2023: What’s going on with Twitter? Just weird X things
Clients are reporting dysfunctionalities with WordPress plugins loading tweets. Ordinary users are complaining about Twitter not showing all tweets, or no tweets. Whatever the new owner Elon Musk does, it’s not user friendly.
Away from Twitter on not?
Twitter (X) users decided to move from Twitter to Mastodon, because of the new owner. Mastodon became very popular for a few months. Then it is quite forgotten nowadays. It is not that exciting for ordinary users, and they were missing their actual followers which they have on Twitter.
The company Meta owning Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram made a copy of Twitter, the Threads. This new social network reported over 100 million new users in very short time (actually, it is 23 million) and spent time changed from 21 minutes to 6 minutes daily per user. What a fall. Threads goes down and it’s not available in EU (privacy issues).
Whatever is written in the media on how cool could be other new social networks, Twitter is still doing quite ok to survive on the market.
New dysfunctionalities appearing
Elon Musk decided to earn more money. More than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers stopped spending money on his platform. API for loading/adding tweets became super expensive. Many plugins’ developers could not afford it. Plugins stopped working.
Some plugins loaded tweets without the API, just loaded them from the website. New action happened; tweets will be visible only if the user will log in. No tweets on website again.
Somehow Twitter had a lack of server resources, so they decided to set limits on the number of visible tweets.
Now, there are no limits for shown tweets, you can see tweets when you are not logged in.
We just have to accept that Twitter works, then if not, then it works partially. It’s like the weather. Anyway, no one knows whether X will be technically fine. Lots of users reported that tweets they deleted years ago became visible again.
Elon Musk killed the brand
We know that Twitter is no longer Twitter, it is just X. Basically he killed the well know and super valuable brand. Almost everybody knows what the simple icon, the blue bird, means. OK, just X now. Whatever.
What is the future of X?
It’s hard to say. Media are predicting something, but the owner’s decisions are unknown. Elon Musk will drop X tweet (is it still a tweet anyway?) saying A, action B is something else. For me it is unpredictable and not reliable platform.
I will just keep working tweets on clients’ websites until it will be possible (somehow).