Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter Killer Is Shockingly Viable. Oh No.
Reading Time: 5 minutesThreads is here. Is a Meta comeback next?, Threads, the new app from Meta, is a shockingly viable Twitter killer.
Mark Zuckerberg first announced that Threads, Meta’s Instagram-linked, text-based, aspirationally decentralized alternative to Twitter, would arrive on Thursday morning. So naturally, the official rollout actually occurred Wednesday evening, with the surprise drop leading a bunch of users into signing up for the gazillionth Twitter clone they’d tried out since Elon Musk took over Twitter last October and proceeded to make it, well, a lot worse. Compared to some of those competitors—T2, Post, you name it—Threads managed to build up some uncomfortable (really, a new Facebook app?) but also undeniable hype: Chatter about the forthcoming service amped up after Twitter suffered a massive breakage last weekend; options to download and preorder the new app (or, if you were extra-savvy, get in on a cheat code) appeared and disappeared from mobile stores ahead of the U.S.-exclusive launch; and celebrities like Oprah and tech entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk were given chances to try Threads in advance of a wider release. (As were media platforms like the Hollywood Reporter, though not MediaDownloader.) The excitement appeared to boost Meta’s stock price even before Threads made its sudden debut. And, when the thing itself landed, it probably helped a lot that there was no finicky server situation to puzzle through (Mastodon), no invite-only codes required for entry (Bluesky), no weird payment demands (Twitter), no confusing signup process that left you aloof. All you had to do was link your Instagram account, transfer your handle and follows, and voila! You could join everyone else in a brand-new space that—as of this writing, just hours after launch—can’t be described as anything other than utter pandemonium.
The massive influx of users who signed up and started posting (threading? sewing?) resembled the weekend scramble to join the decentralized social networks Mastodon and Bluesky when Twitter imposed alleged ‘rate limits‘ on tweet viewership last Saturday. But the Threads landscape is a far stranger rush, structurally and ideologically. For one, if you were the type to use something like Twitter for professional networking or catching up on the news, chances are you had Instagram as more of a personal fiefdom, much like with your Facebook account: family pics, timed posts visible only to ‘Close Friends,’ niche meme accounts, other detritus of your quotidian lifestyle stowed within a restricted profile. Now, Threads is here to take your more personal network and merge it with the wildest, most inflammatory profiles from the world at large. That, plus a bunch of recommended accounts you may not follow but which show up anyway. As the Washington Post notes, ‘there’s no way to make Threads show you only the posts from accounts you’ve chosen to follow. There’s also no way to make your feed ordered chronologically—instead, it’s organized by what the Threads algorithm thinks you might find most interesting.’ To wit, most of the users who’ve ‘liked’ my Threads posts are people I don’t follow, and who also don’t follow me. Whatever—I’ll take the dopamine hits.
So it’s already been quite a time keeping up with this new thingamajig, with constant notifications of new followers, new replies and ‘likes’ on all your bad jokes, and Insta friends whom you followed on Threads before they crafted their official accounts (yes, this is an option). The buzz is not just real—it’s manifesting on your phone every time you get a notification. Which, of course, only adds to the intrigue and earned media, something that no doubt pleases Mark Zuckerberg quite a bit, especially as he openly plans to make Threads ‘a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it.’ The Instagram connection might be the key here. Threads will support posts that are 1) up to 500 characters, 2) include photos, or 3) carry video clips up to five minutes long. And they can be shared through Instagram stories—that is, to an app that already has nearly 2 billion monthly active users across the globe.
Say, what gives Zuck the right, anyway? The CEO and his apps have been pilloried over the past few years, from his botched personal PR campaign that caused people to wonder if the Facebook boss wanted to run for president, to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and scrutiny over Facebook’s often-cavalier attitude toward data collection, to the Facebook Papers leaks, to the ground Facebook has been losing to TikTok, to the company’s already-memory-holed metaverse gambit, to last year’s sucky Instagram algorithm tweaks, to the mass layoffs and internal dysfunction that roiled the company beginning last year. In the Threads-verse, though, Zuck is not held back by any of these things; he’s ready to take this thing beyond, and may just be poised to do it, having supposedly signed up 2 million Threaders in the app’s first two hours of life. Heck, even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, whose links are about to be blocked on Facebook to all Canadian users any day now, has a Threads account. Could all of this cohere into … Facebook’s comeback?
Yeah, that seems a bit farfetched. Meta’s been falling behind on the artificial intelligence rush, and its desire to lure back controversial figures like Donald Trump to Facebook may only refuel the types of scandals and toxic vibes that tanked the company’s reputation for years following the 2016 election. And there was that whole news cycle about Musk tussling with Elon Musk inside a cage? That was weird.
Here’s something to consider: We may not be in the ‘web3‘ age of infinite blockchains, but Web 2.0’s social media–centric era is definitely over. Snapchat still isn’t earning enough revenue; neither is Reddit, whose profit-seeking pivots have alienated many of its most dedicated users. Smaller upstarts like BeReal have lost their momentum, and music- and video-streaming services have largely ditched any social-interconnection features they’d initially incorporated. None of Twitter’s alternatives really has the bird app’s universality, as they’ve tended to settle in on respective siloes: Mastodon is home to liberal tech lawyers, Bluesky to journalists and shitposters, Spill to Black Twitter. The much-feared right-wing social mediasphere isn’t benefiting from this: Getter is a mess, Truth Social is facing money trouble and legal scrutiny, Parler is dead, and Rumble is burning through its cash. (You know what company is actually profitable, though? That’s right—it’s Meta, which, in spite of the adversity, has had some strong earnings so far this year.)
Anyway, of whatever’s left, a lot of it is fake: auto-generated text and audio, unhindered spam bots, cooked up metrics. So, whither our digital town square on which to share all our opinions and photos and snake-oil treatments? Mark Zuckerberg, who continues to weather crises and issues that would take out any other CEO with fewer plans for world domination, thinks he can just tap in to the audience he’s long cultivated for his stupidly large empire that’s not about to get broken up anytime soon, even with the Federal Trade Commission’s newly invigorated antitrust push. The scary part is, he might just be right.
Ref: slate
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