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by motohagiography 1435 days ago
An internet protocol for short message services with an established user base. This was Dorsey's vision, and one Musk appeared to nod to. A t.co product could compete with Signal, Slack, and WhatsApp. Further Slack has wasted what I thought was a huge opportunity to create a Twitter competitor where channels could have public facing boards that published curated highlights from Slack chat. They could have done federation without the body odor. A t.co product could just adapt their existing userbase into using private IRC-like experience, with all of their celebrity and social proof stuff intact.

The product level stuff has huge opportunity, but I think the company became too indexed on their nannyishness, so much so that some billionaire got pissed off and is taking their toy from them.
1 comments
danans 1435 days ago
> A t.co product could compete with Signal, Slack, and WhatsApp.

Entering a crowded and poorly differentiated market where there already huge players with major network effects is the plan? Seems unlikely.

More likely he wanted to do exactly what he said: reduce content moderation (hence expenses) and get people to pay for verified accounts. But none of that is likely to pay back the 20B premium he'd have to pay for it today, so he wants out.

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motohagiography 1435 days ago
A fully adopted protocol with whole new products on top of it will make the 20B back. It's a platform killer. Elon's basically building an internet Deathstar, and we can only hope he will use it for good.
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danans 1435 days ago
Ah right, how could I have missed the "great sorcerer" theory of Musk.

The whole media landscape seems to be entertaining itself and it's audience with that wholly unoriginal one, cuz they sure love their rich fictional anti-heroes.

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