Recently appointed Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino is refuting claims that Twitter’s traffic is plummeting due to the emergence of a new competitor, Instagram Threads.
However, the company does express concern about the potential threat posed by Meta’s rival, which has already amassed over 100 million users.
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On Monday, users reported that Twitter appeared to be selectively blocking links to the Threads.net website in Twitter searches.
This made it more challenging for individuals to discover conversations on Threads or locate users’ profiles.
Tech expert Andy Baio noticed this change on Twitter when conducting a search using the operator “url:threads.net,” which yielded no results.
Typically, this search operator would display tweets with links to the specified website, and there are indeed numerous tweets currently containing threads.net links.
Other users on Twitter also observed and tweeted about this alteration even before Baio’s post.
However, it remains unclear when the block started, as Twitter no longer responds to press inquiries following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social network last year.
It is important to note that these changes are subject to flux, so the effectiveness may vary depending on when this report is read.
This is not the first time Musk’s Twitter has blocked links to a competitor’s website.
When the newsletter platform Substack launched its discussions feature, Substack Notes, Twitter began censoring those links by disabling the ability to reply to, like, or retweet such posts.
The current blocking related to Threads does not go as far, at least not yet.
The rivalry between Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has intensified in recent days, with Musk challenging Zuckerberg to a “cage match.”
Over the weekend, the owner of Twitter resorted to name-calling, referring to Zuckerberg as a “cuck” and proposing a crude “literal dick measuring contest.”
On the other hand, Twitter CEO Yaccarino has taken a less confrontational stance, reassuring advertisers by tweeting about the recent surge in Twitter traffic.
She wrote, “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.”
In her statement, she subtly references Threads, emphasizing that Twitter is the unique platform.
Yaccarino’s remarks come in response to numerous reports suggesting that Twitter’s traffic had declined following the launch and rapid growth of Threads.
Twitter traffic tanking. https://t.co/KSIXqNsu40 pic.twitter.com/mLlbuXVR6r
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 9, 2023
According to web analytics firm Similarweb, Twitter’s web traffic dropped by 5% during the first two days of Threads’ availability compared to the previous week.
Additionally, Similarweb reported that Twitter’s web traffic decreased by 11% compared to the same days in 2022.
Other data seems to support these findings, including a tweet by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who shared a graph showing a sharp decline in DNS rankings for Twitter.com, indicating a decline in traffic.
Given these reports, Yaccarino’s claims about record usage on Twitter raise doubts.
Notably, she did not provide specific metrics for comparison or specify the day when the traffic spiked.
Although Threads has experienced a rapid start by leveraging Instagram’s social graph to quickly expand its user base and connections, its long-term future remains uncertain.
Typically, new apps witness a surge in demand during the initial experimentation phase, which then tapers off.
This pattern was evident with the open-source Twitter competitor Mastodon, which peaked at 2.5 million monthly users last year but has since dropped to 1.9 million, according to Mastodon’s website.
However, it is worth mentioning that Mastodon’s user count has increased from 1.4 million earlier this month, as the platform capitalized on Twitter’s struggles.
In a peculiar move by a social media executive, Musk limited the number of readable tweets as a solution to a data scraping problem that he had created by significantly raising prices for the API used by third-party apps for data collection.
Zuckerberg astutely seized the opportunity presented by Twitter’s faltering and rushed out Threads even before its web version was fully functional or its upcoming features.
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Like a following feed and integration with ActivityPub (also used by Mastodon), were available.
As a result, Threads grew faster than ChatGPT, surpassing 100 million users in just five days, while it took ChatGPT two months to achieve the same scale.
