By RayJaun Stelly, The Seattle Medium
Social media platform Twitter has been up and running for 17 years and counting. Founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams, the application has emerged as one of the most popular social media platforms ever, as it is utilized by a wide variety of users, including businesses, celebrities, athletes, entertainers, and regular 9-5 working civilians.
Fast forward to today, and Twitter has experiencing changes that some of its users have not been accustomed to. Since being acquired by billionaire Elon Musk acquired for $44 billion the platform has been criticized by users who aren’t in favor of the direction Twitter may be headed.
On July 1, Elon Musk sent out a tweet, “To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits. Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts daily, unverified accounts to 600 posts a day, and new unverified accounts to 300 posts daily.”
The tweet and new guidelines sent some users into an uproar throughout the day because they were being limited, regardless of their verification status, which is something and this was something that has yet to happen on the platform.
Torrence Baker, a small business owner in Seattle, has been a Twitter user since July 2011 and is not in agreement with Twitter’s direction under Musk.
“Twitter will always be superior to me,” says Baker. “Right now, it’s just been run in this messed up way since Elon took over, it’s almost like Twitter is in a ‘make America great again’ type of vibe,” said Baker.“Then you factor in how he treated the employees; Twitter is in a weird state.”
With controversy looming with regard to limiting how many posts users can read, many users, like Baker, began to look for other platforms to suit their social media needs, and ‘Threads’, a social media platform launched by Meta at the beginning of July, seemed to fit the bill for many people who were on the fence about Twitter moving forward.
According to decrypt.co, Threads is broadly viewed as an alternative and challenger to Twitter, as it quickly became the fastest-growing app of all time, amassing 100 million users in just five days.
Threads, which allow users to share text updates and engage in public conversations, are linked through one’s Instagram profile and have eye-popping characteristics that appeal to many users, like making posts that contain up to 500 characters. Although Threads is focused on text-based social networking, its posts can involve links, photos, and videos up to five minutes long.
Local business owner Kai Greene, who joined Twitter in November 2012, is not ready to completely give up on the application just yet.
“Threads will never beat out people doing the same thing on the app, but Twitter has decade-long accounts users that aren’t trying to lose that in all honesty,” said Greene. “Twitter is more organic because we all made it what it is, Threads can only be a copycat.”
Twitter has 250 million users which could ultimately work to the application’s advantage considering all the features it has compared to Threads. Although Threads appears to be mirroring the Twitter platform, to get rid of your account it requires a user to delete their Instagram page and that is not the case for Twitter.
With Elon Musk temporarily suspending the feature that allows users to only receive or read a certain amount of content, and Mark Zuckerberg forcing users to keep their Instagram accounts in order to have access to Threads leaves to question which platform will users choose as both applications continue to evolve?
“Twitter will always be until Elon completely destroys it and forces users to pay even for just using the app,” said Carliss Bussey, Jr., who’s been a Twitter user since January 2015. “Threads has a perfect window to capitalize on building its platform to compete with Twitter right now. The only way they can compete is by giving a great social experience while doing everything Twitter won’t do.”
“If Threads is in it for a 10–15-year window then they can compete long term with Twitter. They have to consistently do a lot of leg work to show that they are a serious competitor. If they want results quickly, they’ll be gone in 2 years,” added Bussey.
