Twitter Chaos Over Tweet 142l65 Reading Limits Leaves Door Open for Meta’s Rival Microblogging App Threads

Meta group has listed new app in stores as "Threads, an Instagram app", available for pre-order in the United States. 4j6t3h

By Agence -Presse | Updated: 5 July 2023 09:06 IST

Twitter Chaos Over Tweet-Reading Limits Leaves Door Open for Meta’s Rival Microblogging App Threads

Photo Credit: Google Play 4k2z6y

Twitter announced Monday that access to TweetDeck would be limited to verified s next month

Highlights

Musk has said he wants to make boost income from Twitter subscriptions
On the weekend, Musk limited the posts readers could view
The rollout of Threads represents a direct challenge to Twitter

ment

Twitter s with more drastic changes to the social media giant, and he is facing a new challenge as tech nemesis Mark Zuckerberg prepares to launch a rival app this week.

Facebook, has listed a new app in stores as "Threads, an Instagram app", available for pre-order in the United States, with a message saying it is "expected" this Thursday.

The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run "sanely" irked Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight.

Twitter's Move to Limit Tweet Views Will Affect s: Here's How

Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,37,465 crore), Musk has fired thousands of employees and charged s $8 a month to have a blue checkmark and a "verified" .

On the weekend, he limited the posts readers could view and decreed that nobody could look at a tweet unless they were logged in, meaning external links no longer work for many.

He said he needed to fire up extra servers just to cope with the demand as artificial intelligence (AI) companies scraped "extreme levels" of data to train their models.

Here's What Twitter's New CEO Said About the New Tweet-Reading Limits

But commentators have poured scorn on that idea and marketing experts say he has massively alienated both his base and the rs he needs to get profits rolling.

In another move that shocked s, Twitter TweetDeck, an app that allows s to monitor several s at once, would be limited to verified s next month.

John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, told AFP that plenty of people wanted to quit Twitter for ethical reasons after Musk took over, but he had now given them a technical reason to leave too.

And he added that Musk's decision to sack thousands of workers meant it had long been expected that the site would become "technically unusable".

Remarkably bad

Musk has said he wants to make Twitter less reliant on advertising and boost income from subscriptions.

Yet he chose advertising specialist Linda Yaccarino as his chief executive recently, and she has spoken of going into "hand-to-hand combat" to win back rs.

"How do you tell Twitter rs that your most engaged free s potentially will never see their ads because of data caps on their usage," tweeted Justin Taylor, a former marketing executive at Twitter.

Mike Proulx, vice president at market research firm Forrester, said the weekend's chaos had been "remarkably bad" for both s and rs.

"rs depend on reach and engagement yet Twitter is currently decimating both," he told AFP.

He said Twitter had "moved from stable to startup" and Yaccarino, who remained silent over the weekend, would struggle to restore its credibility, leaving the door open to Twitter's rivals to suck up any cash from rs.

Open secret

The technical reasons Musk gave for limiting the views of s immediately brought a backlash.

Many social media s speculated that Musk had simply failed to pay the bill for his servers.

French social data analyst Florent Lefebvre said AI firms were more likely to train their models on books and media articles than social network content, which "is of much poorer quality, full of mistakes and lacking in context".

Yoel Roth, who stepped down as Twitter's head of security weeks after Musk took over, said the idea that data scraping had caused such performance problems that s needed to be forced to "doesn't the sniff test".

"Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access," he wrote on the Bluesky social network — another Twitter rival.

"We knew about it. It was fine."

From the Nothing Phone 2 to the Motorola Razr 40 Ultra, several new smartphones are expected to make their debut in July. We discuss all of the most exciting smartphones coming this month and more on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.

Comments

For the latest reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.