Looking at Notes, I get why Elon is so mad about it. They totally ripped off the Twitter UI.
I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.
And it s not like twitter has some kind of optimal design. The heart button in the middle is bad for my fingers! the left sidebar is useless and search sucks. Both of these services should try to make good work instead of copying each other
I actually thought that a newsfeed would be a good fit for substack, but looking at this i dont think i m going to use it. It should be simpler, a timeline of things i ve subscribed, with some threaded, sane comments. The medium shapes the message, and twitter's medium is just not a good fit for substack's message
I didn't claim there was IP infringement. IG & lots of other companies stole the stories format from Snap. Makes it easier for users who recognize the ui, but it's still got to be galling.
I remember both MySpace and Facebook status updates actually being a copy of Twitter style updates. I don't think Facebook even had status updates as we know it today when Twitter released.
Why? It's just a UI for something where there aren't many alternative ways to present it. Timeline, follower, following. That's it. The rest is styling and that is even less relevant.
GitLab initially copied GitHub’s UI, virtually identically, and the CEO advertised GitLab in every thread that involved GH for over a year. It didn’t seem that many people on HN cared, because GitLab was “open source” and ethics didn’t apply.
I follow Ed Zitron's Substack, and he is also a prolific Tweeter. He seems to be using Notes the same way he uses Twitter, for shitposting. I'm not sure that's really in line with the tone of Substack.