If they want to overtake twitter or whatever it’s called now, they need a functioning search, the one thing twitter is still good at is searching for real time events.
All in good time. I suspect meta hired all the good engineers that left twitter - praised be their effort to undermine musk - and they are likely working on a neat way of implementing it such that it works better. I dont like meta, but i am confident tech wise it will kick ass.
They've explicitly said in interviews that they moved up the launch date because of the Twitter rate limiting fiasco, which is why it wasn't launched with all the features they had planned.
yes really. rate limiting reading to average users is completely different than rate limiting writing. the average user doesn't post, so it's already impacting a completely different demographic
Rate-limiting of itself isn't the issue. No one really wants to deal with unbounded flow and infinite load. It's a matter of what, exactly the limits are set to, and whether those are reasonable, understandable, and well-understood before the changes are implemented.
The limits on posting to Twitter — 500 direct messages per day, 2,400 tweets, seem reasonable enough to most people.
However, I have feedback from people with extensive DM group systems that find the 500 DM limit really chafing. They generally operate private accounts and use the DM system to maintain multiple private groups for various reasons of online confidentiality.
Further, it was the rate limit on reading posts, 6,000 per day (avg. 250/hour), which meant many accounts monitoring breaking real-time world events found the platform to all-too-easily locked up.
For example, if you are doing Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), you often have to scour through a bunch of chafe (crap posts, disinformation, look-at-me distractions, etc.) to get the few kernels of grain (new, unique information) you are looking for. The rate of posts for a suddenly stochastically popular keyword or hashtag means that you can fill that pipe really quickly — sometimes less than an hour.
Twitter API changes have been perceived as utterly draconian, especially for researchers into, say, disinformation analysis.
The thing is that Elon is making these changes without any sort of grace period, or any sort of actual plan. Zero accommodations. Capricious, mercurial changes like this are being seen as user hostile.
I get that, and maybe I'm a dinosaur in terms of social network user expectations....but how can you not have that as part of your SOCIAL network? But I guess it's just a platform for surfacing whatever engaging content the platform designers can think up these days.
You can't censor content without it being blatantly obvious while you're serving content chronologically, so I'm guessing their "following" feed either won't last, or won't be chronological (for long).
The main issue is that Threads is attempting to replicate Twitter, and other services are also striving to be "better Twitter," making it challenging to encourage a significant migration of users.
To stand out, Threads and other platforms should consider offering something truly unique, which might entice people to switch.
