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Twitter appears to be unhappy with the runaway success of Threads, Meta's Twitter alternative that launched last night. Threads has amassed more than 30 million users in under 24 hours, making it the biggest threat to Twitter to date.

Twitter-Feature.jpg

According to Semafor, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro yesterday sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter [PDF] accusing Meta of "systemic, willful, and lawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property."

Twitter claims that Meta hired "dozens" of former Twitter employees that "had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information." The company further says that the employees "improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices," and that Meta took advantage of this to have those workers develop the "copycat" Threads app on an accelerated timeline.

When Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, he fired thousands of employees who then had to look for work. It is likely that some of those employees transitioned to Meta, but hiring people actively looking for a job is not typically considered poaching.


Twitter's letter says that it plans to "enforce its intellectual property rights," with the company demanding that Meta "take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets." Twitter threatens that it reserves the right to seek "civil remedies and injunctive relief" to prevent Meta from using its intellectual property.

Along with claims that Meta poached Twitter employees to develop Threads, Twitter says that Meta is "expressly prohibited" from scraping Twitter's followers or following data. Twitter is asking Meta to "preserve any documents" that could be relevant to a future dispute, suggesting that Twitter might be planning to file a lawsuit in the future.

Twitter has not gone after other Twitter-like social networks that include Bluesky and Mastodon, but Threads is a newly-launched app that is built off of Instagram, giving it a notable user base from its debut. Mastodon and Bluesky have far fewer users. In February, for example, Mastodon had 1.4 million active users, while Bluesky had 50,000 users at the end of April.

Following Twitter's accusations, Meta's communications director Andy Stone said that no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee. "That's just not a thing," he wrote.

Article Link: Twitter Accuses Meta of Poaching Employees to Build Threads
Well Elon, maybe you shouldn't have fired all those experts. Did you expect them to start working for McDonald's? Karma is a bitch.
 
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Release the trolls!

I think Facebook is as toxic as Twitter has become and would never use any Facebook product — but it’s entertaining to follow the drama as it plays out in discussion .. and even app reviews. This current snapshot of critical reviews shows that Twitter Bros are coming to the defense of their venerated CTO (Chief Toxic Officer). 😂
 
Because it confirms your bias?

FYI: Elon uses an iPhone.
@tripsync: It is consistent with my direct observations of his unmoderated behavior on a platform he controls. The examples of childish, vindictive comments and actions far outweigh examples of sane, adult behavior. To conclude the opposite of what his behavior demonstrates would require, and confirm bias.
 
I also worked for a CA company from outside CA. This is a federal case. They don’t care about California law, especially when the core element of the cease and desist order IS NOT about poaching employees, but is completely about patent violations. If you read the cease and desist letter, it talks about former employees retaining documents that contain Twitter IP that Meta is using illegally (from their POV). The letter says nothing about alleging employment violations.
You cant patent lines of code, and while you can patent functions it’s pretty difficult to prove. I suspect Musk is SOL on that one

And there are two things musk is complaining about that are related but distinct, and I think we may be missing eachother on:

1) theft of IP - absolutely a federal issue, I agree with you, and that’s what you’re talking about

2) employee poaching - and that’s what I was talking about
 
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View attachment 2229891Release the trolls!

I think Facebook is as toxic as Twitter has become and would never use any Facebook product — but it’s entertaining to follow the drama as it plays out in discussion .. and even app reviews. This current snapshot of critical reviews shows that Twitter Bros are coming to the defense of their venerated CTO (Chief Toxic Officer). 😂
Threads isnt bad, isnt amazing, but isnt bad, but its main attraction for me if I’m going to be totally honest is pure and utter amusement at it eating Musk’s lunch. I’m not alone, I feel like I should buy some stock in popcorn makers
 
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@tripsync: It is consistent with my direct observations of his unmoderated behavior on a platform he controls. The examples of childish, vindictive comments and actions far outweigh examples of sane, adult behavior. To conclude the opposite of what his behavior demonstrates would require, and confirm bias.

Concluding that he didn't write it is not opposite of what his behavior demonstrates since there are many factors that have nothing to do with behavior (as I already gave, he does not use an Android phone which you seem to ignore). If that was your best deductive reasoning then that highly suggests, if not, proves that this confirms your bias against Elon.
 
Concluding that he didn't write it is not opposite of what his behavior demonstrates since there are many factors that have nothing to do with behavior (as I already gave, he does not use an Android phone which you seem to ignore). If that was your best deductive reasoning then that highly suggests, if not, proves that this confirms your bias against Elon.
Here is the statement you chose to wrangle into a reason to suggest that I am biased:

“But I wouldn’t be surprised if that was an actual review — given the petty, child-like behavior we’ve all observed from E.”

It’s clear that the comment and this entire thread is a direct response to Elon’s childish behavior coming home to roost. Further, the broader context of the comment was clearly lighthearted and in jest.

I’m puzzled by the behavior of those who feel compelled to defend indefensible behavior then invent laughable reasons to attack those who call it out. 🤔
 
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Here is the statement you chose to wrangle into a reason to suggest that I am biased:

“But I wouldn’t be surprised if that was an actual review — given the petty, child-like behavior we’ve all observed from E.”

It’s clear that the comment and this entire thread is a direct response to Elon’s childish behavior coming home to roost. Further, the broader context of the comment was clearly lighthearted and in jest.

I’m puzzled by the behavior of those who feel compelled to defend indefensible behavior then invent laughable reasons to attack those who call it out. 🤔

The comments are in direct response to the screenshot. My original post clearly is discussing the screenshot as I mentioned "FYI: Elon uses an iPhone" to contrast to the Google Play Store screenshot. Anything else is moving goal posts.

1. Elon has been seen carrying an iPhone for the past 10 years.
2. The formatting of the date on my Pixel is M/D/YY. Web shows the full date. The screenshot's formatting is DD/MM/YYYY
3. The date is off center from the stars while my Pixel shows it's aligned
4. Date and stars are placed under the profile pic on Pixel and Web. Screenshot shows stars and date to the right of the pic.

Despite such evidence being placed in front of you, you still hold the stance of "I wouldn’t be surprised if that was an actual review". Tell me again how these are "laughable reasons".

I'm puzzled by the behavior of those who feel to completely ignore the evidence in front of them and instead only choose to believe what confirms their bias and personally attack those who disagree.

I've spent enough time on this. Have a good one. 👋
 
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Twitter appears to be unhappy with the runaway success of Threads, Meta's Twitter alternative that launched last night. Threads has amassed more than 30 million users in under 24 hours, making it the biggest threat to Twitter to date.

Twitter-Feature.jpg

According to Semafor, Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro yesterday sent Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg a letter [PDF] accusing Meta of "systemic, willful, and lawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property."

Twitter claims that Meta hired "dozens" of former Twitter employees that "had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information." The company further says that the employees "improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices," and that Meta took advantage of this to have those workers develop the "copycat" Threads app on an accelerated timeline.

When Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, he fired thousands of employees who then had to look for work. It is likely that some of those employees transitioned to Meta, but hiring people actively looking for a job is not typically considered poaching.


Twitter's letter says that it plans to "enforce its intellectual property rights," with the company demanding that Meta "take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets." Twitter threatens that it reserves the right to seek "civil remedies and injunctive relief" to prevent Meta from using its intellectual property.

Along with claims that Meta poached Twitter employees to develop Threads, Twitter says that Meta is "expressly prohibited" from scraping Twitter's followers or following data. Twitter is asking Meta to "preserve any documents" that could be relevant to a future dispute, suggesting that Twitter might be planning to file a lawsuit in the future.

Twitter has not gone after other Twitter-like social networks that include Bluesky and Mastodon, but Threads is a newly-launched app that is built off of Instagram, giving it a notable user base from its debut. Mastodon and Bluesky have far fewer users. In February, for example, Mastodon had 1.4 million active users, while Bluesky had 50,000 users at the end of April.

Following Twitter's accusations, Meta's communications director Andy Stone said that no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee. "That's just not a thing," he wrote.

Article Link: Twitter Accuses Meta of Poaching Employees to Build Threads
Ah, so they "poached" all the Twitter employees that Elon Musk turfed out, did they?
 
They're software developers. Twitter isn't a complicated application. They can get any development job.
Agreed, Twitter’s biggest complication was and is scale - and I personally know enough former twitter network engineers and devops/ops staff to know they certainly arent having any trouble finding work, I doubt twitter’s other former engineers are either
 
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That's not exactly true--any junior programmer could single handedly write a Twitter clone with a bad backend that doesn't scale.

Conceptually the structure of Twitter is easy, but like anything of the sort there's a lot going on that isn't obvious or even visible to the user. And more to the point, even if it really was that simple, building a platform that can support hundreds of millions of user interactions per day requires a lot of people with an uncommon skillset and a huge amount of experience using it.

You're right that those things aren't trade secrets, though--they're what you get from years of working at a company doing those tasks and honing that skillset.

It's like building a modern car--it's conceptually simple, but there's a lot of moving parts there and a lot of backend that make it happen efficiently, so actually executing the process isn't anywhere near as easy as it seems. Also like designing a car though, anybody can take the thing apart down to the last bolt, so there's no magical trade secrets involved in the process, it's just that actually executing it well is something that requires a lot of talent and experience that you mostly gain by doing.
Here is the thing. Much of what Twitter is can be looked at as Facebook with artificial limits put in place. The data handling and coding is going to be similar underneath and should easy to implement for Meta. In fact it looks like they used the already simplified code from Instagram and likely the messaging coding knowledge from WhatsApp to make their Twitter killer.
 
Hilarious.

1. if you fire somebody and a competitor hires them, that is not poaching. Poaching is hiring active employees by offering them more money — usually when there is some sort of relationship in place between the two companies involved. Example: company A does consulting services for company B to build them a custom app and company B hires one or more developers from company A just as the contract is winding up.

2. What intellectual property? Every forum on every website that allows comments is using essentially the same functionality to store posts and responses. Did Twitter patent the character limit?
He accused Apple of doing the same with Tesla. 😭
 
I think it does, and yes I responded to you...

They're cheering Zucc on because he isn't a moron and a far right extremist. Compared to what Musk turned Twitter into, Threads automatically looks great... no matter how much data it mines.
Yeah, no. Musk talking trash has *zero* impact on my life. Zuckerturd and the Zuckerverse are like a weevil, burrowing through the ships rations, taking as much as it can while trying to remain unseen. See the difference?

Wonder why people are reporting superfluous battery use by the app? 🤔 what could it be? 😵‍💫🙄
 
View attachment 2229891Release the trolls!

I think Facebook is as toxic as Twitter has become and would never use any Facebook product — but it’s entertaining to follow the drama as it plays out in discussion .. and even app reviews. This current snapshot of critical reviews shows that Twitter Bros are coming to the defense of their venerated CTO (Chief Toxic Officer). 😂
$.05 has been deposited into your account.
 
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