We’re a little more than a week into the Threads experience, and Threads is…well, it’s a little bit dead. The idea behind Threads, as I understood it, was Twitter run by competent people taking a more aggressive approach to content moderation. A lot of attention has been paid to that last part—the content moderation. A little has been paid to the middle part—the competence. Not as much, relative to its importance, has been paid to the central idea: This is supposed to just be Twitter again.
Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, Twitter people have been shouting en masse about how its downfall is imminent. There’s ideology mixed up in this, of course, had a comparably flaky entrepreneur with a different set of ideals taken over the site the reaction would have been different—but we were treated for weeks to a string of legitimate, reported articles describing how exactly and when exactly Twitter would crumble, the general thesis being that the guy who managed to convert luxury car fans to electric vehicles and successfully carved out space for private players in the world of space exploration would be incapable of running a glorified message board. In hindsight, it may have been a fair question, because after a few months, the exact problems the journalists’ experts predicted came to pass: The site stopped working. Under what Musk said was a barrage of data-scraping bots, Twitter became briefly unusable. The level of intentionality behind the rate-limiting is still up for debate, but Mark Zuckerberg was ready, and just as Twitter was climbing out of its hole, Instagram launched Threads, a direct competitor. Uptake was smooth—millions upon millions more people use Instagram than Twitter already, and setting up an account was as simple as downloading an app—and uptake was therefore huge, bigger than anyone anticipated.
There are two things to say about this, and one is going to take us a little off track but it’s a Saturday and if you’re reading a blog post about a pair of online message boards, you have the time. I’ll say that one in italics.
Mark Zuckerberg went for Twitter’s jugular.
This was a kill shot. This was a direct attack on Twitter’s existence. And as we’re being reminded in a few places around the world, those take more time to play out when they happen live than they do when written down in future history books. The attack is ongoing. This still is a kill shot. It’s an ongoing battle between two of the world’s top tech titans, and I can’t see how it’s anything but a good thing for users of social media. I’m far from an expert on the industry, but speaking from an economic point of view, it’s odd how rare it is for social media platforms to compete head to head. More often, they’re respecting one another’s turf, effectively granting one another monopolies through some extremely soft collusion. Yes, Instagram went after Snapchat’s stories midway through last decade, but it didn’t create a platform for sending disappearing texts and photos. This is a working theory, but it’s possible Threads and Reels represent a new era in the social media business ecosystem. For a long time, the method of competition seemed to be to create entirely different products and pitch them to consumers against one another, competing for users’ time. It was like if dessert was a new concept and there was one ice cream provider competing with one cookie provider for our after-dinner spot on the placemat. Not since Facebook and Myspace do I think we’ve seen platforms as similar as we’re seeing with Threads and Twitter. Even Reels exist within the Instagram app.
This is probably a good thing for consumers. We have better ice cream and better cookies when different producers are producing each, and we have ice cream and cookies more tailored to our individual tastes. Social media is a different product—the point of eating dessert is to consume a product oneself, not to enter it to interact with others—but the concept isn’t wholly different, and while heightened polarized groupthink is possible if we end up with dozens of competing Twitters, it’s also possible the wackos among us will recede to their own corners and the ideological mainstream might be able to reclaim a little space online. Maybe I’ll regret saying this, maybe this is somewhere where The Shared Experience is a good thing, but I’m not sure it is. Shouting in the same room as everybody else doesn’t seem all that similar in value to sitting and watching the same readout of the day’s happenings. Regardless: In general, competition improves quality. Until proven otherwise, that should be the assumption of what’s going to happen here.
It’s also just exciting. It’s fun. It’s the kind of thing you’d hope today’s Rockefellers and Carnegies would have the pride to do. We, as humans, have an innate craving for warlords. It’s why we like football coaches. But we want those warlords to do their laying waste somewhere other than literal battlefields. War in the business sphere has plenty of real life effects, but it’s much less bloody and it can satisfy some of that itch.
Now. The actual point here.
Some Twitter people have already given up on Threads. They haven’t deleted their accounts—that is rumored to be impossible without deleting one’s Instagram account, in a deft Trojan Horse—but they aren’t using it anymore. Heck, we aren’t using it much right now here at The Barking Crow. I will tweet out this post. I’m not sure I’ll post it on Threads. Threads sucks right now. It’s boring, it’s not possible to make it chronological, it’s unclear and inconsistent how much content on a user’s feed will come from accounts that user follows and how much will come from other sources. It’s similarly unclear how the Threads algorithm is choosing those sources. Using Threads, if one is used to Twitter, is a little like having a conversation with a mediocre support bot. You’re just not getting anywhere.
Threads still has a chance to thrive, though. Threads has a good chance to thrive.
The first thing being missed by the more vocal among those Twitter people is how temporary the current situation is. We are something like nine days into Threads’s existence. The app is going to develop. Search functionality and a working timeline and hashtags and all the rest *should* come. The app should imitate Twitter more and more in terms of how it works. Twitter people should feel more and more at home on Threads and able to do the things they want to do as time goes on. It’s hard to see this not happening. Meta has a massive user base in a new channel it would like to monetize with advertisements. They have every economic incentive to make this thing work.
The second thing being missed by those Twitter people is how few people use Twitter. Twitter is a tiny, tiny platform, one whose cultural importance is heightened but also vastly overstated by its tendency to be the bulletin board upon which news is posted. News reports go straight to Twitter. Politicians make statements on Twitter. It is easy to embed tweets into WordPress-based online publications and probably many using other platforms as well. But Twitter isn’t used by nearly as many people as use Instagram or Facebook or TikTok. What Threads has a chance to do, then, is to take the Twitter concept and attempt to tailor it more towards the mainstream. Perhaps this looks like a more soft-edged Twitter, as Threads has sometimes been hyped to be, and perhaps people want that. Or, perhaps people don’t want it, and Threads goes in a different direction, becoming a different sort of app, but Twitter continues to flail technologically and Twitter people continue to wait for a viable alternative to this integral part of their waking hours. Or, perhaps people don’t want it and Twitter recovers, ending up perfectly fine and much the same as it currently is and similar to what it’s always been. Maybe this post ends up looking silly when it’s uncovered in a few years in an accidental search back through our thousands of blog posts on this silly little site.
More than anything, I guess what I’m trying to say is that the Threads vs. Twitter war has still hardly begun. It might end with Twitter in the dustheap. It might end with two competing Twitters. It might end with Threads remembered with laughs, alongside Google Glass. It’s only been nine days. There are a lot of campaigns left in the war.
