The death of Twitter: Is it real this time, thanks to Threads?

Reports of the death of Twitter have so far been somewhat exaggerated. Musk may have made dumb decision after dumb decision, but each time either did a rapid U-turn shortly afterwards, or the sheer momentum of Twitter as the default social media app has carried it through.

But this time, Musk has not only achieved Michael Scott levels of ineptitude, but Meta has brought forward the launch of its Twitter rival Threads in order to take advantage of the chaos …

Twitter rate limits – the final straw?

Of all the times Musk has shot Twitter in the foot, rate limits is probably the most … um … Muskesque of them.

Twitter’s owner-but-not-CEO-honest claimed too many bots were scraping Twitter content, and said this was putting an unacceptable load on the servers. Rather than take action to block the bots specifically, Musk decided to limit everyone’s access to Twitter.

First, he made it impossible to read Twitter without being logged in. That, of course, broke embedded tweets and many other things. Second, he limited the number of tweets you can read – or, more accurately, scroll past.

Amusingly, the most likely explanation is that the bot in question was … Twitter.

Twitter is popular because Twitter is popular

So far, Musk has done plenty of things to drive brands away from advertising on Twitter, and plenty of things to annoy Twitter users, but each time most of us have eventually shrugged and asked ourselves: Where else are we going to go?

Sure, there are alternatives, among them:

• Mastodon
• Bluesky
• WT.Social
• Cohost
• Reddit

But none of them have achieved the critical mass needed to be a realistic alternative to Twitter. We need to post in the place people read, and we need to read in the place people post, and so far that’s been Twitter.

The death of Twitter is already real for many

But this is different. Instead of merely implementing policies which make Twitter a more annoying and less pleasant place to be, what Musk has done this time is put the platform somewhere on the scale of “Almost totally unusable” to “Completely broken.”

Many people found they were getting rate-limited every time they refreshed their timeline, either automatically or manually. Brands are stuck unable to tweet, because the old version of TweetDeck stopped working, and the new version doesn’t support the Teams feature which allows a single PR or marketing agency to tweet on behalf of different brands.

Just as example, here’s how my own Twitter feed looks right now:

For many, Twitter is already a dead platform; for others, it’s taking its last gasp of breath before the life-support machine runs out of power.

Threads seems set to be the first realistic alternative

It doesn’t matter how good a potential Twitter competitor might be, unless it can persuade the world to not only use it at all, but to view it as their new primary social network. So far, none of the would-be replacements have had the clout needed to achieve that.

But Threads seems likely to me to be it. Once the new app goes live, it’s for sure going to get the critical mass needed to make it viable not just as a Twitter alternative, but a Twitter replacement.

Sure, everyone loves to hate Meta and its robo-CEO, but it’s not like Twitter and Musk* are winning any popularity contests right now. If you want evidence that distaste for a company is no barrier to using its products, look no further than the world’s most popular messaging app: Meta-owned WhatsApp. (Third place, after China’s WeChat, is … Facebook Messenger.)

*I know Linda Yaccarino is technically Twitter’s CEO, but given she’s spend the last month or so trying to persuade advertisers that the chaos is over, and Musk has undone all her work with a single tweet, I doubt she’s going to stick around for long.

So yep, I think the death of Twitter could be real

We’ll have to wait and see, of course – while you can preorder the Threads app, it doesn’t go live for another couple of days.

But honestly, Zuckerberg must be drinking the world’s most expensive champagne for breakfast this week. Overnight, Threads has gone from a largely uninteresting Instagram spin-off to a serious contender to replace Twitter. I think this time Musk did figure out how to top his own track-record.

That’s my view – what’s yours? Could Threads replace Twitter? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.