A strong position? They are going head-to-head with one of the largest social networks and their odds are... OK at best. They have every incentive to make their new service as desirable and accessible as possible (until such time they are too big for people to leave and then they can do whatever they want).
> Twitter, is an (un)surprisingly small fry when it comes to social networks.
By active users, yes Twitter is smaller than many of the other big networks. But by influence, Twitter is one of, if not the biggest fish in the pond. @[username] is everywhere in advertising and news programs. People don't break news on Facebook and Instagram. There's a reason Musk and his backers paid $ 44 billion for Twitter, and it wasn't the revenue per user. It was buying influence.
The last year has significantly weakened Twitter's position. Musk paid $44B for a company that was almost immediately worth less; he has massively harmed it's image for further valuation reduction. The recent "must be logged in to view tweets" and "only X00 items available" combined with the increase in hate speech weakened it even further.
Further, Twitter has laid off 75% of the people who could help combat this push.
You are describing Twitter from 2-3 years ago. It is not is such a strong position now, and people are actively looking for something else that provides similar functionality. By bootstrapping from an existing social graph, it's a really strong possibility this is Twitter's death blow.
The reason Musk wanted to buy Twitter was to satisfy bis own enormous ego and whims. He did try to get out of buying it though.
As for relevance... A few more great business decisions from Musk, and Twitter's relevance will plummet to unrecoverable depths. All Facebook has to do with Threads is not do obvious mistakes.
But that all is completely beside the point. The original claim was "They are going head-to-head with one of the largest social networks".
"Large networks" are counted in terms of MAU and hours of engagement. And Twitter is rapidly losing it's relevance. Because FB's (and everyone's) largest competitors are
1. Time. There's only 24 hours in the day
2. Social networks and products grabbing that time: TikTok and video streaming services
