Why Are There So Many Twitter Clones Now?

This past week, Mark Zuckerberg released a new app called Threads. It’s the latest attempt by a corporation to make a Twitter clone app that is supposed to kill Twitter and take its users. This isn’t new, ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, there has been a large number of Twitter clones released: Mastodon, Bluesky, Post.News, Cohost, Artifact, Hive, and Substack Notes. All of these apps have been marketed as alternatives to a Musk-led Twitter with the intent of replacing it.

It’s a new development. For the past 16 years Twitter existed without any competition. Why would it? It only There were a few right-wing specific social media apps that came out like Donald Trump’s “Truth Social”, but for the most part no one cared about competing with Twitter for 16 years. That all changed in one year with Musk.

When I say Twitter clones, I really mean. They all look exactly like Twitter.

People point to Twitter becoming different. Is it different? There’s 400 million users on the app. There’s entire ecosystems that exist that do not interact with other ecosystems. There are even tabs that allow you to just view only people you follow on your timeline in case you dislike the algorithm.

I think what’s really going on is that people hate Elon Musk. And since Elon Musk owns Twitter they are associating the product with him. Other companies also see this dynamic and are trying to cash by starting alternatives in hopes that people will leave and join their new app.

Hating Elon Musk

Elon Musk is easy to hate. For one thing he’s the world’s richest man at $250 Billion. People cannot contextualize how much a billion is. If you make $50k/yr for 40 years that’s 2 million. It’d take the average person 60,000 lifetimes to even start getting close to what Elon Musk has. There are even videos about trying to show you how much that really is because it’s difficult for the human mind to conceive of those numbers.

He’s also someone who is right wing, takes a hard stand on the culture war and posts openly on Twitter trying to change the discourse. I get it. I I can see how he can make someone think he’s a jerk. But that’s not very interesting though.

What’s interesting to me is right now Twitter and Elon Musk are seen as exactly the same thing to most people. It isn’t just a corporation with a CEO or owner. Elon Musk is the company. That wasn’t always the case.

Jack Dorsey was the founder and CEO but he didn’t use the product much. If he did post it was hippie “world peace” type messages. Twitter was Twitter. Jack Dorsey happened to create it and run it but he wasn’t tied to the product like Musk is. Dorsey was even the CEO of another big company at the same time as Twitter. He did an interview with Joe Rogan a few years ago, but he had to bring his Lawyer with because he couldn’t any questions about users or policies or anything.

This distinction between seeing Twitter as a corporation or Twitter as an extension of Elon Musk (or another owner) is important.

A lot of crazy stuff has happened during the last 16 years under Jack Dorsey. There was censorship and bans. No one really knew what would get you banned from posting. For example, I remember in 2020 Twitter banning accounts for stating that the Covid virus probably leaked from a lab. Fast forward to today and the US intelligence agency are split on whether it came from the lab or not. This is an extreme act of censorship by Twitter considering all the devastation that Covid caused.

Or take the example of ISIS fighters openly recruited terrorists and put videos of their atrocities in 2012-2014. You would see beheading videos and support for bombings. Lots of innocent people got killed. They had slaves. It was a strange time.

People didn’t leave Twitter though. Nor did any other company or investors think they could replace Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t try coming out with a competitor.

In my opinion nothing Elon has done has made Twitter worse than these episodes. Nor has Elon made the site grossly worse or unusable, despite all the histrionics. He just courts controversy in a way that is necessarily bad for business.

The real story is much more fascinating. We treat corporations and people differently.

We Treat Corporations Differently Than Individuals

Getting screwed over by your local mechanic or shop keeper feels way worse than getting screwed over by a corporation. Once things become human and personalized it activates a visceral response. I once had someone who ran a one-man business respond with "it's against our policy" and it made me angrier than when an employee from Home Depot said the same thing. I’ve had issues with drinks at Starbucks being made wrong or slow service. But I just go to another Starbucks a few blocks over instead of never going back to Starbucks at all. With independent coffee shops or restaurants, it just feels more personal if they are rude to you.

There is something about scale and "corporate distance" that changes how we as humans respond. With individual or small businesses, I am more likely to just never return as a customer. I’m just more pissed off in general. We hold individuals to a higher standard of morality than to abstract corporations with dozens of layers of executives and boards.

This is because we've evolved in environments with localist conditions where we wouldn't engage much with scaled up entities. We spent most of history engaging with individuals or families who sold goods to us. The corporation is only a few hundred years old. And up until very recently, we were dealing with small businesses everywhere.

There’s a tradition in Greek literature of how the sellers at the market will try to cheat on you. Think of how buying and selling at the local individual level is much different than walking into CVS and buying a product. Much less emotion

That means the best thing you can do from a business standpoint is create as much corporate distance as possible. Layers and layers of abstraction. Put people in a haze where they hand over their credit card they have no idea who is on the other side.

Marketing can even help accentuate this phenomenon. Marketing makes sure the sections of the your brain responsible for personalization associates the product with branding (e.g.mascots) rather than scandalous executives. I don’t know if the CEO or a board member of CVS is a good guy or not. I just see a logo and need to buy toothpaste.

This transformation of how we approach corporations and individuals has consequences. Corporations commit all types of nasty act all the time. But most people don’t care. Volkswagen pulled that huge environmental fraud and it went about it’s business after paying a fine to the government. We rely on the government to enforce standards on corporations because it’s hard for us to boycott them.

Which is one of the reasons why the Bud Lite boycott was so shocking.

Customers treated Bud Lite like an individual and not a scaled up corporation. No one saw it coming. But this is how small businesses are treated all the time.

When organizations or things scale, they don’t stay the same. They transform into something else. Also, our behavior toward them changes as they scale.

Corporations and Crime

If I need to purchase shampoo or toothpaste I’m probably going to go to the CVS. There are a lot of upsides to going to CVS. They are reliable. The quality is good. They always have products in stock. The prices are competitive. There’s a reason they replaced the mom n pop drug stores. They are just more efficient. But if they close down, I’ll have to go to the locally owned convenience store. Who stays in an area and who exits an area depends on what scale the business is.

There has been a recent crime wave, specifically shoplifting, happening in cities that have led to closures of some chain stores.

I remember being in a CVS in Washington DC and a man walked in and grabbed laundry detergent off the shelves, put them in a bag and walked out. No one stopped him. It makes sense. These stores have insurance and there is a lot of liability to the Company that could happen if employees start trying to stop theft.

Scaled up corporations have no answer for crime. They can only function in a peaceful world. Or if the neighborhood is not peaceful they have to rely on an efficient state policing apparatus. If the policing is not adequate or If too much theft occurs they just exit that particular market. There is no adaptation. No stress response.

If you go to the most dangerous parts of American cities you will see small businesses, mostly locally owned convenience stores. The small business has been operating in high crime areas for decades. It is much more "fit" for the environment. It adapts and does not exit the market. There are many videos of small business owners resisting robberies on the internet for a reason.

Remember the rooftop Koreans?

If the Corporation attempts to address crime, the results end up looking very depressing. Do you want to shop here? It looks like a mental institution.

In This Newsletter

The transformation that occurs when things scale isn’t just limited to corporations or businesses. It has many applications in life. Let’s discuss a few of them:

1) The Town is Not the City and a City is not a Nation-State

2) Why Elite Athletes Die at a Younger Age than the General Population

The Town and City and Nation-State

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