Twitter has made changes to its upcoming status feature, introducing new emojis and hashtags into the mix for users to use and enjoy as they please.
Twitter has been tinkering with the status feature for a while now; the feature first appeared all the way back in 2018 (which was four years ago, I can almost hear my bones creaking with age) and was part of Twitter’s effort to connect with new social media audiences . I could see it working, of course; if other social media platforms had already done the idea first, then Twitter jumping on the long overdue bandwagon is exactly what will save the platform. Of course, the social media site isn’t in immediate danger of bankruptcy or any such distress, but it definitely seems like a cultural shift is happening. Platforms such as TikTok and the growing success of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts have proven that future generations continue to respond to short-form visual media above all else.
Twitter’s short-form text-derived media is not only not short-form visual media, it is not visual media either. While I’m not here to make a sweeping generalization about how younger generations don’t read books like older ones, Twitter’s limitations of being a word-oriented platform are definitely limiting. Although the platform continues to expand into other ventures, introducing videos, threaded replies and so on, it cannot hope to emulate the success of other social media platforms that built their entire brand on such features.
However, Twitter will continue to move forward because copying previous features is much easier than creating new trends. The new status features are something you’ve already come across on Facebook: they’re basically tags that appear right above a post, usually next to or just below a user’s name, and they consist of some fun exclamation points with a corresponding emoji. Think of the Feeling Excited or Feeling Sad tags that pop up on the social network: that’s exactly what Twitter is trying to target. Jane Manchun Wong, social media extraordinaire and serial spreader, took her reverse engineering tricks and managed to identify many of future tags.
These consist of “A thread”, accompanied by a spool of thread as an emoji. These are, well, about threads, which often begin with the opening line of “a thread” in the current vernacular. There’s Spoiler Alert with a warning sign, Need Advice with a Magic 8 Ball (which I actually find kind of clever), AMAs with a microphone, Shower Thoughts with, well, a shower, Hot Take with a red pepper, Mode of holidays with a palm tree, and finally Unpopular Opinion with a mushroom. I’ll leave that last one up to interpretation, see what responses we get in the comments section.
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