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Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s new CEO, denies that Instagram Threads’ July 5 launch is hurting Twitter traffic. However, Meta’s 100 million-plus user rival appears to worry the company. On Monday, users reported that Twitter appears to be selectively blocking links to Threads.net’s website in Twitter searches, making it harder to find Threads conversations and profiles.
After searching “url:threads.net” on Twitter, technologist Andy Baio noticed the change. This search operator usually finds tweets with threads.net links, and there are many.
A simpler search without the operator “url:” will return tweets that reference the threads.net website or Twitter users who are tweeting their Threads usernames to their followers, but didn’t seem to return direct links to discussions on Threads’ platform (e.g., https://www.threads.net/t/CuiNy-zPbbJ/).
Before Baio’s post, Twitter users noticed and tweeted about the change.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter last year, Twitter no longer responds to press inquiries about the block’s start.
Musk has blocked competitor links before on Twitter.
Twitter blocked replies, likes, and retweets on Substack Notes posts shortly after the newsletter platform launched it. Threads does not yet go that far.
Musk earlier this month challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a “cage match,” escalating their feud. The Twitter owner called Zuck a cuck and suggested a “literal dick measuring contest” over the weekend.
Twitter CEO Yaccarino has tweeted that Twitter traffic is up, likely to reassure advertisers.
“Don’t leave you hanging…Twitter surpassed itself! “Last week was our biggest usage day since February,” the executive wrote. One Twitter. You know. “I know it,” she said, referencing Threads.
Her comments follow reports that Twitter traffic had plummeted since Threads’ debut and rapid rise. CNBC reported that Twitter’s web traffic dropped 5% in the first two days Threads was available compared to the week before, citing Similarweb data. Similarweb reported that Twitter’s web traffic dropped 11% from 2022.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince tweeted that his company’s content delivery network and denial-of-service attack protection services supported these findings.
Prince tweeted, “Twitter traffic tanking,” with a graph of Twitter.com DNS rankings showing a steep decline.
Twitter traffic tanking. https://t.co/KSIXqNsu40 pic.twitter.com/mLlbuXVR6r
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 9, 2023
These reports cast doubt on Yaccarino’s Twitter usage claims. The CEO didn’t provide metrics or even the day traffic spiked.
Threads leveraged Instagram’s social graph to quickly grow its user base and social connections, but its long-term viability is uncertain. After all, a new app’s initial demand usually dies down after the experimentation phase. Mastodon, an open-source Twitter competitor, peaked last year with 2.5 million monthly users but now has 1.9 million, according to its website.
As Mastodon has capitalized on Twitter’s issues, that figure is up from 1.4 million earlier this month. Musk limited the number of readable tweets to solve a data-scraping problem he created by dramatically raising API prices for third-party apps.
Zuckerberg took advantage of Twitter’s struggles to release Threads before its web version was fully functional and before its future features, like a following feed and ActivityPub integration (used by Mastodon), were ready. Threads reached 100 million users in five days, while ChatGPT took two months.
