The one sort of nice thing they implemented is that you can pre follow anyone you follow on Instagram and if they eventually sign up for Threads, you’ll be following them.
Of course, assuming Threads is supposed to be more Twitter like, it’s not as helpful as it sounds. The people and reasons to follow someone on Instagram vs Twitter/Threads are very different.
The app is bad too. It’s like a fire hose of whatever the algorithm wants to show you and no real controls or other options at all. Do people really use Twitter like that? I get that it’s a release 1, but couldn’t they at least make it feature equivelent to Twitter? It’s not like they never used Twitter, or maybe they didn’t. It feels even worse than Instagram. At least there I can choose only following with some extra steps.
Says something that Zuck looks considerably more human in the second picture. The mustache looks good on him and the glasses help to hide the hollow robotic look in his eyes.
It depends how big a hurry they were in and how many other bugs they had to fix. When the launch date is upon you and the bug database has 1500 bugs in it, “add dumb GDPR pop up” gets pushed down the list.
It’s easy for non-developers to say “why didn’t they just fix this one bug”, but you don’t know how many other bugs they had to prioritize to get it shipped on time.
I liked the idea that they could just fight it out in the Colosseum. I don’t even care which one is armed as the murmillo and which one the retiarius, or whatever styles they decide to go with.
ETA: Wow, he admits that he didn’t know how to handle firing in that letter.
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.”
Nope. As someone who’s job once depended on understanding GDPR, all you need is user consent and you can do all that stuff. “Consent” consists of a pop-up that the user doesn’t opt to manually engage with quickly enough before disappearing and assuming consent.
People are making a lot of hay about how Threads “couldn’t release in Europe because it’s so evil” but the truth is this is probably just a standard staged rollout. After soft launching in a small English-speaking market (usually Canada) to test and gather analytics, you roll out in the US. Then you start working on the special requirements for Europe (and Germany separately), China, etc. Each market has their own little things you have to do and it takes time. GDPR is just a pop-up you have to add. People want to believe it has more teeth than that, but it really doesn’t.
This has been true for some times, but thanks to things like the Schrems I and II cases¹, limiting the transfer of data outside of EU¹, and other recent cases where the contract nature was disputed, answering with a tentative no to the question “Is personal data a sellable right?”, the landscape is slowly changing.
It’s complicated and there have been a number of conflicting case resolutions, but the privacy guarantors are working hard - there’s hope.
IANAL, TINLA and GDPR is complicated AF. The source of the above is my scarce memory and listening to Matteo Flora’s “Ciao Internet” podcast who often hosts Guido Scorza, one of the four Italian guarantors.
¹ AFAIU he’s preparing a third one, but I don’t remember about exactly what.
² As said above, there’s some light at the horizon. Meanwhile, as a counterbalance, when Google Analytics, thanks to Schrems, was more or less banned in Italy many services switched to a publicly sanctioned platform, that should have provided analytics while abiding by all the rules.
It goes without saying that it was soon discovered they were using AWS services - with no kind of geographical bounding .
Given his proven lack of technical knowledge, I can believe that Musk hasn’t heard of Mastdon or ActivityPub and doesn’t realise that a Twitter lookalike can be whipped up quickly with off the shelf software.
yeah, assuming threads wins the internet, and i feel eventually compelled to sign up, i definitely don’t want my instagram and threads account to be the same thing. especially as insta is getting ever more tiktok like.
no, and that firehose is also what facebook became. usually the enshitification starts after getting the users, but maybe with twitter in flames they decided to start at the bottom and dig down.
yeah, and who knows: maybe it conveniently lets them gate the number of users and servers. granted the us+uk is a huge pool of users, but not having to deal with europe as well might be helpful to them internally in someway.
That’s why I join social media sites: to be insulted, abused, and threatened by strangers, rather than communicate with like minded people who share my interests and provide a supportive environment.
/s
I still won’t join threads, because FB is a cesspool and Zuckerbot is doing fuckall about his Nazi infestation.
Accepting and displaying small messages on a very large scale, with acceptable latency, adequate reliability, and at low cost is undeniably nontrivial; so Twitter probably does(or did, depending on how the brain draining is going) have some reasonably special sauce there; but Facebook also has and has also solved pretty similar problems to support their existing products; so it’s very hard to think of anything that a twitter clone would require that is more than a UI change away from something facebook already had in service for something else.
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