Newly hired Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino is pushing back on reports that Twitter traffic is plummeting as a result of the July 5 launch of a new competitor, Instagram Threads. But the company seems concerned about the potential threat posed by Meta's rival, which now exceeds 100 million users. Users reported that Twitter appears to be selectively blocking links to the Threads.net website in Twitter searches, making it difficult for anyone to display conversations on Threads or locate user profiles.
The technologist Andy Baio was one of those who noticed the change on Twitter after performing a search using the operator "url:threads.net," which returned no results. Typically, this search operator would get any tweet with links to the specified website, and there are already many tweets that have threads.net links included.
Image credits: Andy Baio in Threads
Also, a simpler search without the url: operator would return tweets referencing the threads.net website or Twitter users who are tweeting their Threads usernames to their followers (for example, "threads.net/@trplane), but didn't seem to return direct links to discussions taking place on the Threads platform (for example, something like https://www.threads.net/t/CuiNy-zPbbJ/).
Other users on Twitter also noticed and tweeted about the alleged change even before Baio's post.
The timing of the lockdown remains unclear as Twitter no longer responds to press inquiries following Elon Musk's acquisition of the social network last year.
This is not the first time that Musk's Twitter has blocked links to the site from a competitor.
Shortly after the newsletter platform Substacks launched its discussions feature, Substack Notes, Twitter began censoring those links by making posts impossible to reply to, like, or retweet. The current Threads block doesn't go that far... at least not yet.
However, animosity between social media executives Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has heated up in recent days, with Musk earlier this month challenging Zuckerberg to a "cage match".” Over the weekend, the owner of Twitter even resorted to insults, tweeting “Zuck is a cuckold”, and crudely proposing a “literal dick-sizing contest”.
Image credits: Twitter
On the other hand, Twitter CEO Yaccarino has taken a less adversarial stance, instead tweeting how Twitter traffic has been booming lately, with the logical intention of reassuring advertisers.
“I don't want to leave you hanging on a piece of information… but Twitter really outdid itself. Last week we had our busiest day since February." wrote. “There is only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know,” she added, in a not-too-subtle reference to Threads.
His comments follow numerous reports implying that Twitter traffic has been stagnating in the days since Threads' debut and rapidly increasing growth. Citing data from a web analytics company Similarweb, as reported by CNBC. Twitter web traffic decreased 5% during the first two days Threads was generally available, compared to the previous week. Additionally, Similarweb said that Twitter web traffic was down 11% compared to the same days in 2022.
Other data seemed to support these findings, including a Tweet from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, whose company provides content delivery network services and protection against denial-of-service attacks, among other things.
“Thumping up Twitter traffic”, tweeted Prince showing a graph of DNS rankings over time for Twitter.com, clearly showing a sharp drop.
Given these reports, Yaccarino's comments about Twitter's record usage seem questionable. Notably, the CEO did not share any specific metrics to compare or even what day the traffic he previously argued for spiked.
Although Threads is off to a fast start, having leveraged Instagram's social graph to quickly grow its user base and social connections, the app's long-term future is uncertain. After all, there is usually a spike in demand for a new app that will fizzle out when the initial testing phase ends. This was also seen with Twitter's open source rival, Mastodon, which peaked last year with 2,5 million monthly users but since then it has been reduced to 1,9 million currently, according to the own mastodon website.
However, it's worth noting that that figure is up from the 1,4 million early game in the current month, as Mastodon has also capitalized on Twitter's woes. In one of the strangest moves for a social media executive, Musk decided to limit the number of readable tweets as a solution to a data mining problem he had created by drastically increasing the prices of the API used by third-party data-gathering apps.
Zuckerberg cleverly took advantage of the fracaso Twitter to launch Threads even before its web version was fully functional and before its upcoming features like a follow-up feed and integration with ActivityPub (the network protocol Mastodon also uses) were available. As a result, Threads grew faster than ChatGPT, surpassing 100 million users in just five days, while ChatGPT it took him two months reach those metrics.
