Twitter Accuses Meta of Poaching Employees to Build Threads

[Someyoungguy]

This part sounds…legal:

“…and lawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets…”

Is this a typo on Macrumors, or in the original letter?

 

[Muzzakus]

Can’t imagine this competing with Twitter long term anyway. And the big user base is instagram accounts so there is no impressive organic growth to measure as yet.

 

[FelixDerKater]

I wonder how much they will end up paying for the .COM version of their web URL.

 

[threeseed]

Can’t imagine this competing with Twitter long term anyway. And the big user base is instagram accounts so there is no impressive organic growth to measure as yet.

48m users in a day. One day. It's impressive by any definition.

And you have to specifically say you want Threads so it is organic growth.

 

[FattiesGoneWild]

Musky cheats all the time what is he talking about…. Running Twitter into the ground did not help either.

 

[seek3r]

generally the agreements developers sign include a 2+ year time after employment has terminated where they cannot work on projects that compete with their own product.

While I dont know specifically about twitter , I would be surprised if there wasn't a no competing clause in there

Non-competes arent valid in Cali. Guess which state both companies are or were HQd in?

 

[heifetz7]

I wouldn't have guessed a year ago that I would feel schadenfreude about Facebook copying someone's app. In this case, I'm happy if Threads become wildly successful, since Twitter gave their userbase away, and Musk has no idea how to run a company. He's become a big cry baby.

 

[abowlby]

This whole “Threads” thing stinks like days old fish. All of a sudden the tech blog world is cheering on Mark Zuckerberg? “Bro this new FaceBook data mining tool is so great!”

Also many of my comments on other blogs that are critical of Threads magically disappeared.

Zuck is just circling the wagon around and corralling all the people who left FaceBook years ago for Round 2.

Additionally, the preemptive manipulation of user activity data that will/is occurring by tying Threads to Instagram seems really shady as well. You can essentially throw analytics and quarterly reporting out the window. This almost feels like a pump and dump.

 

[StyxMaker]

“I don’t think that …. isn’t phrased right” is a double negative. So unless you meant to say that you do think it is phrased right, your phrasing is incorrect.

You are wrong. He did not use a double negative. He has a statement with a single negative and a parenthetical with a single negative.

 

[canadianreader]

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Most likely they took the name from the thread reader app that compiles Twitter threads.

 

[gshocked]

Good artists copy. Great artists steal.

Nah not copy, Inspired by! 😁

 

[Herrpod]

so zuck basically used all the elon haters as puppets to drum up support for threads? lol

Elon drummed up support for Threads by being a complete idiot.

 

[canadianreader]

So let me get this straight. Elon:

• Overpaid for Twitter
• Fired the vast majority of their employees
• Is somehow labeling the hiring of said fired employees as "poaching"
• Thinks Twitter has some magic proprietary technology that enables them to post text to a website that FaceBook could never figure out on their own
• Has driven the company into the ground by:
  • Not having enough employees to keep servers and code operational
  • Completely destroyed the third party app community
  • Scared off advertisers with his promotion of hateful content
  • Scared off users with his promotion of hateful content
  • Artificially boosted the ranking of his own stupid tweets so everyone is forced to see them
  • Made the platform less secure by removing two factor authentication
  • Made people pay to view Tweets
• Somehow thinks he is the victim in all of this, the poor billionaire

I hate Facebook and Zuck as much as the next guy, but **** Elon Musk for real. What a loser.

Tired of these billionaires having so much power. We need to rise up against them.

I agree with you, everything is bigger and bigger, big tech, big pharma, big food, big internet companies, pretty much big everything. The only way to escpae these is to buy locally or encourage small companies for every day things. For example using alternative storage to iCloud, using alternative social networks like Mastodon and Lemmy using paid alternatives to gmail, buying locally grown organic foods, favoring traditional medicine to chemical drugs etc. It's the only way to impoverish these big evil companies.

 

[Dancin-Ted-Danson]

Let me see if I understand the sequence of events. Musk makes an outlandish offer to buy Twitter. Twitter calls the bluff and accepts. Musk gets cold feet and tries to wiggle out of the deal by claiming some made up issues with fake accounts (by the way, what has he done about bots and fake accounts now that he owns Twitter?). Musk is forced to buy Twitter or face the court system. Reluctantly buys the company and in a show of petty vindictiveness starts firing people all over the company. Things go down from there and continue going down. Claims some sort of freedom of expression crusade but it seems to be mostly allowing disinformation and hate go rampant. When you fire so many employees chances are some of them are going to end up creating a better version of your product. That is the computer industry ethos. Don't complain for a problem of your own creation. Way to tarnish your reputation after Tesla and SpaceX.

You must have been asleep during that entire situation. The Twitter board did not want to accept his offer, they elected to adopt a poison pill... it wasn't until they got threatened with shareholder lawsuits that they accepted it. Musk's team openly talked about how the due diligence wasn't adding up (users vs bots)...

"in a show of petty vindictiveness starts firing people" is a wild opinion, dude took over a fire drill of a place that was lighting money on fire... let me re-frame it for you. In this situation, mid 90s, you'd be posting the same thing about Steve showing back up at Apple... going WTF is happening here, laying off people left and right, and killing product lines... desperate times call for desperate measures (ones that Apple went through before as well)

"Claims some sort of freedom of expression crusade but it seems to be mostly allowing disinformation and hate go rampant". yeah you have no proof of that... but keep spouting that BS. The Twitter files also have shown how much government involvement was happening, and it isn't pretty. Community notes are what every other social media platform should be adopting

 

[threeseed]

All of a sudden the tech blog world is cheering on Mark Zuckerberg?

People have been hating Musk for quite some time now.

It started for me when he called that hero diver a pedo just because they didn't like his stupid tube idea.

 

[Kierkegaarden]

Zuck might be a horrible individual but he's not Elon Musk.

How would you classify Elon Musk?

 

[kevwilso]

No sympathy for the twit..... You treat people like crap and what do you expect.

 

[tobybrut]

Considering the lack of features (no search, no hashtags, no filters), I doubt Threads will go anywhere unless it has a huge upgrade soon. How many of the signups are people just reserving their username just in case, like me? I have no intention of using Twitter or Threads but have accounts on both just to make sure I have my specific LLC name reserved. As soon as I signed up, I deleted both Instagram and Threads from my phone.

 

[svish]

Waiting to see how this fight will end!! Threads can be a good competitor.

 

[tripsync]

So let me get this straight. Elon:

This is absolutely hilarious. Apparently you don't have it straight.

[*]Fired the vast majority of their employees

You mean "LAID OFF" the vast majority. Being "laid off" pays severance. Being "fired"does not.
Also talking as if layoffs weren't going to happen had Elon not bought the company (see Microsoft/Google layoffs that came after Twitter).

[*]Is somehow labeling the hiring of said fired employees as "poaching"

"It is likely that some of those employees transitioned to Meta, but hiring people actively looking for a job is not typically considered poaching."

[*]Thinks Twitter has some magic proprietary technology that enables them to post text to a website that FaceBook could never figure out on their own

Intellectual property is intellectual property. Instead of building from scratch the infrastructure, one can easily grab scripts that can spin up an API/servers/database schema with resiliency built in in a matter of minutes instead of weeks which gave Meta the opportunity of great timing.

[*]Has driven the company into the ground by:

Twitter was headed to bankruptcy before Elon bought the company considering Twitter didn't have many profitable quarters and ad spending was going to dry up in end of 2022/1st Q of 2023. Weird you didn't even mention this but put 100% of the blame on Elon.

[*]Artificially boosted the ranking of his own stupid tweets so everyone is forced to see them

I'm sure The Platform's source was Ligma and Johnson.

[*]Made the platform less secure by removing two factor authentication

False. Two factor has always and continues to be available to all. Two factor SMS (which is less secure) was removed for free users.

[*]Made people pay to view Tweets

Existed before Elon took over: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/t...cription-takes-shots-at-substack-and-patreon/

[*]Somehow thinks he is the victim in all of this, the poor billionaire

Lol

I hate Facebook and Zuck as much as the next guy, but **** Elon Musk for real. What a loser.

Tired of these billionaires having so much power. We need to rise up against them.

Maybe get the facts straight first?

 

[AriaAmaris]

”runaway success” It’s very obvious that people who lean to the left now hate Twiiter, simply because of politics. The phrasing they use to denounce anything that doesn’t jive with their political beliefs is telling. It’s always us vs them. Pitiful really!

 

[Serqetry]

All of a sudden the tech blog world is cheering on Mark Zuckerberg? “Bro this new FaceBook data mining tool is so great!”

Just goes to show how incredibly horrible Elon Musk is... he makes anything that he's not associated with look good.

 

[AriaAmaris]

Waiting to see how this fight will end!! Threads can be a good competitor.

I don’t trust anything Meta does.

 

[coolfactor]

Elon is funny! He fired the world's smartest software engineers. Fast forward it today he is jealous that Threads was dominated in the App Store.

View attachment 2229023

"the world's smartest"



Twitter has never been the pinnacle of software accomplishments.

 

[Powerbooky]

I just watched a couple of international news channels and saw multiple journalist speculate all kinds of **** about this subject. Look, this is a thing out of the standard lawyers playbook: if any other company releases something that has in any way (even vaguely) the looks of your product, get ready for a lawsuit. Any media, including MR, should not pay any attention to this until this is settled in court.