Twitter is committed to expanding Spaces’ role as a communication hub.
The most recent development on this front is a whole new advertising campaign for Spaces, which may or may not be as effective in selling the feature as the developers would want.
Clearly, Twitter is attempting to demonstrate the use of Spaces and in-app audio conversation. And without a doubt, the Spaces subjects that it emphasizes here are rather popular; for example, right now you can go to the Spaces page and see a plethora of posts discussing NFTs, “shower thoughts,” and other such topics.
Twitter’s Spaces Isn’t Catching On
Unfortunately, this is also contributing to the lack of popularity of Spaces: most of these debates are very specialized, and the algorithm is currently not excellent at showcasing the most relevant and fascinating topics to each particular user.
And that’s not easy to achieve by any stretch of the imagination. As the conversations are occurring in real time, they cannot be controlled and sorted in advance, but Twitter has introduced subject tags to aid with this.
Twitter may be hesitant to promote Spaces that may cause problems, which is a far greater obstacle. The response may be substantial if the most popular Space that Twitter had featured turned out to be a cloaked discussion of QAnon, for example.
This is just one of the numerous problems with streaming video in real time, as was recently shown when a Twitch user broadcasted himself going on a shooting spree in Buffalo.
The same thing happened with Facebook’s live map tool, which the company finally deactivated: boosting live-stream content means boosting bad stuff as well, as the latter is an inevitable part of the live experience.
