2 minute read
Not content with pitting Elon Muck and Mark Zuckerberg together in a cage fight, the two companies are now going head to head as Meta launches its potential Twitter-killer Threads.
Twitter has been a dumpster fire ever since Elon Musk decided to buy it and turn it round from the failed company it was to the impressively even more failed company it currently is. But now it could be facing potentially its worst week ever as not only does it roll out several deeply unpopular policies but also Facebook-owner Meta finally releases its long-mooted “text based conversation app” Threads.
Threads has appeared in the iOS App Store as a prerelease which is going to be available for download on 6 July. And the timing of the release could not have been worse for Twitter. At the weekend, Musk suddenly rolled out a limit of 600 tweet views per user, citing extreme AI data scraping as a reason for the restrictions. Verified (ie paid) accounts got 10x that number, with the promise that the number would soon ramp up to 1000/10,000, but many people weren’t impressed.
It’s a classic Muskian not-thought-through policy. In the US, the National Weather Service said it may be unable to see tweeted reports of severe weather and associated damage, and asked subscribers to use its office telephone numbers instead.
Twitter also blocked unregistered users from being able to see tweets, and then said it stuck the cherry on top of everything by stating it was finally rolling out a new version of its popular TweetDeck app — but that it was sticking it behind a Verified-user paywall. The stampede for the exit was impressive in its scope
People have been leaving Twitter in droves for some time now, but alternatives are either a bit finicky for the generally mass market, have a user base that feels way too small, or both. That said, according to Reuters, Bluesky, launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and currently operating in beta mode, said it saw "record high traffic" on Saturday and that it was temporarily pausing new sign-ups. Meanwhile Mastodon also saw its active user base swell by 110,000 on that day
Threads, though, which is rolling out under the Instagram umbrella, could change the playing field entirely. For all of Facebook’s many wrongs, it does know how to put a UI together and it has the marketing clout and deep pockets to give Threads a huge push. It will also undoubtedly allow easy cross-posting between its various platforms as it already does with Instagram and Facebook. And Insta’s 2 billion monthly active users gives it a frankly ludicrous amount of leverage.
It is though a very different beast to the alternatives. On the left the privacy policy for Mastodon, on the right the one for Threads.
Do people care about this? The next few weeks will see. As the old saying goes, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Or, rather, you don’t pays your money and you see what the alternatives are. Either way, the increasingly acrimonious rivalry between Musk and Zuckerberg and the Hobson’s Choice it provides us as users looks more likely to be settled on screen rather than in a cage fight.
(As an aside, it has to be said that the name Threads will strike a certain amount of terror into anyone who watched the devastating 1984 BBC drama on the aftereffects of nuclear war. It is also the name of a lethal alien spore that burrows into the ground and destroys everything it touches in the Anne McCaffery Dragronriders of Pern series, which may or may not become a useful metaphor in the weeks ahead...)
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