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Ask HN: How hard would it be for him to commission his own Twitter clone?

3 points by ogou ↗ HN
How much would it cost? How soon to acquire decent development team? Wouldn’t new technologies and language/platform options make it easier? Since he has all kinds of resources in a PAC, what would it take? Seems like a straightforward thing to build based on all the “build your own Twitter” tutorials I’ve seen.

14 comments

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poormystic
I kinda wonder if he'd end up getting hacked at pretty hard. I can't see him establishing a secure network very easily - he's made a few enemies from what I can see.
factorialboy
He has money to buy good engineers in China and Russia who are more than willing to continue the domestic chaos in the US.
logicslave
Whats funny is I think the platform would rapidly get users, like millions on the first day. Could be a legitimate threat to Twitter. Also funny that you said "him" and no one has any questions about who youre referencing
Trias11
The way things are going - mentioning his name might become a criminal offence by the end of Jan.
stephenr
I heard by March it’ll be illegal to even think about him and by April you won’t even be able to start a cult Meeting with a circle jerk dedicated to him.

Seriously. Illegal to mention someone’s name? Because a private company banned a person who flouts their rules and incites violence.

The only “lawmaker” you should be concerned about trying to prevent free speech is the one who called the independent media “an enemy of the people”.

I’ll let you work out who said that as homework.

Trias11
Go join your "peaceful protestors". There's still some stuff left to burn and loot for your friends. Your upcoming ailing "leader" is fully supporting you.
eecks
I only realised 'him' was in reference to Donald Trump after reading your post. Before that I thought it was poor English.
Trias11
Technology is easy and scalable. Typical challenge for beginner startup to gain audience and traction is not a problem here either.

Unchain yourself from dorseys and zuckerbergs.

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hkarthik
There are three big challenges he has to overcome.

1. Make it work. This sounds easy with open source tech, but really hard if it includes effective content moderation from day one. That's a tough product problem to solve which only the largest consumer companies have addressed with their own proprietary technology.

2. Make it scale. This is hard, especially given the potential large userbase and the fact that none of the major public clouds like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft will likely host him without very strict content moderation policies. He's going to have to find some esoteric hosting providers that are willing to look the other way and potentially lose every other customer over it.

3. Make it cheap. Related to previous option, there are few viable hosts so he will have to pay a lot due to having little to no leverage on pricing. It could turn into a money pit very quickly without a rich corporate benefactor (that also has the tech) willing to take it on. Even friends like Peter Thiel at Palantir may not be able to do it with the potential risk it would pose to their other contracts.

moksly
The real issue would be how to make it profitable. If your user base is much further right than Fox, you’ll be hard pressed to attract advertising because most companies would not want their brand associated with you.

Which poses the problem of building your user base on a clone site. Where all your first movers would be exactly the kind of people that no one would want to join. Just look at voat, it was a Reddit clone and many people went to see what it was like, but left because of how disgusting the regular voat users were, and since 99% of us aren’t going to get banned from Twitter, why would we leave it to join a bunch of degenerates?

avl999
That joke about "Twitter...pffft... I can build that in a weekend" is coming full circle.
randomopining
I don't get why he just doesn't have a twitter-like daily news feed on the white house website.

Honestly I hate Trump but I think they've gone a bit too far. They should just filter individual tweets if needed (like they have). It comes across as divisive and heavy handed.