Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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When someone says bullshit about rocket science, its hard to argue because we aren't rocket scientists.

When someone says bullshit about mass manufacturing of cars, its hard to argue because we aren't mechanical engineers.

When someone says bullshit about running a website... guess what? Hacker News is full of programmers, venture capitalists, and website owners. Suddenly Elon Musk is speaking our language and what we see from Twitter is... uggghhhh....

Elon Musk hasn't changed much. All that's really happened is that he moved back into a proper technology discussion in a subject people around here are deeply familiar with. The standard levels of bullshit he spouts are insufficient when the audience here has a much deeper understanding of online advertisements, bots, user engagement, UI issues, and the like.

If they have a deeper understanding of these things, then why haven't they produced a real competitor?

probably because of the classic "making twitter is easy, getting twitter to a billion people is hard"

Elon didn't build anything on Twitter. He paid $44 Billion for the website and then collapsed it.

Well Threads is making pretty decent strides given that it was spun up in record time (by ex-Twitter employees that have an ax to grind for some reason)

There were no ex-Twitter employees involved in Threads at the time it launched. AFAICT, it was a frontend over a pared-down Instagram comment-system.

Designing something like Twitter isn't hard, and it used to be a pretty common design question that could be answered in 30 minutes or less. Instagram certainly doesn't need outside help to help scale stuff, let alone people specifically from Twitter.

>There were no ex-Twitter employees involved in Threads at the time it launched.

This is not what I heard. I heard they hired up tons of prominent ex-Twitter.

>AFAICT, it was a frontend over a pared-down Instagram comment-system.

Do you use it? I do and it does not seem to operate that way. It is a more involved than that.

Yes they did rely on IG's infrastructure to help speed up development but this was a deliberate design choice and I don't blame them: They have this large asset of users and built up infrastructure, might as well use this advantage.

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