Moving to a new site would be an enormous risk for users because you would lose your network of friends. The network's entire existence, the theory goes, is secured by these barriers to starting afresh at a new outlet.
This was how the Guardian described MySpace in 2007, when the early social network had 150 million global users, a number so large it was considered improbable that they would ever move elsewhere. In the end MySpace was soon overtaken by Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook, Rupert Murdoch lost almost all the money he spent buying the site, and MySpace's once-ubiquitous co-founder Tom Anderson has travelled the world on the profits ever since.
Sixteen years later, Elon Musk's Twitter is also testing the theory that people remain loyally addicted to their favoured social network until suddenly, one day, they give up and move elsewhere.
Yesterday, Zuckerberg launched Threads, a new platform aimed at winning over people who, in the words of one executive, want somewhere a bit like Twitter that is "sanely run".
After a day using Threads, one thing is pretty clear: it is not Twitter. But Threads has the potential to be something different and powerful: Twitter with fewer rough edges, more corporate sheen, and enough potential to suck the remaining life - and advertising revenue - out of Musk's struggling network.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 07, 2023-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July 07, 2023-Ausgabe von The Guardian.
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