I actually don’t hate the idea but it’s the rigid sticking to it that’s the dumb part. The rate limiting clusterfuck was such a perfect opportunity to go “OK everyone here’s a hundred invites valid for the next 48 hours go wild”. Still feels like a club since you have to get an invite and creates an impetus on users to get these invites sent out ASAP.
I actually figured that this was the strategy, but now that they let that golden moment pass them by I now realise that nobody there has any idea what the fuck they’re doing.
Guess Jack just wants it to be a haven for all the worst blue checkmark behaviour of Twitter, in which case I commend him for creating a containment website.
BlueSky never had a chance, same goes for Threads. It's not some mistake in strategy, it just turns out you can't launch a copycat social network no matter how good your marketing/funding... network effects are tough.
They aren't failing due to privacy, or invite strategy, or anything else. They are failing because there's no differentiation whatsoever. It's so simple, and it's been true since forever.
The meme that Twitter is burning down is cope. The only people for whom it's burning down are extremely online liberals. And even they are not leaving Twitter. They are the only ones praying for these alternatives to succeed, or in recent HN threads asserting the downfall is assured and imminent. The actual ground truth of using Twitter if you aren't extremely online and praying on political rivals' downfall is that it basically hasn't changed much at all.
You need to differentiate, be cool, and be fun in some new way to leap past immense network effects. And probably also guarantee revenue share through a sort of decentralized network.
