Social media Instagram gears up to launch Twitter rival this week By Sarah Frier July 4, 2023 Instagram’s highly anticipated Twitter rival is expected to launch on Thursday, according to a listing on Apple’s App Store. The app, called Threads, will function similarly to Twitter, with text-based posts that can be liked, commented on and shared, according to examples of screenshots on the App Store listing. People will be able to follow the accounts they follow on Instagram and keep their same user name. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook parent company Meta Platforms, declined to comment. Instagram’s Twitter-like app is the latest salvo in the battle between the social media giants.Credit: Getty With the launch, Meta is seeking to take advantage of Twitter’s problems since the social media service was taken over last year by Elon Musk. Among the issues that have angered users, and spurred them to seek alternative platforms, are Twitter’s loosening content moderation policies, and requiring a monthly subscription fee to be labelled as an authentic account. There are also problems with site reliability. On Saturday, Twitter began temporarily limiting the number of posts users can see. Instagram has been touting its forthcoming app with various celebrities and influencers for months, aiming to generate a buzz when it launches. The app is available for “pre-order” and is “expected” on Thursday, according to the App Store listing. There, Threads is described as “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today, to what’ll be trending tomorrow”. Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has a long history of borrowing ideas from competitors — and it hasn’t always worked out. But when the company’s copycat products succeed, they can catch on quickly. The feature for posts that disappear after 24 hours, called “stories,” was copied from Snapchat in 2016. Now, far more people use that format on Meta’s apps than use Snapchat. Meta more recently made a short-video product similar to TikTok, called “reels.” In earnings calls, company executives have said reels are driving growth on both Instagram and Facebook. More than 3 billion people daily used at least one of Meta’s apps — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — in the first quarter of the year, the company reported in April. Bloomberg
Musk is partaking in fantasy when he proclaims that Twitter is seeing "record user engagement". The reality is that Twitter is nowhere near peak user engagement. Even back in March (when Musk was proclaiming this), Twitter was nowhere near the user engagement compared to the previous March. Nobody can see the numbers improving recently -- seeing that Musk is limited users to viewing a mere 600 posts per day. This will hardly maintain current user engagement, much less increasing it -- of course while entirely infuriating advertisers. Twitter seeing 'record user engagement'? The data tells a different story A quarter of Twitter users said they 'are not very or not at all likely to be on Twitter a year from now.' https://www.zdnet.com/article/twitt...-engagement-the-data-tells-a-different-story/
It's becoming more clear that Musk's Twitter rate limits are due to him not paying his bills to cloud hosting and other vendors -- and has nothing to do with "data scraping" and "system manipulation." Twitter's rate limits may be driven by financial issues and are likely an attempt by Elon Musk to cut costs, ex-employee says https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-rate-limits-cut-costs-former-employee-elon-musk-2023-7
Twitter's Death Is Something We Should Have All Seen Coming Elon Musk should have just gone to therapy instead of wasting billions. https://www.thegamer.com/twitter-death-elon-musk-rate-limit-social-media/ Twitter is in its death throes once again. This weekend saw new technical limits imposed on non-premium users regarding how many tweets they could view in a day. Elon Musk claims this is to tackle "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” with non-verified accounts now limited to reading just 1,000 tweets per day. Verified users however can scroll through 10,000 before being locked out. The reasons put forth by Musk are utter nonsense, and you don’t have to dig far to discover why. According to a number of reports and insiders speaking out online, Musk has failed to stay up to date with his Google Cloud subscription, and thus the corporation has limited the access it has to its services. The end of a quarter came along, and the social media platform has been faring so terribly that it’s now paying the price for failing to foot the bills required to keep the lights on. Musk isn’t protecting us from hackers or data scraping, he’s covering up his own incompetence with yet another obnoxious lie. Forbes revealed yesterday that the company is facing a sixth lawsuit over unpaid office rent, so he must really hate paying bills. (Much more at above url)
Well it is ET so wtf.... I'll betcha posting rights. Twitter is not going away bro, that's like the dumbest thing you have ever said. A tough nut to crack btw.
You guys are too stupid to know why Elon is requiring a membership to view/post on TWTR. Write this down..... Elon is building the network Trump tried and failed to build. Get back to me in 3 years. TWTR is a goldmine.
I didn't say it's going offline, it will be like Parler or some other right-wing shithole, 'Threads' will get all the celebrities and media organizations in no time and Twitter's main selling point of being the app for breaking news is going to take a huge hit. I give it three months if the roll out for Threads is smooth.