Who Really Runs Twitter?

Elon Musk seems to be having trouble letting go.

Despite having stepped down from the company, the former "Chief Twit" of Twitter continues to make decisions, both small and large, that haven't done the company any favors and are undermining current CEO Linda Yaccarino's efforts to make the social media platform profitable.

The latest? Limiting the number of tweets users can read in a day. On paper, the move was designed to limit the "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation" experienced by the platform (perhaps to prevent OpenAI from feeding more training data into ChatGPT?), but in practice resulted in users being greeted with the "rate limit exceeded" messages. What followed were user complaints and hilarious tweets like this:

And then, in a further attempt to alienate the Twitter user base and truly turn the platform into a "pay-to-win" website, Twitter announced that only verified users will be able to access TweetDeck. This means that individuals and enterprises unwilling to pay $8/month and $1,000/month to remain verified, can kiss their access to TweetDeck bubye.

All of this really begs the question: who really is running Twitter? Is it Elon Musk, with his erratic decision-making and disregard for due process? Or Linda Yaccarino, who left NBC to head the social media company as its CEO just last month?

"This move signals to the marketplace that he's not capable of empowering her to save him from himself," Lou Paskalis, the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and former marketing boss at Bank of America, said referring to Musk and Yaccarino, following the daily read limit on Twitter.

We couldn't agree more.

Twitter ranked #7 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankingsthis week.

Meta to Capture Disgruntled Twitter Users with 'Threads'

Twitter's social media rival, months in the making, is finally making its debut.

Called 'Threads', the app is Meta's attempt at capturing disgruntled users that are tired of Elon Musk's shenanigans and just want a platform that is "sanely run." Launching July 6, users can expect to be welcomed by a user interface eerily similar to that of Twitter's, the only difference being that people would have to log in using Instagram (also owned by Meta). In fact, Threads' official page on the Apple app store calls it "Instagram’s text-based conversation app".

According to The Guardian, 'Threads' was originally the name of a 2019 app Meta launched to compete with the youth-focused messaging app Snapchat but later abandoned. The company has decided to revive the branding to take on Twitter instead.

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and CEO of Meta, was recently in the news foragreeing to fight Elon Musk some time in the future. Both billionaires have a bit of a history and really seem to dislike each other. With the launch of Threads, the animosity is only likely to increase, and if the Twitter rival ends up becoming more successful, there's no telling how Musk will react.

HackerNoonfirst reported the existence of Threads in March, with additional reporting in June. At the time, Threads was referred to as 'Project 92' within Meta offices.

The launch of Threads could indicate a softening of position for Zuckerberg's long-held ambition of ruling the world with VR, which has already cost the company billions of dollars and earned the ire of the company's shareholders. To course correct, the young CEO has announced thousands of job cuts and is increasingly dabbling into promising avenues, including artificial intelligence.

Meta ranked #37 on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings this week. Instagram was #1, while Facebook was on the #6 spot.

In Other News.. 📰

• Mastodon wins, Twitter loses: Elon Musk's chaotic decisions are only boosting the popularity of Twitter's rivals, including Germany's Mastodon.
• Subscription services at Snap seem to be working. The legacy social media app recently revealed that its subscription service Snapchat+ hit 4 million members. The service, which costs $3.99/month, was launched in June of last year.
• Microsoft and Nvidia were among a slew of investors that funneled about $1.3 billion in Inflection AI, an AI startup founded by Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
• Binance is not welcome in Germany.
• U.S. regulators plan to sue Amazon for rewarding online merchants that use its logistics services and punishing those that don't.

And that's a wrap! Don't forget to share this newsletter with your family and friends!

See y'all next week. PEACE! ☮️

— Sheharyar Khan, Editor, Business Tech @ HackerNoon