[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[semi-extrinsic]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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