[rtsil]

None. There is no trade secret in building something like Twitter. Anyone on this site can probably make a clone of it.

The real secrets are the massive money needed to promote the network and to pay for the infrastructure, the massive social reach to attract top posters, the massive networking effect needed to make it a must-have app.

Meta already have all of those.

[veec_cas_tant]

I’m very confident that not everyone on this site could make it work at such a massive scale

[danShumway]

People on HN in particular tend to oversimplify large projects. Trying to build and maintain an app the size of Twitter would be hard. Trying to tie it into a functional advertising network would be harder. HN just tends to be brightly cynical about complexity in general; in reality there would be very significant challenges (as Musk is discovering now).

But do I buy that specifically Facebook could do it? Yeah, obviously they could. It's not at all surprising that Facebook could quickly launch a Twitter clone. This isn't like the "metaverse", Facebook already runs social networks that are larger and more complicated than Twitter is, and Threads looks to be highly tied into their existing infrastructure.

I could not build a Twitter clone in my free time, but I also don't currently run Instagram.

[6D794163636F756]

I'm not very confident, I'm 100% certain that there is at least one person on this site (me) who could not make it work on such a scale.