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Art by Clark Miller

Copy and Kill: The Ex-Tweeps Hatching a Plan to Knock Off Twitter

A Twitter look-alike called T2 joins the flock of services offering an alternative to the original.

Art by Clark Miller

By

April 28, 2023 9:00 AM PDT

On the day Sarah Oh got laid off from Twitter last November, her friend Gabor Cselle called with his condolences. Then he made her an offer: Would she help him build a better Twitter?

Cselle wasn’t trying to reinvent the social media wheel. He just wanted to return to a simpler time on the platform—before 4,000-character tweets or the bloodbath of blue check marks. Before Donald Trump or Alex Jones or Ye could spread vitriol like a virus. Before Elon Musk or even Jack Dorsey ran the company. (Cselle blames Dorsey, not Musk, for greenlighting “one crappy growth hack after another” in pursuit of more monthly active users.)

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