Making logins required to view twitter was the ultimate bed shitting move. The whole point of twitter was to be a broadcast medium. Tweets were viewable without following or logging in. There is a huge vacuum in that space now.
For most (social media) platforms really. Management believes it would force users to sign up, but in reality the platform just becomes less relevant because of that limitation. Not even talking about search crawlers.
An all around stupid decision. That said, if management is that shitty, the platform probably won't be attractive for long anyway.
Facebook/Instagram were successful despite that to a degree, but this decision probably still did a lot of damage to their relevancy and user numbers.
I don't really agree with that. Facebook was originally about mirroring your real-life social network. In the mid 00's nobody was trying to get likes from strangers on Facebook.
Instagram is closer to broadcast, but it was always closely tied to the mobile app experience and the "follower" mentality. People didn't really share links to Instagram posts in other online venues in the beginning.
Twitter was always unique. It existed before smartphones, and there was a good chunk of years where people without smartphones would read twitter posts on desktops. Its producer/consumer distribution is much more skewed, many twitter users never post. Tweets were always getting posted to places like HN, reddit, discussed in news articles, etc.
I think Twitter's (former) position as a broadcast medium à la TV, radio, and newspapers is unique among social networks. There's a reason why Twitter was the place for journalists, politicians, academics, fire departments, web service status alerts, etc.
> Facebook/Instagram were successful despite that to a degree, but this decision probably still did a lot of damage to their relevancy and user numbers.
FB/IG/Whatsapp have half of humanity logging into their services once per month, so I'm not sure how much better they could be doing if they didn't have a login wall.
Meanwhile, Twitter (with no login wall) never broke 500mn. Like, personally I totally take your point about status updates but I'd have used my Twitter account a lot more if I'd needed to log in to see the content.
