Mark Titanic Zuckerberg’s Meta, the Mothership of Facebook, said as much this week it’ll be launching a platform to kill rival Elon Le Frelon Musk’s Twitter.
It was going to be called “Threads,” and the Meta-backed microblogging platform has described itself in loving, taunting terms as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app,” according to some pretty lame copywriting on Apple’s App Store.
The listing suggests Threads would be released on Thursday, July 6. And as I’m writing from the French resort town of Châtelaillon-Plage on that exact day, I’m delighted to say Threads is already off to a cage-fighting start.
Threads: not at all what I expected…
The actual Threads app has reportedly received 30mn sign-ups, according to Instagram, including heaps of important brands, vacuous celebrities, boring journalists and many other prominent types with short pithy words to spare.
“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow,” the app’s non-office-sleeping copywriter says.
The Verge reported earlier this month Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox told a Meta-meeting earlier this month that the app wasn’t just about cage-fighting, but was in fact a direct response to Twitter being crap and how Insta could probably do it better for less and not seem like a dick in the process.
The company’s “been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution,” The Meta Man said.
Before it became clear that Thread would be the name of Meta’s challenger to Twitter, there were reports in early June that the Zuckerberg-led company was working on a Twitter competitor code named Project 92 or P92Musk–Zuckerberg Cage Fight.
“…the biggest fight ever in the history of the world”
Musk, who snapped up Twitter for an obscene self-goal rip-off last year, reacted with his trademark cool to news of P92 by challenging Zuckerberg to a mixed martial arts cage match.
Titanic Zuckerberg just happens to have been getting schooled in the gentle art of Brazilian jiu-jitsu for a few years now and has already won (or been cravenly tossed) medals in a tournament.
But the best news is Zuckers promptly accepted the Musk throwdown.
While no date’s been set for the most insanely perfect moment of my life, UFC President Dana White has already started looking for words to describe what a billionaire Musk v. Zuckerberg matchup might require.
“Talked with Mark and Elon last night, both guys are absolutely dead serious about this,” White said in a June 22 interview with TMZ. “They both said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ They both want to do it.”
White reckons Le Frelon vs Titanic “would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world.”
“It would break all pay-per-view records… You don’t have to be a fighting fan to be interested in this fight. Everybody would want to see it,” the UFC boss promised.
Musk accepted an offer from decorated UFC veteran Georges St-Pierre to train him in MMA and the Tesla mastermind has already rolled around on a mat and been photographed with the Canadian cannibal.
“Had a great training session with Elon Musk, Georges St-Pierre, and John Danaher last night,” Lex Fridman, the podcaster and jiu-jitsu deatheater said via Instagram, which was the best bit.
Well. God luck to Zucks in and uot of the cage. Threads is happily capitalising on the unending series of missteps Elon seems to be intent on continuing Chez Twitter.
Since Elon acquired the company for US$44 billion, it’s been one enormous smackdown after another.
Culling thousands of jobs (via Twitter), loosening content moderation policies (via Twitter), puttin, friends, influencers, users and advertisers through a spate of technical challenges (via twitter).
But it’s the latest controversial policy change which seems to have just annoyed everyone enough to think downloading another option is now an easier option.
Twitter limited the number of tweets users can view daily — a measure Musk called “temporary” in order to scare away data scrapers and bots ‘n the like.
Fact is Threads is arriving just as Twitter is leaving.
Or disintegrating.
Threads: All you can’t tweet
Elon’s trying to impose temporary limits on the amount of tweets that users can see, but it’s hard to come up with a number that might make a lick of difference.
Elon suggested last weekend that the move was in response to “extreme” levels of AI hungry competitors larping up all of Twitter’s oodles of data, akin to system manipulation and all you can eat data scraping. As Elon knows, nothing in life except a cagefight vs a billionaire is free.
Initially, Musk said that that new unverified accounts would be limited to reading just 300 posts per day, though he has since raised that to 500.
The limits rise to 1,000 posts per day for existing unverified accounts, meaning ones without a blue checkmark, while verified accounts enjoy 10 times the volume, 10,000 posts, per day.
Musk said earlier that 100s of firms or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”.
While Elon said that was contributing to a negative user experience, the Twitter chief has expressed Muskian displeasure with AI set ups like OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data as a handy way to train their large language talking monkey models.
Musk to sue Microsoft, kill Gates barehanded in a cage
Elon already wants to sue the pants of Microsoft, and then beat Bill Gates to death in a cage. In April he accused MSOFT of using Twitter data for training after it’d pumped billions int oOpenAI. Of course the tweet also came a few seconds after Microsoft decalred it was removing Twitter from one of its advertising platforms.
Musk wrote this, without providing further details regarding the allegations nor the almost 100% definitely imminent Bill The Wall Gates cage fight which we can only assume is a Winner Take All death match.
ChatGPT is certainly trained using some kind of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and schnaffling up massive encyclopediae of text from wherever it can – like I’d use the internet – as well as human conversations, which happen a lot on tools with names like Threads and Twitter.
Earlier, the Twitter chief joined more than 1,100 know-it-alls… experts and industry execs and super geeks like APPL co-founder Steve Wozniak, in signing an open letter calling on all artificial intelligence labs to pause training of systems more powerful than Chat GPT-4 for at least six months.
Elon, along with other signatories of the letter, cited concerns over AI’s possible “risks to society and humanity.”
But since we’re up to, like Terminator 7, I don’t think hitting pause for six months is going to save anyone’s arse.
Especially not The Zuck. He is going down.