Twitter has been fiddling around with the status feature for quite a while; the feature was initially previewed all the way back in 2018 (which was four years ago, I can almost hear my bones creak with age), and was part of Twitter’s attempt to connect with new social media audiences. I could see that working, sure; if other social media platforms had already done the idea first, then Twitter jumping onto the all-too late bandwagon is exactly what will save the platform. The social media site is of course in no immediate danger of bankruptcy or any such qualms, but there definitely seems to be a cultural shift occurring. Platforms such as TikTok and the added success of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have proven that the upcoming generations continue to respond to visual short-form media above all else.
Twitter’s short-form text derived medium is not only not short-form visual media, it’s not even visual media. While I’m not here to make some dense generalization about how the younger generations don’t read books like the older ones do, Twitter’s restrictions to being a word-oriented platform is definitely limiting. Even as the platform continues to expand to other ventures, introducing videos, threaded replies and so forth, it can’t hope to emulate the success of other social media platforms that built their entire brand upon such features.
At any rate, Twitter’s still going to march onwards, because copying prior features is much easier than making up new trends of your own. The new status features are something you’ve already encountered on Facebook: they’re essentially tags that are displayed right above a post, usually next to or just below a user’s name, and they consist of some fun exclamation with a relevant emoji. Think of the Feeling Excited or Feeling Sad tags that show up on the social network: that’s exactly what Twitter’s trying to aim for. Jane Manchun Wong, social media extraordinaire and serial leaker, took to her reverse engineering tricks and managed to identify many of the upcoming tags.
These consist of “A Thread”, accompanied by a spool of thread as an emoji. These are for, well, threads, which are often started with the opening line of “a thread” in current vernacular. There’s Spoiler Alert with a warning sign, Need Advice with a Magic 8 Ball (which I actually find kind of clever), AMA with a mic, Shower Thoughts with, well, a shower, Hot Take with a red pepper, Vacation Mode with a palm tree, and finally Unpopular Opinion with a mushroom. I’m going to leave that last one up to interpretation, see what answers we get in the comment section.
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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World
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