true, and just what everyone expected.
The only thing to learn from Twitter's fall is that they were right. Great experiment I guess? Really validated some things we had all seen small scale or intuited.
Twitter layoffs will have only "failed" due to creating a cultural divide and driving people to other services. Not due to the mechanical aspect of them
Twitter laid off 80-90% of their people and the app functions the same. No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased. Even if the features were in the pipeline already, none of them appeared over the 5-6 years preceding the acquisition. Highly coincidental, to the point of being suspect.
Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons, not because of moderation. The individuals behind advertising at many large corporations simply didn't want to help Elon. Would you want to give money to somebody you hated, and who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles? This part is obvious to any objective observer.
It's clear at this point that net added value per Twitter employee was low or even negative for many. If a company can layoff 90% of the developers and have no material change in availability or development velocity, then it's really inarguable otherwise
> Advertisers left due to taking sides on will of the moment cultural reasons
> who loudly vocalized things that went strongly against your principles?
I mean, you're talking about moderation. It's always going to be based on where the culture is at the moment. 70 years ago, nobody cared about misogynistic ads, now they've fallen out of fashion. People don't want to advertise on a site flooded with posts that go against the values of their customers. You simply can't have it both ways, Elon's preferred kind of speech and having advertisers.
> No material downtime in the year or so since the acquisition and feature velocity has only increased.
The downtime and strangeness has definitely increased. And the features aren't good! Blue was not good. It existed as a paid feature with edit capability. He added boosting for Blue and removed verification, and he fired all the product people who told him it was a terrible idea to convert to pay to win comments. They lost users, saw hate comments float to the top under ads etc. etc. Nobody wanted massive walls of text on Twitter, that's what made it different. Brevity is the soul of wit. And they put up a login wall because of scraping? It's a public site, you just have to live with that. If you're getting slammed, the solution is to increase your server availability, not take eyeballs of your content.
> If a company can layoff 90% of the developers
It wasn't 90% of developers. It wasn't even 90% of the company, if they really went from 7500 to 2000, which was the last count. Most of the layoffs/firing/quits were outside of development, in moderation, sales etc.
And after all this, their traffic has massively declined, and ad sales are down 60% YoY. It is absolutely spiraling. It is unreal how it can be seen as anything but.
It's not really possible to say how many people are "working on" Threads, I bet. Threads is using Meta infrastructure. Should all those employees count towards Threads employees? How about HR? Legal? Internal tools? Building staff? Security? etc etc.
I'm not particularly interested in Twitter itself, I just disagree that many of the products we use today require a large number of developers.
Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now. That trend will only continue. OpenAI only had ~100 employees at one point.
You don't need 100s of operations people if you move from on-prem to serverless, for example. Today, social media requires the most people in content moderation/support, rather than development. Tomorrow those people are likely to be supplanted by LLMs or similar more tailored AI moderation models.
Many products that required 1000s of people 10 years ago, may only require 100s today. To me this is just a fact
I see it as four categories, from least employees to most:
1. Desperately trying to make short term cash, and are trying to do their best with fewer employees than needed to maintain the current product. (Twitter is here).
2. Enough staff to maintain the current product, but not significantly innovate.
3. Significantly more than needed to maintain the current product, leaving room for people to work on non-core products that may end up being the next billion dollar project, even if the vast majority flop (Most big tech companies are here).
4. Way too bloated, with not enough projects to work on or not enough revenue to justify the R&D.
The problem is that outsiders have a really really hard time understanding the product complexity of half a billion+ user services.
Comparing OpenAI to the social media sites that this HN post is talking about is a great example. It's a completely different product with completely different challenges than FB, twitter, threads, youtube, whatever.
Another great example is people citing "day in the life" videos that are actually recruiting videos showing the brighter sides of the job. Or people citing employees who claim that the company hired them to do nothing, when in reality it's a recruiter that was hired shortly before hiring slowed.
Do you agree or disagree that techproducts today are easier to build than 15 years ago?
Everything else is irrelevant. Technology drives abstractions which drive deflation by allowing fewer people to produce more goods. This has been proven and observed for thousands of years
Companies can thrive while overemploying people, but eventually they get undercut by one that doesn't
1. "Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now."
Correct. It's easier now to build apps that we used 10-15 years ago.
2. "Do you agree or disagree that techproducts today are easier to build than 15 years ago?"
Incorrect. Tech product complexity has increased in many ways in the last 15 years (and the increase in complexity is larger than the decrease in complexity we talked about above).
-- Regulation. COPPA regulations strengthened significantly around 10 years ago. Europe's GDPR went into effect in like 2016. Those are just a couple popular ones. Remember when Amazon just didn't collect sales tax? Sure makes things easier! And remember, those laws are constantly changing. If NJ raises their sales tax, you better have someone paying attention. If Europe comes up with a new privacy law, you better have enough people to drop everything and implement everything that's needed.
-- Scale + globalization. Myspace topped out at like 100 million active users around 15 years ago. Facebook is 30 times that size now! That scale comes with complexities most don't think about. How do you report user video ad income to the IRS-equivalent in Andorra? I don't know, but you now need to know at Facebook's scale!
I'm automating network engineering. We still hire network engineers, and while scale/regulations are big reasons why, do not forget security.
This can trigger entirety new projects. Some industries still transfer their driver updates in sealed, marked usb sticks to their clients. A lot of companies invested in IOT in the past 5 years, and just recently decided they wanted all their connected stuff to go through specific Cisco routers. Security is my SWE job security.
Is there a giant difference in complexity between 100 million MAU and 3 billion MAU? It seems like "being present in Andorra" has the complexity, not the order of magnitude more users.
That said, being present in Andorra is probably necessary to get to 3 billion MAU but not 100 million MAU.
> That said, being present in Andorra is probably necessary to get to 3 billion MAU but not 100 million MAU.
Exactly. You know those undersea cables that Google laid? Or Facebook's controversial "Free Basic" internet program in India?
At a certain point you start to run out of people, and need to go to great lengths to get more people on the internet and using your services. And then you need to start a financial relationship with those people.
An equally complex product is drastically easier to build now than it was 15 years ago, but expectations since then have risen even more drastically. A product that is competitive in the market is generally harder to build now.
> I just disagree that many of the products we use today require a large number of developers.
In a non competitive world this might be true (although I have my doubts). In a competitive free market world it isn’t because a competitor can then beat you by hiring more developers and delivering more features faster than you could.
> Its easy to find many examples of apps that were challenging to build even just 10 years ago, that are somewhat trivial now.
The consequence of this isn’t that people continue using those tiny apps. The consequence is that people’s expectations increase dramatically. There was a time Evernote was a Unicorn. Today, even though building a product like Evernote would still be fairly challenging, it’s considered a feature.
> You don't need 100s of operations people if you move from on-prem to serverless,
I have not yet, in practice, seen overall spend go down by moving to serverless. You may have fewer ops people, but you now need more devs to achieve the same work because a lot of ops has been shifted to devs. That being said, I’ve often seen serverless not even lead to a reduction in ops.
> Many products that required 1000s of people 10 years ago, may only require 100s today. To me this is just a fact
This does not come close to matching reality. In the late 90s early 2000s you and a handful of other devs could build a multimillion dollar product using Visual Basic which only ran on Windows and was distributed as a binary to be run by your clients and it would be a best in class product.
Today, you would need a designer, web developers, and someone with experience in pushing it to production and securing it to simply build an MVP version that ran on browsers. In addition you would need another set of iOS developers and another set of Android developers. Heck, you may even need an Apple Watch and iPad app to be competitive. All of this would probably be required to simply make your app competitive, never mind best in class.
What your comment appears to be missing is that with software development becoming easier, what changes most is an increase in customer expectations.
At a certain scale you start to break many things that you're used to abstract away into a neat little box. This can be anything, from kernel, libraries, network stacks to anything running in the cloud.
"Serverless" is not really an option at a certain scale. It's likely too expensive, but especially a giant risk if you abstract away something that can fail in an interesting way.
I remember we once managed to break the AWS ELB in one AZ and had a nice little call with a dev from Seattle. Another time we managed to saturate EC2 in a zone at a certain time.
You will need people who can dig into this. If you're at Twitter scale you'll probably want whole teams digging into aspects that you take for granted.
In addition to the other points made by others about sharing staff...
At their respective peaks Meta had around 12x the staff of peak Twitter despite not having 10x the user base (that said Meta towers heavily over Twitter in users and monthly accesses.)
Even today Meta still has more than 10x the staff of peak Twitter.
If anything you're highlighting that at ~7,500 staff Twitter was probably too thinly run.
This is not a move that a company makes from a position of strength. I like Musk and frequently defend his decisions, and there's no love lost between me and Meta. But Musks's trigger happy litigiousness is pathetic. His obsession with scrapers scraping public content is extremely cringe and betrays his fundamental misalignment with the open web. The fact that Zuck is planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub (presumably) is hilarious, especially considering that Musk originally promised to "turn the platform into “something new that’s decentralized.”" [0]).
There was a time when Facebook almost became decentralized, long long ago. It is promising to see this line of thought repeat with Threads. My only hesitancy is how the product will evolve, but the saying always goes “you don’t mess with the Zuck”.
Indeed, money trumps idealism perhaps. Or idealism trumps money. Given his actions negative effect on Tesla it truly seems like he doesn't care about money, perhaps he just sees Threads as a dangerous woke competitor to Twitter.
It's decades old tactic from Musk. One of the things he's really great at is SEO. He is trying to shift narrative from Threads hyper growth to whatever random lawsuit he's threatening them with.
Bingo. Any story involving the name Musk and Twitter is better than a story involving JUST Threads.
NOT to get too political - but - people like Musk and Trump and their ilk are just the natural progression of the PR focused United States culture. Spin and story are just as good as skill and intelligence. Being able to control a narrative is a superpower that leads to massive connections, wealth, and power.
This is what we asked for when we invented PR and advertising. We're reaping what we sow and nobody wants to eat the harvest.
It's clearly a text-forward port of Instagram. Using any Twitter "trade secrets" would probably be counterproductive. So unless Twitter is claiming that Instagram stole trade secrets (ha), this seems like desperate litigating.
> 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.”
> He also alleged that Meta assigned those employees to develop “Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees’ ongoing obligations to Twitter.”
Isn’t the burden here on Twitter enormous? And given META’s size, a discovery would be enormous and require serious legal effort and money on Elon’s behalf, legal effort that would be better appropriated in dealing with legal issues in EU?
I wouldn’t be surprised if part of Zuck’s goal with the Spider-Man meme was to prod Elon directly into this lawsuit which will surely go nowhere, cost pocket change to Meta, and push Twitter that much closer to bankruptcy.
I don’t care much for either of these guys but you gotta love seeing a guy’s own toxic personality traits used against him.
Looks like Zuck’s jiu jitsu training is paying off after all!
I think that the Elon/Zucc fight thing makes them both look ridiculous and childish and I've been enjoying that aspect of it (it doesn't matter even a little who wins, they both lose). This lawsuit strikes me the same way.
I'm looking forward to one (or both) getting - in order of preference: a black eye, knocked out teeth, KO'd, loss consciousness and/or loss of bowel control. The hero-worshipping of billionaires is harmful IMO, having that rolled back a little will do us all some good. Besides, seeing any billionaire hit so hard he shits himself live is great TV.
> I'm looking forward to one (or both) getting - in order of preference: a black eye, knocked out teeth, KO'd, loss consciousness and/or loss of bowel control.
That’s a pretty good list, but I’d add “meteor strike” to the end of it.
Wow you're right. I somehow skipped right over that. I even read it again to make sure I had the context right. I wasn't sure if his mom had literally said "don't do that!" or just inferred it in a tweet like she actually did ("I can't like this")..
I doubt this hold water, part because commentary that Mera doesn’t even have any ex-Twitter employees on this project, but especially because it’s a reactive lawsuit following the launch and the news it has been a big success.
If Twitter knew what Meta was doing, surely they could have shut this down right away?
Whose responsibility is it to prove these claims? Do our courts put the burden on the accuser or the accused to prove these? I hope Twitter has to spend the money upfront and come up with proof rather than just filing a frivolous lawsuit and making the other party spend.
In a civil case, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff. The plaintiff doesn't have to prove their case entirely, they only have to convince the judge (or jury) that the claim is "more likely than not" to be true. This is a lower level of proof than in a criminal case, where the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt".
Letters like this aren't delivered under oath and don't cost much. They can blather as much as they want and try to re-frame the story from "Elon Musk destroyed Twitter" to "Elon Musk was rescuing Twitter until Zucc hired traitorous IP thieves and they destroyed Twitter."
My completely uninformed opinion is Zuck looks kinda ripped. Even though Musk is heavier and taller, I think Zuck could take him. But Newsweek, that bastion of factual reporting on objective reality, says London bookies are giving Musk better odds:
Depends who buys the better steroids/drug cocktails. I hope that by some miracle of money and medical malpractice they both come out looking like the hulk and bane from batman.
I can't find the video I wanted to. It was a breakdown of some big guy who didn't know how to fight go up against someone much smaller but knew some boxing. The little guy backs up, moving laterally away from the big guy's primary hand. After the big guy throws a punch and gets himself off balance, the little guy knocks him out with one good punch to the jaw. Lights out.
True, I think if they fought today Zuck would win. However, given enough training, Musk can close the gap. If he trained hard and they fought a year from now I'd put money on Musk, hands down.
I think the important bit is that it's relatively hard to argue that "how to scale up message passing infrastructure and process metadata like hashtags" is a Twitter trade secret rather than a general tech skillset useful across FAANG companies. I suspect Meta's implementation will be quite different from Twitter's under the hood, and rely quite a lot on Meta tech platforms.
If Meta was incubating a rocket ship division, it might be a little bit easier to demonstrate that former SpaceX employees were making non-obvious design choices based on SpaceX research and undisclosed features of SpaceX tech
Probably won't help that a lot of the more Twitter-specific knowledge around content recommendations and warning algorithms and scaling up moderation processes is stuff Elon's spent his time trashing Twitter's original implementations of anyway...
One could imagine, that Instagram, on which they based it on and apparently reused most of the backend dealt with some of those problems before. And I've heard that Meta had some other social networks that scaled in the past.
Instagram has a much higher MAU so meta can argue they know how to make and retain audience. Twitter will have to prove actual secrets were stolen and that's going to be a tough sell I feel
Musk is such an idiot ... i was excited for him to buy Twitter and hopefully provide more of a balance of opinions but its all about him. He's like Trump .. a narcissitic ego maniac and suing FB for launching a Twitter competitor is more proof that he's just like Trump ... a whiney ego maniac sue happy multi-billionaire.
I mean if you dig it up, the guys controversies and shenanigans go back decades and most of it is preserved online.
The Twitter purchase wasn't anything other than a blunder either. When he realised what he got himself into he wanted to nope out of it but this time that didn't work. Going back and seeing how badly he wanted to be a "co-founder" of Tesla even though he wasn't tells you all about his ego.
Whether or not Threads is a success, the fact remains that it wouldn’t exist if Musk hadn’t strongly signalled he was ceding Twitter’s market position.
That’s the kind of unforced error you can’t sue your way out of.
The first page of search results for "Very truly yours" includes a forum thread asking why lawyers sign letters that way, so apparently it's just a standard form.
I used to be able to talk friends on AIM, Yahoo, and Messenger all through Pidgin too.
"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.'"
It's kinda funny how Bush's fans back then tried to justify this, saying he was self-aware enough to dodge saying 'Shame on me' on tape. They thought he was trying to avoid giving his opponents some campaign ad material.
Given the one being defended, I'm not so sure.
Meta mentioned ActivityPub/Fediverse support but I'll believe it when I see it.
Maybe it's the cynic in me but I think Meta will just implement a tiny portion of the spec that benefits them (importing posts from Mastodon?) and then stall there.
I mean, while I'm no fan of Facebook, it appears to be a lot less of a locked garden than Twitter. You can view full threads on the web (you can't do that with Twitter anymore, without logging in), and they are apparently going to support ActivityPub (though I suspect in practice a lot of Mastodon and other ActivityPub instances will defederate; I can't imagine that Facebook's moderation will be adequate).
It's mostly smaller ones which have pre-emptively promised to defederate; a lot of the big ones are taking a wait and see approach. Though it's hard to imagine that Facebook's moderation will be adequate, and I expect a lot of those will defederate once the crypto spam starts coming through.
The following is a copy and paste of OCR of the pdf. There may be some transcription/OCR errors in the following text.
---
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg:
I write on behalf of X Corp., as successor in interest to Twitter, Inc. ("Twitter"). Based on recent reports regarding your recently launched "Threads" app, Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms ("Meta") has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property.
Over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former Twitter employees. Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter; that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information; that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter; and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices. With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta's copycat "Threads" app with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta's competing app, in violation of both state and federal law as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter.
Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information. Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.
Further, Meta is expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter's followers or following data. As set forth in Twitter's Terms of Service, crawling any Twitter services - including, but not limited to, any Twitter websites, SMS, APIs, email notifications, applications, buttons, widgets, ads, and commerce services - is permissible only "if done in accordance with the provisions of the robots.txt file" available at https://twitter.com/robots.txt. The robots.txt file specifically disallows crawling of Twitter's followers or following data. Scraping any Twitter services is expressly prohibited for any reason without Twitter's prior consent. Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seck both civil remedies or injunctive relief without further notice.
Please consider this letter a formal notice that Meta must preserve any documents that could be relevant to a dispute between Twitter. Meta, and/or former Twitter employees who now work for Meta. That includes, but is not limited to, all documents related to the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding of these former Twitter employees, the development of Meta's competing Threads app, and any communications between these former Twitter employees and any agent, representative, or employee or Meta.
If ANYONE other than Meta was behind threads.net, I would consider your theory.
But this is Meta, millions of people will join regardless. The content will generate itself. There is no need for bootstrapping with stolen content, nor any insight to gain from analyzing twitter's content patterns.
And if they were faced with a slow start, a tiny banner on instagram or facebook would convert hundreds of millions of users in a matter of days.
Totally... the only thing I can be convinced of is my Twitter social graph looks quite different from my Instagram and Facebook graphs. The letter explicitly calls out follower graph and following data which is the only reason why I would even entertain this as a even remotely plausible theory.
There’s zero seeded content in threads and it would be stupid of meta to do so. They just needed to pay some influencers to get higher quality content cheaper then scraping it all.
I disagree... follower graph would be pretty important to bootstrap a Twitter like experience. My follower graph on Twitter looks quite different than Instagram or Facebook. The letter also explicitly calls out follower graph and following data which is why I mention it.
I'd estimate less than 25% overlap between my social graph on Twitter and Meta so building a account recommendation system based on my graph from Twitter would be mighty useful. Again this was a just a thought experiment based on two temporally related events and specific wording in a letter nothing more. Of course its on them to prove it.
What use is a follower graph if it doesn't correlate to the accounts on your platform? They have pushed this claim without evidence and Meta has denied them outright. The onus is on Musk's team to produce proof now.
I'm not sure I follow. I'd estimate there's less than a 25% overlap between my Twitter social graph and my Meta (instagram + facebook) social graph. If I was going to build a system to recommend accounts to follow it sure would be handy to know what accounts you followed on the platform most related to the one I'm building. Again I have 0 evidence of anything as I've said and of course its on Musk's team to prove it but just thought the timing and specific wording chosen in the letter was interesting.
> What use is a follower graph if it doesn't correlate to the accounts on your platform?
Is asking about the point of scraping your Twitter social graph if they can’t actually align it with accounts on the platform. If you follow foo bar on Twitter, it doesn’t mean that foo bar on threads is the same foo bar. The Twitter social graph is useless unless to try to map to meta accounts.
I would venture to guess that 80%+ of the handles are the same on both, enough for the graph to be useful especially for the more popular accounts. If not I bet there’s enough other metadata to do a decent job of mapping them it doesn’t have to be perfect just good enough to get the recommendation engine going. At least enough to bootstrap a recommendation algorithm that is geared more toward primary accounts that create text based content.
Who cares about your guess? You're just doubling down on your previous faulty argument, and anyone would know that there is not a 1:1 between handles on Instagram and Twitter
Meta already has a massive follower graph from using Instagram for signin.
When I logged in to Threads, it added my entire follower list of hundreds from Instagram.
Also, Instagram already links Instagram accounts with Facebook accounts for the majority of users so they graph is even bigger than that (with Facebook friends).
I'm not arguing that... I'm saying that my follower graph for facebook (mostly family) and instagram (mostly friends and diy etc) looks very different than my Twitter graph because the use cases are very different. I would say there is less than 25% overlap between my Twitter social graph and my Meta social graph. If I was bootstrapping a platform like Twitter it would be nice to be able to recommend accounts to follow based on a similar platform (Twitter). Again I have no evidence of anything here... it was literally just two temporally related events that seemed interesting.
100% I think this is the most likely case. I just noticed a couple things, explicit follower graph/following data called out in the letter and the timing and abruptness of the rate limiting change that made me think there's a chance there's more going on behind the scenes. Total conjecture of course but thought the two data points were interesting.
I guess one takeaway for me is if you don’t want your competitor to hire a bunch of your former employees, don’t make a bunch of your employees former employees.