Over the weekend, experiences emerged that each one pictures and movies hooked up to any tweet created earlier than 2014 had been rendered inactive within the app, in what initially appeared to be a cost-reduction measure.
Extra vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now eliminated all media posted earlier than 2014. Thats – up to now – virtually a decade of images and movies from the early 2000s faraway from the service.
For instance, right here’s a search of my media tweets from earlier than 2014. https://t.co/FU6K34oqmA
— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) August 19, 2023
Many speculated that this was probably brought on by a discount in storage, or a change to X’s community configuration, designed to reduce its knowledge load, and thus scale back the corporate’s working prices. However various investigations have since discovered that the media parts are nonetheless obtainable, they’re simply not the place they need to be, and as such, X’s system is having hassle discovering the supply and displaying it in posts/tweets.
Nevertheless it’s inconsistent. Some folks can see pictures and clips in some tweets, others are simply displaying text-based t.co hyperlinks.
Some have recommended that the changeover from HTTP to HTTPS round 2014 could possibly be to blame for the change, primarily de-railing some more moderen clean-up work by the X staff, whereas others have hypothesized that possibly this was a deliberate deactivation, so as to see if customers can be upset about dropping these hyperlinks.
The impression for customers is that you simply wouldn’t have the option entry any of that content material, which could possibly be annoying for retrospective searches, whereas for manufacturers, it might imply that any embedded tweets with video or pictures would now not be lively in your web site, and any of your traditional campaigns would primarily be erased.
Nicely, not erased, as they’re seemingly nonetheless someplace on the internet. However gone from view, and possibly gone endlessly, if that is certainly an precise take a look at of a future path for the app.
One other principle is that that is all a part of Twitter.com transitioning to X.com as its house area, and the X staff encountering points with mass knowledge migration. Certainly, the platform remains to be predominantly branded as ‘Twitter’ and ‘tweets’ in all of its documentation and code, and it’ll probably face many challenges like this in making the swap.
We don’t know precisely what’s occurring, and we are able to’t ask as a result of X doesn’t have a press contact anymore, but it surely does seem to be it’s making some form of main change to its back-end infrastructure, which I’m tipping is linked to its area swap.
Or, as famous, it could possibly be a cost-cutting measure, as X continues to work to get again into the black, amid considerably decreased advert consumption.
We’ll probably discover out quickly, as X continues to make adjustments to its inner structure.
