[evanextreme]

the problem is that said "new platform" is doomed to fail, just as every free speech twitter competitor before it (gab, parler, truth, etc). this is an idea thats been attempted numerous times but doesnt succeed because no one wants a platform where they can be harassed. so im not inclined to believe that the share price of twitter will fall once he makes a competitor, because if free speech was truly a differentiator (versus decentralization / federation e.g. mastodon), then these other networks would have actually seen continuous use, but at the end of the day everyone still uses twitter

[memish]

Even just him announcing a new platform would scare twitter investors. If successful it'd drive twitter even further down.

Paul Graham thinks he would be able to compete:

"It is obvious. It's also obvious that Elon could draw an initial set of users that was more than big enough to have sufficient network effects on day 1."

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1507782349924274180

"I'd try it the first day. Wouldn't you? Sum that pattern across Twitter, and you've got quite a lot of users on day 1."

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1507855287130243085

"You don't need to get everyone to switch right away. All you need, to start with, is a critical mass of users — enough so that people don't feel they're talking to a void. You'd very likely have that from the start. Then it grows."

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1507855750680428545

[ChicagoDave]

I doubt Musk has the patience for building or owning a graph based technology business. The complexities of Twitter’s architecture are not trivial and a huge reason it’s not been successfully disrupted.

The other big reason is balancing the greater good vs unrestricted access, which has taken years to accommodate.

Musk is just an ego-centric billionaire with a lot of money and an unproven belief that Twitter could be better with his proposed changes. I’d bet he’s thoroughly aware that those changes could destroy the platform.

I believe the offer is rejected and the other top ten shareholders (all hedge funds) buy up anything he dumps and the price remains stable.

[chemmail]

Twitter is complex. But not nearly as complex a building a mass produced EV, charging and servicing infrastructure and space company. You have a bug in twitter? Easy try something new. Bug in either of the others? People DIE. Twitter will barely be remembered next to MY___________ in a few years. It's blank for a reason.

[evanextreme]

I'd argue Twitter is just as complex, because Twitter's product is its users and the content they create, where the others are governed by the laws of physics and making a good car (i have one, they're good!). What you have is a bunch of engineers on twitter going "ah yes, its just a social network feed! I wrote that in CS244 as my class project. how hard could it be", forgetting that twitter is an international network with tens of thousands of hyper targeted communities that feed off each other, diplomats that negotiate with governments and communities, etc. Not to say that this is impossible for anyone else to make, but it's a lot harder than just launching a site with your hundred engineers. i'd recommend reading platformer.news for a good

[chillwaves]

Apples to oranges. The fanboyism is not helpful.

[memish]

Tesla and SpaceX are as complex as it gets, orders of magnitude beyond Twitter.

Paul Graham on building a new Twitter: "A decent team could reverse engineer a version 1 in a month."

[ChicagoDave]

This is laughable. Social graphs are not trivial. It may not be as complex as landing a rocket booster on a platform, but it’s definitely as complex as monitoring a car.

[kfrzcode]

OK but SpaceX and Tesla and are all significant software shops in their own right.

[aceon48]

It’s not been successfully disrupted because a disrupter came and went viral, and AWS literally deleted their servers as they were becoming the most downloaded app

[ChicagoDave]

Are you talking about Parler and the overt fascism and racist postings?

No global corporation will allow that in their midst. You’re a fool if you think there is any long term viability to those psychotic beliefs.

[KerrAvon]

It will tank the price because other people will sell if he does. I don't know if his threat is strictly illegal, but the feds have to reign in some of this behavior sooner or later or all of the Musk day-trader fanboys will think they too can get away with it. A few people can't, but the SEC can't deal with thousands of Musk's fanboys skirting the law.

[doopy1]

How is it skirting the law to trade based on what he publicly says?

[ChicagoDave]

88% of Twitter is owned by institutional investors. They will instantly protect the stock price.

[majormajor]

> "It is obvious. It's also obvious that Elon could draw an initial set of users that was more than big enough to have sufficient network effects on day 1."

This would be "obvious" about Trump, too, no?

Perhaps your claim is that Musk would have a better chance of making something that scales and can accept all those users from day 1, but then that's also a much more expensive bet for Musk to make with higher up-front pre-launch cost.

[skinnymuch]

Musk wouldn’t do such a blunder launching it. Truth Social with a sizeable war chest, took Mastadon (while [still] lying about it) with many months if not over a year to get it ready.

Being able to launch a product with more than enough resources is almost intertwined with drawing in users. Truth Social never had the bare minimum expectations. Something that is not given to most people since most aren’t abnormally focused on grifting and so on for such a big venture.

[ocdtrekkie]

Another critical failure of Truth: Trump wasn't posting on it. Trump can't carry a platform he himself couldn't bother to use. Truth might've survived launch on that core difference alone, and an Elon-backed service might work if Elon himself actually uses it.

[skinnymuch]

That is wildly baffling. Not only Trump not using it, but does that mean the dozens upon dozens of popular figures around him who his fans also like, are mostly not using it either?

The SPAC stock is still holding strong snd it self making no sense day to day. It went up 7%+ on news Fox joined two weeks ago. The next day when this was found to be false. It didn’t even drop 1-2%.

Truth will fail no doubt. However all the SPAC, other investing and political insiders and the Trump family themselves still have a realistic shot of cashing out pretty well. Nothing close to if it was competently rolled out, but tens of millions to hundreds of millions going to many diff insiders is still a ton. Trump’s cash out should still be huge and would probably give him his largest cash stock pile ever (before it goes to pay debts off)

[ocdtrekkie]

Indeed, this will fall into the long history of Trump branded failures. The thing is it would be so difficult for him to avoid. The only "thing that doesn't scale" he'd have to do is talk on it for a while. How many of his followers would flock there if there was a non-zero chance to actually talk to him.

[bastardoperator]

I'd argue Trump has more immediate, impressionable supporters than Elon and his twitter like platform is a complete bust. I'd also argue people don't switch, they add. Rarely is someone popular on a single media platform, they tend to use to all of the vertices to engage. There would have to be a value proposition, one that persuades users, the name Elon in my opinion isn't a large enough selling point on it's own.

[memish]

"Trump's fan base are not tech bellwethers, to put it mildly. Elon's are."

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1507791725410070528

[bastardoperator]

I don't think Elon's fan base are any more capable or driven. I would argue Trump is vastly more popular on social media than Elon and that Trump supporters are at the very least motivated for reasons outside of billionaire worship and straight trolling.

[skinnymuch]

Billionaire worship/trolling vs Blindly following regardless of the amt of double speak, hypocrisy, blindly rejecting things because they are not on your side and following things that go against your best interests + billionaire worship + allowing the amount of grifting that occurs...

The motivation may be different. Is it any better? Or change anything for the better in terms of social media success?

Trump’s popularity may be larger, but it’s also more isolated and siloed. The total possible user base for a social network of almost any billionaire will be larger than Trump’s. Not that most would ever get close to reaching that amount or getting numbers more than Trump. Just that the addressable market is bigger.

[chillwaves]

you are arguing that signing up for twitter (or the equivalent) is some kind of significant barrier to entry?

[skrbjc]

Trump was also kicked off of twitter while being excoriated in the media and then took, what, two years to launch something?

Musk is not nearly as trashed in the media and could leverage promoting an alternative while still on twitter. Obviously there does need to be something that is at least reasonably differentiating from twitter, and I think that is the real challenge as just saying it is twitter but more free is not as tangible.

[shrimpx]

I think Paul Graham overestimates Musk’s social media influence. He’s powerful on Twitter in large part due to Twitter. Same with Trump, btw. If it were so easy for Musk to recreate the network, why spend 43B on some infrastructure? Musk knows he’s muzzled outside of Twitter.

[sgjohnson]

> why spend 43B on some infrastructure?

Because he's not spending $43bn on some infrastructure, but for the >200mn daily users. That's $210 for every user.

[swores]

That's the point being made rhetorically by the person you replied to, fyi.

[giarc]

Would that not have been true about Truth Social? They would have had enough users on day 1 to get network effects, but it hasn't happened. You could blame technical issues, but as I understand, Trump isn't even on the platform and neither is Fox News. So why would a Musk Twitter clone work any better?

[tekknik]

Truth Social still has a waitlist. They failed to attract the critical mass of users in day 1

[semi-extrinsic]

If this is true, why isn't Clubhouse a resounding success?

[themanmaran]

It's functionally quite different. And requires a higher level of effort to engage with the content.

[behnamoh]

elitist marketing bs based on invitations that didn't work and ultimately attracted wannabe narcists to boost their ego

[swores]

Clearly that's not the only reason or gmail would have been a flop too. I actually think that marketing choice was the only reason they got as much initial traction as they did, without it I think most of HN would never have heard of Clubhouse, rather than that it would have been more successful.

[evanextreme]

If the former president of the United States with a distortion field around his politics and the largest cable news network backing his every word couldn't succeed in launching a platform, I doubt Elon can. Unlike Elon, Trump has constantly blasted news networks and tech companies in the U.S. as being fake and run by lefties, to the point where his entire base believes it, and even that wasn't enough to migrate them off of twitter, because again, network effects. Twitter benefits by having everyone on it, and with no one to yell at Trump's audience is left to talk to themselves, which is boring.

Additionally, with all due respect to Paul, his logic here is absurd. "I'd be interested so that means everyone must be" is the wrong line of thinking for a product launch like this. Everyone is _interested_ in something the first day, but whether or not that's enough to build on is another matter. So many social networks had massive first day signups. I was "interested" in Byte on the first day. I signed up, posted a few bytes, and stopped using the app after a week. Parler, Gab, Truth, had "interest" too. The problem is that critical mass of users he describes are all just talking to themselves in their insular group (elon fans) just as the right-wing networks had their conspiracy theorists etc. It's enough to have users, but its not enough to promote long term growth. I know it's not something _i'd_ be interested in, which refutes his point because its purely anecdotal.

So, the only demographics that'd actually stick with an elon twitter competitor are: People who love elon musk and everything he creates, and people who are banned from twitter. If it shakes out to be anything like Gab and Parler, the later means the site is going to swarm with Nazis like every other free speech competitor to twitter, which as a jew is something i'm deeply uncomfortable with. There's not enough free speech in the world for me to put up with being harassed by people who share the views as the ones who murdered my great grandparents. And as much as people here enjoy grandstanding about free speech, its likely something you're uncomfortable with too, otherwise you'd be on those sites.

Basically, the product elon wants to make already exists and it has no users. If Trump (who had a significantly bigger following on twitter than Elon) wasnt enough, if big right wing stars like Milo werent enough, what's gonna be enough? Because copy pasting Truth and slapping Elon on the front... wont be.

[sssilver]

> no one wants a platform where they can be harassed

I’m not sure whether it’s that, or that simply no one wants a platform everyone isn’t already on.

Personally I would absolutely not mind being “harassed” by text, if I was also able to exercise wide spectrum of free speech myself.

[thwayunion]

Getting someone to onboard to a new platform is ultimately a sales job. Selling is about telling people who they want to be, not who they are.

A social media platform advertised as a politics-first/free-speech platform is the social media equivalent of a beer ad featuring a divorced balding man at last call in a dingy basement bar. No one aspires to bicker about politics with strangers on the internet, even though in reality that's the engagement that pays the bills.

[suslik]

> No one aspires to bicker about politics with strangers on the internet

This is quite a controversial statement.

[attilaperez]

>Personally I would absolutely not mind being “harassed” by text, if I was also able to exercise wide spectrum of free speech myself.

This is precisely the idea behind 4chan.

[alanh]

It seems overly reductionist to ascribe the essence of 4chan to this one, singular idea. For example, m00t reports that 4chan was inspired by another image board he used to frequent. It is also hardly the first or only website to have light moderation.

[k1ko]

The failure of those other platforms has nothing to do with free speech or lack there of. Twitter has a moat that you aren't going to be able to break by just trying to out Twitter them.

[13years]

Every competitor has failed because it prioritized free speech above user experience. Almost all have had terrible UI's, terrible performance, lots of bugs.

BigTech owns the mindshare of how to build these platforms. Musk would actually have the resources to pay for the level of expertise and competence to build such a platform. However, it would be years in the making which might all become irrelevant with web3.

Or Musk could throw support behind web3 tech as ultimately free speech will only exist when controlled by no one including free speech advocates such as Musk.

[jrockway]

I don't think the technical challenge is the blocker here. Lots of people on HN could build a really good version of Twitter in a month and be ready to tweak things as scale increases. (Nothing is an overnight success and you will have time. Twitter didn't even get it right for a couple years, remember the "fail whale"? The idea being right as much more important than choosing the right distributed database or whatever.) The reason people don't do that is because they don't know what they could do better than Twitter. People leave Twitter because nobody wants to read their tweets; you can't build a Twitter clone from people whose tweets nobody wants to read.

One idea that I have is that I noticed a lot of people went from blogging to making YouTube videos. I'm guessing YouTube is the sweet spot that balances monetization potential (they will find ads to put in your videos, and advertisers pay a lot for video ads) with a recommendation engine (that essentially forces people to watch your content; or more charitably, tells people that will like your content that they should take a look). Blogs didn't really have monetization or recommendation, and people were willing to switch media (text to video) just to get those two things! Now we have things like Substack bringing those to text, and people are taking advantage of that.

Maybe that's where the next Twitter wants to be? Paying smart people to write? That sounds a lot more appealing than "free speech" (which is great to have, but I don't really want to read anyone's free speech), which is all we've seen as the differentiation point for Twitter clones.

[KptMarchewa]

>Lots of people on HN could build a really good version of Twitter in a month and be ready to tweak things as scale increases.

Oh, the hubris.

[mrep]

Just throw a bunch of cash at some googlers. They make a new messaging app every month. They are pros at building them, just not getting users.

[jrockway]

Hey, I didn't say me ;)

[procombo]

The next step is a social media company that is (1) private (2) membership based (3) no reliance on huge ad contracts, just promoted content (4) can tell the difference between political opinion and hate speech (5) gets out of the way of legal public discourse.

It doesn't need to be web3. It just needs to be somewhat transparent and minimally auditable. Web3 doesn't know what web3 is yet. Most is just garbage, sorry.

[8note]

Dan olsen has a great video about this, something along the lines of "platforms are not your friends" with the specific case of some YouTube competitor.

The real problem with competing platforms is that they don't offer anything to the main people they need to attract.

[doopy1]

Web3 is niche and I think social media is outside of that niche and will be for a very long time.

[sgjohnson]

> web3

what does it even mean?

[smsm42]

"everyone I know and care about still uses twitter" FTFY

[evanextreme]

well, sure. but unless you're hyper obsessed with far-right circles you're likely either in my boat, or just dont use twitter altogether.

[jokethrowaway]

It's the network effect.

Everyone is on twitter, a few of the people you want to follow are on parler. You won't bother checking parler too much.

[trident5000]

He already has a social network to jumpstart a messaging platform....Tesla cars.

[voidfunc]

Everyone likes betting against Elon... it has worked out so well so far.

[evanextreme]

The guy has launched more than 2 companies. Last I checked there aren't any super tunnel sleds under LA fixing traffic there yet, and my car was supposed to be able to autonomously drive itself a solid 4 years before I got it. It's very easy to be in the mindset that elon never fails if you think all his failures are just very long delays