Happy Monday, y’all! We are now into July, which for the South means Summer is halfway over! Thankfully we have been spared the brunt of the heat and humidity so far this year, but I suspect it’s coming by the end of this month and into August. Ugh….till then, let’s try to cool off with some hot tech news. And oh my is the social media space having some growing pains right now…
Threads officially launched a few days ago and you are likely either thrilled with this news, or pretty indifferent. My take on Threads launching is pretty much the same as when Bluesky launched: I didn’t trust the guy in charge when he ran his previous site, so why would I trust him with a new one?
It seems my fears over Threads were founded, as many users began noticing that they were being censored as soon as the joined Threads. Some were being flagged before they even posted!
NEWS: Threads is already censoring/banning users on its platform.
“Are you sure you want to follow…?” asked the Threads warning. “This account has repeatedly posted false information.” pic.twitter.com/2WHdsz7vX5
— X Daily News (@xDaily) July 6, 2023
Additionally, Elon is making a move to block Threads, and has already sent Meta a C&D letter. Which honestly is just free publicity for Threads at this point.
A letter written by Twitter's lawyer accused Meta and Threads of using "trade secrets" by hiring dozens of ex-Twitter employees to help build and roll out the new platform, calling it a "copycat" of Twitter's original platform. https://t.co/uadh626dmb
— Entrepreneur (@Entrepreneur) July 7, 2023
So we will see where this slapfight between Elon and Zuck goes next. I’m on the edge of my seat and I’m sure you are as well.
Speaking of Twitter, the site continues to have many issues. Recently, it was revealed that there were still shadowbanning codes found within the sites programming even though Elon had claimed to remove those. Apparently even Elon was being censored at times! Additionally, Elon recently started ‘rate limiting’ users from viewing a certain number of tweets. The reasoning given was to address bot activity on the platform. I’m honestly not sure if this is still being practiced as I’m not spending enough time on Twitter these days to hit the limit (I’m neck deep in website maintenance this month).
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
Finally, Meta is making moves to launch an App Store for its platform. These seems like a move that should have been made a long time ago, but will no doubt be a money-maker for Zuck if he decides to move forward with it.
This could be big https://t.co/spewSZbIJs
— Social Media Today (@socialmedia2day) July 3, 2023
So that’s all I have for this edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. As I eluded to earlier, I am in the middle of my annual website maintenance, so I’m spending WAY too much time with Google Search Console and SEMRush these days, but the results show it’s paying off. I will probably write a post with some takeaways to help the rest of you, in a few weeks.
Till then, thank you as always for reading, and have a wonderful week!
