Twitter disables links to rival Threads, as its CEO dismisses concerns of traffic decline – Recently hired Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino is disputing allegations that Twitter traffic is plummeting as a result of the July 5th launch of a new competitor, Instagram Threads, but however, the company appears to be concerned about the potential threat posed by Meta’s rival, which now has more than 100 million users. Users claimed on Monday that Twitter appears to be selectively blocking links to Threads.net’s website in Twitter searches, making it more difficult for anyone to find Threads conversations or access users’ profiles.
Andy Baio, a technologist, was among several who discovered the change on Twitter after conducting a search using the operator “url:threads.net,” which yielded no results. Typically, this search operator would fetch tweets that contained links to the chosen domain — and currently, there are so many tweets that contain the Threads.net.link now.
Furthermore, a simpler search without the operator “URL:” bit will return tweets that reference the threads.net website or Twitter users who are tweeting out their Threads usernames to their followers (like “threads.net/@techcrunch, for example), but did not appear to return direct links to discussions taking place on Threads’ platform (e.g. https://www.threads.net/t/CuiNy-zPbbJ/).
Even before Baio’s article, others on Twitter had noticed and tweeted about the shift. The exact start date of the block is unknown because Twitter no longer answers press inquiries following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network last year.
(Because these modifications are still in the works, your mileage may vary depending on when you see this report.)
Also, see: Snap is teaming up with Linktree to allow users include links in their profiles
This is not the first time Musk’s Twitter account has restricted links to a competitor’s website.
Twitter began censoring the links shortly after the mailing platform Substack released its comments feature, Substack Notes, by making the postings impossible to react to, like, or retweet. The existing Threads block does not go that far…yet.
The feud between the social media executives, Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has erupted in recent days, with Musk earlier this month daring Zuckerberg to a “cage match.” Over the weekend, the Twitter owner turned to name-calling, writing, “Zuck is a cuck,” and coarsely proposing a “literal dick measuring contest.”
Also, see: Threads App Set to Reach 100 Million Users Under a WeekTwitter Reportedly Sees Traffic Drop
Twitter CEO Yaccarino, on the other hand, has chosen a less confrontational stance, tweeting instead about how Twitter traffic has been rising recently, perhaps with the intention of comforting advertisers.
“Don’t want to leave you hanging by a thread… but Twitter, you really outdid yourselves! Last week we had our largest usage day since February,” the exec wrote. “There’s only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it,” she added, in a veiled reference to Threads.
Her comments come on the heels of various reports claiming that Twitter traffic had plummeted in the days following Threads’ introduction and rapid rise. CNBC claimed that Twitter’s site traffic had decreased by 5% in the first two days Threads was generally available, citing statistics from online analytics firm Similarweb. In addition, Similarweb reported that Twitter’s web traffic was down 11% compared to the same days in 2022.
Other evidence appeared to verify these conclusions, including a tweet from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, whose company, among other things, provides content delivery network services and security against denial-of-service assaults.
“Twitter traffic tanking,” Prince tweeted, displaying a graph of DNS rankings for Twitter.com over time, which showed a sharp fall.
In light of these facts, Yaccarino’s remarks on Twitter’s record usage sound dubious. Notably, the CEO did not provide any precise figures for comparison, nor specify which day the traffic spike occurred.
Though Threads has gotten off to a fast start, leveraging Instagram’s social graph to rapidly increase its user base and users’ social connections, the app’s long-term viability remains unknown. After all, there is usually a burst of demand for new software that subsequently fades away once the first trial period is through. This was also observed with Mastodon, an open-source Twitter competitor that peaked last year with 2.5 million monthly users but has subsequently declined to 1.9 million as of today, according to Mastodon’s website.
It’s worth noting, though, that this figure is up from 1.4 million earlier this month, indicating that Mastodon, too, has benefited from Twitter’s problems. Musk made one of the most unusual acts by a social media executive when he chose to limit the number of readable tweets as a response to a data scraping problem that he had created by drastically boosting charges for the API used by third-party apps for data-gathering.
Zuckerberg wisely took advantage of Twitter’s inability to launch Threads before its web version was completely functional or its forthcoming features, like a following feed and integration with ActivityPub (the networking protocol also used by Mastodon), were available. As a result, Threads grew quicker than ChatGPT, surpassing 100 million members in just 5 days, while ChatGPT grew at a slower pace within two months.
