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Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, sees the inevitable.
If paying brands stay away from the platform and deprive what was once Twitter of its lifeline of ad revenue, X is toast. Musk himself has admitted as much. But no matter how risky the platform is for advertisers and how degraded the experience is for users, X is still standing at the end of 2023.
For a handful of X-alternatives, Musk’s recent missteps were their opportunities. If this was X’s year of persistence, this was a year of emergence for his replacements.
This summer, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (META) unveiled its text-based Twitter rival Threads in a surprise release. The app exploded onto the scene just as Twitter blundered. Musk had imposed a poorly received update that temporarily limited the number of posts Twitter users could see in a day. Users lashed out at the restrictions, which added to the turmoil that defined Musk’s takeover.
Additional changes to the site, such as removing journalists’ verification badges and amplifying the posts of users who pay for premium services, worsened its public reputation after it had already been damaged by chaotic mass layoffs and a declining rating.
Zuckerberg timed the arrival of Threads at the height of Twitter discontent. Within hours, the app claimed at least 10 million sign-ups.
But while Threads has the supportive and built-in user network of a tech giant with a market cap of nearly a trillion dollars, other microblogging platforms have turned heads and attracted their own emerging user bases as well.
Such alternatives do not bill themselves as a direct replacement.
“There has to come a point when people realize that there will no longer be a second Twitter,” said Noam Bardin, CEO and founder of Post, the new social platform, which has 550,000 registered users. While some newcomers are trying to recreate the quirks behind the success of old Twitter, Bardin said these types of app clones won’t work “if you’re just Twitter without the content.”
The way Post differentiates itself relies in part on emphasizing news, which other players like Meta have emphasized, ceding ground to newcomers. The platform allows users to purchase individual articles from news providers and read stories from outlets within the same interface.
Bardin points to TikTok’s success as a model for Post. Rather than trying to clone YouTube, TikTok leaned heavily on offering entertaining content that suits its users’ tastes without having to force them to find and follow other accounts or build a curated feed using social media. signals. The result was an endless stream of clips personalized for users. Before Bardin, TikTok took part of the incumbent’s service and ran with it. That is also a path for Post.
Bardin also emphasized that Post’s business model of partnering with news outlets and publishers, rather than relying on impression-based advertising revenue, shapes the company’s incentives in a way that doesn’t rely on the more toxic elements of social media, such as its constant push for users who are psychologically stuck on the platform.
“You don’t have to doomscroll for five hours,” he said. “We make the same money by reading three articles.”
Bluesky, which has 2.6 million users and is still invite-only, is claiming its own niche. It aims to provide a more common and transparent alternative to X that is less susceptible to control by a single entity.
Originally founded as an initiative within Twitter to develop an open-source social network, Bluesky is now its own public benefit company. While it may look like the old Twitter, the company has plans for a fully decentralized system that will allow the general public to run their own apps, using Bluesky as a kind of digital infrastructure. For now, the flagship Bluesky app offers many former Twitter users a place for public conversations.
“The changes Twitter has undergone inadvertently demonstrate why it’s important for us to exist,” said CEO Jay Graber.
“We’re actually trying to build something that is resilient for a single person or a single company, which changes the infrastructure on which people communicate very dramatically.”
Then there’s Mastodon, an open-source Twitter alternative that was one of the first social networks to attract users fleeing Musk’s platform. Although monthly active users faltered this year, efforts are underway to continue the early momentum. A range of third-party customers have released polished apps that make using the service more intuitive.
I’ve been hesitant to spend more time on other social networks, even while experimenting a bit in them. Leaving X can be disorienting at first, just as starting a new video game or hobby can be. You don’t know what you’re doing. The screens look weird. When will it be fun? What is a clay clay?
It’s hard to get over that rookie feeling when X is sitting there, even when it’s so much worse: clogged with crypto spam, hostile to consuming news, and increasingly missing my favorite accounts that don’t post as much, if at all. I know I’m stuck with X.
I lurk more on LinkedIn and Reddit, even when newer, tempting alternatives are right in front of me.
As a friend recently texted me about Bluesky: “Come in here, the water is warm.”
Ryan Broderick, web culture writer and author of the Garbage Day newsletter, said we don’t have much historical precedent for thinking about Twitter’s extinction. But there are examples to draw from.
“The big question mark is what kind of crisis is X currently in?” he said, sketching three paths. The first is what many people immediately jump on: Myspace, a complete shutdown. The second is similar to what happened to YouTube during advertiser boycotts over brand safety. Eventually, the advertisers came back and the platform recovered. The third case Broderick noted was Tumblr, which was experiencing a massive user exodus but was limping along with an ever-shrinking user base.
It’s likely that X will continue to flounder and become smaller and dumber, Broderick said. “I don’t think X will disappear one day.”
That all depends on Musk and the course that X’s competitors set. Zuckerberg, for his part, has lofty ambitions for Threads, even as the platform has de-emphasized news, a crucial element of the chaotic magic of old Twitter. During Meta’s most recent earnings call, Zuckerberg said Threads has nearly 100 million monthly active users. Reaching a level 10 times higher is within a few years, he said. Last week, Threads was opened to users in the European Union.
In the days following the October 7 Hamas attack and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, At the same time, its limitations were exposed: the proliferation of attention grabbers, a flood of offensive and bigoted messages, and design choices that make it harder for people to find reliable news sources. When the drama of current events draws the audience in, X becomes an irresistible destination. It is also a deeply flawed one. That makes the race to replace or circumvent it simultaneously intriguing and unlikely.
Broderick said he was following the events on both Threads and X and described the experience of being on Musk’s platform as exhausting and terrible without proper filtering. “But I had a better sense of the ticking clock of the conflict on X,” he said. “The machinery is still there. It’s still a pretty good app.”
Hamza Shaban is a reporter for Yahoo Finance covering markets and the economy. Follow Hamza on Twitter @hshaban.
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