ELON MUSK’S STEWARDSHIP of social media giant Twitter has generated much discussion yet again this week.
On Saturday, the most basic functionality of the microblogging site was throttled as its owner announced ordinary users would be capped at seeing 600 tweets per day, with a limit of 6,000 for subscribed Twitter Blue members paying at least €8 a month.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Twitter and you’re wondering whether that’s a lot, roughly 500 million tweets are posted per day. It’s sort of like – at a bit of a stretch – if The Journal told you that you could only read one word from one headline per day, or pay us some money and we’ll let you read almost an entire headline.
The caps have since been relaxed, though some users are still reporting problems with functionality — problems with functionality have persisted throughout Musk’s entire tenure.
The unexpected change sent many users searching for somewhere else to get their fix of information, content and community, and many migrated to Bluesky which is (for now) an invite-only replica of Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, who you may remember as… the co-founder of Twitter.
Such was the scale of the shift that Bluesky warned of “some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic”. Anyone who pays close attention to the vagaries of the social media industry will remember that social media site Mastodon experienced a similar migration in November, shortly after Musk first bought Twitter.
After that short-lived surge, Mastodon ultimately went back to its original level of popularity (or obscurity, depending on how you look at it).
Anecdotally, a similar issue could face Bluesky. Social media sites populated only by hardcore users don’t tend to produce the same level of varied content that makes a behemoth like Twitter still so popular despite its increasing problems.
Notes, a microblogging Platform launched by Substack, and Post, a Twitter-like service mainly aimed at publishers like journalists and writers, both experienced short-lived surges before falling by the wayside.
Saturday’s tumult was only the beginning of what promises to be another long week for Twitter.
We have just launched a new, improved version of TweetDeck. All users can continue to access their saved searches & workflows via https://t.co/2WwL3hNVR2 by selecting “Try the new TweetDeck” in the bottom left menu.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 3, 2023
Some notes on getting started and the future of the product…
On Tuesday morning, Twitter Support announced that it was launching a new version of Tweetdeck – an account management tool used by organisations, businesses and individuals to schedule tweets, refine the kind of tweets they see, and manage multiple accounts at once. Essentially, it’s like if you could have 10 Twitter timelines open side-by-side all at once, each one with a different purpose.
It is likely that any large Twitter account you follow uses Tweetdeck in some capacity.
By the start of next month, only paying users will be able to use Tweetdeck – a hard-sell, given that many users don’t seem to like the new Tweetdeck format as much as they liked the old one. Some are already complaining about bugs in the new system — finding once again that there are limits to how many tweets they can see, or that their lists of tweets won’t populate at all (even for Twitter Blue users).
Tried the 'New' Tweetdeck, which removes the ability to have lists from multiple accounts on the same deck, and it appears my lists have been rate limited after less than an hour, even though I have Twitter Blue. My home feed still runs. Is this a bug? pic.twitter.com/wzhgQF1lNV
— iambinarymind (@iambinarymind) July 3, 2023
It appears that much like Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg has also smelled blood in the water.
The Facebook CEO won’t get the chance to show off his jiu-jitsu skills in a cage-fight against Musk (since his mother pulled the plug on their proposed fight), but it seems he’s primed to land a blow on Twitter’s corner of the internet.
The company announced that its Twitter competitor, currently advertised in the Apple App Store under the name ‘Threads, an Instagram app’, will be made available to users in the US and UK on Thursday.
Screengrabs from the app prototype show an interface that is nearly identical to Twitter, and suggests strongly that Zuckerberg is trying his hand at absorbing the Twitter fallout.
Concerns have been raised over whether Meta sharing data between its various apps, like Instagram and Threads, will pose a problem under EU law, and so the company is holding off on its EU launch for now.
This means that Twitter remains the only app that does exactly what its users want it to do – even if that becomes less and less the case with each passing week.
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