I know it’s owned by Meta and that’s kinda icky but I am glad that Threads is finally on the web. Not every feature is there yet, but if you’re there, give me a follow!
Category: Social Media
Some Tasty Numbers Concering X ⇢
Matt Binder at Mashable, reporting on data from Travis Brown about Elon Musk’s 153 million followers:
Of the 153,209,283 X accounts following Musk at the time the data was collected, around 42 percent of Musk’s followers, or more than 65.3 million users, have zero followers on their own account. Just over 72 percent, or nearly 112 million, of these users following Musk have less than 10 followers on their account.
When it comes to content creation on the platform, more than 62.5 million Musk followers have zero tweets. This would include users who have deleted all of their tweets by the time this data was collected over the past few weeks as well as accounts that have never before tweeted. More than 100 million Musk followers have less than 10 tweets posted to their account.
X Gon’ Take It From Ya ⇢
Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:
The owner of the @x Twitter handle confirmed that the company, now known as X, took over his account without warning or financial compensation, telling him the handle is a property of X. The handle had previously belonged to Gene X Hwang of the corporate photography and videography studio Orange Photography. In a letter, the company formerly known as Twitter thanked Hwang for his loyalty and offered him a selection of X merchandise and a tour of X’s HQ, as a “reflection of our appreciation.”
Threads Adds Following Feed, in the Most Meta Way Possible ⇢
Jay Peters, writing about today’s update to Threads:
The much-needed Following feed is unfortunately a bit hidden: you can make it appear by tapping the home icon at the bottom of the screen or the Threads logo at the top. Once you see it, you can switch between “Following,” which shows posts in reverse-chronological order, and “For You,” which is the algorithmically sorted feed the app has offered since launch.
But a few of us at The Verge noticed that Threads will occasionally rehide the Following feed and bring you back to the For You feed after you open the app. (You can test it for yourself by force closing and reopening the app.) Unfortunately, it sounds like that’s by design, based on a statement from Meta.
Thread Passes 100 Million Users ⇢
Jay Peters and Jon Porter, reporting at The Verge:
Instagram’s new Threads app has already surpassed 100 million users, meaning it reached the milestone dramatically faster than even ChatGPT. OpenAI’s chatbot passed the mark after two months, but Threads, which only launched on Wednesday, got there in a matter of days. The number of users can be found in the Instagram app, which tracks the size of the Threads userbase.
Late last year, Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter had around 260 million monetizable daily active users. At least he’s taking it well.
Threads
As just about everyone knows, Meta’s Twitter competitor launched last night, and as of this writing, has 30 million users.
I think most people in our corner of the Internet have pretty mixed feelings about it. I love the idea of federated social media, but Mastodon is proving too complex for the masses. Then there is the gatekeeping done by some to keep the platform what they want it to be is a pretty big turn-off for some.
Maybe Zuck is Winning the Fight With Elon Anyway
A few fun stories this month today in The Social Media Apocalypse:
- Tweets aren’t showing up in Google results as often because of changes at Twitter
- Twitter’s ‘new’ Tweetdeck lives behind a verified paywall
- Meta to launch its new Threads app this week as Twitter falls apart
So as Twitter continues to evolve into the Internet’s silliest island, Meta is ready to come in and build a mansion right on the beach. I don’t often root for Meta to win, but I think if anyone could replace Twitter for the masses, it’s going to be them with Threads.
Twitter Pulls Redditesque Move That Itself Was Inspired by Reddit Wanting to be Like Twitter ⇢
Over at The Verge, Wes Davis and Richard Lawler are reporting on the new paywall that has been erected around Twitter:
Elon Musk continues to blame Twitter’s new limitations on AI companies scraping “vast amounts of data” as he announced new “temporary” limits on how many posts people can read.
Now unverified accounts will only be able to see 600 posts per day, and for “new” unverified accounts, just 300 in a day. The limits for verified accounts (presumably whether they’re bought as a part of the Twitter Blue subscription, granted through an organization, or verification Elon forced on people like Stephen King, LeBron James, and anyone else with more than a million followers) still allow reading only a maximum of 6,000 posts per day.
Steve Huffman’s Inspiration in Ruining Reddit: Elon Musk ⇢
In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.
Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.
Apollo Shutting Down June 30 ⇢
Christian Selig, writing on Reddit:
Eight years ago, I posted in the Apple subreddit about a Reddit app I was looking for beta testers for, and my life completely changed that day. I just finished university and an internship at Apple, and wanted to build a Reddit client of my own: a premier, customizable, well-designed Reddit app for iPhone. This fortunately resonated with people immediately, and it’s been my full time job ever since.
Reddit’s API Pricing is Ridiculous ⇢
Christian Selig, the developer behind the Reddit client Apollo got some shockingly bad news from Reddit today:
Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.
Twitter Removes ‘Legacy’ Verification Checkmarks ⇢
I’ve been verified on Twitter for years, and at the time it happened, I was pretty excited about it. It felt like a badge of honor as someone who works in media. Today, I honestly couldn’t care less about it going away, and that makes me a little sad for what Twitter has become.