Twitter has made some questionable moves lately, but this is one of the WORST…
Twitter has decided to ‘ban’ content that links to other social platforms when they deem it a primary purpose.
They state this in an attempt to STOP ‘promoting other platforms’.
You can continue to post whatever you want so long as it doesn’t link to:
*Nostr
*Tribel
*Facebook
*Instagram
*Mastodon
*Truth Social
Link aggregators like linktr.ee and lnk.bio have also just been banned.
But this is flawed thinking.
Social media works best when there are no borders. While it is not uncommon for social platforms to limit reach for posts with links. Outright banning accounts from doing so is a new step.
To gain the attention of new users you need to remove the friction between ecosystems.
Ideas spread across platforms, and the platforms they originate inadvertently benefit.
Twitter has benefitted from screenshots of tweets shared across other platforms.
They once even joked in Tweet that ‘Instagram is basically now screenshots of tweets’.
TikTok partly rose to prominence by making it easy to link to other places and watermarking the internet.
To be honest they didn’t even need to be explicit with this move.
Most platforms already have penalties for linking away from their platform.
Their algorithms simply don’t reward links with reach.
To go as far as banning content creators with links to their main platforms is just another step towards driving away content creators.
Without creators in their ecosystem, they’re left with the silent majority.
And when the silent majority have nothing to see, they move on.
I want Twitter to succeed as I get a lot of value from the platform, but this just seems shortsighted and I can’t see how they take a win on this 🤷🏽♂️.
