Meta’s New Threads App Is Terrible. It Just Might Bury Twitter.
Reading Time: 6 minutesIt has one killer feature that’s a nightmare for Elon Musk., Meta’s Threads app is terrible, and it could actually bury Twitter.
During Elon Musk’s eight months running Twitter aground, a big group of aspirants has sought to build a new, better boat for the social network’s refugees. It’s a sound enough theory. Twitter is now worth something like a third of what Musk paid for it. The site breaks a lot. Over the long Fourth of July weekend, Musk’s team broke it in new and innovative ways, then said that breakage was intentional. We can safely assume that is a lie, because Musk’s explanation involves efforts to fight bots and spam, and when he talks about that topic, he is usually not telling the truth. Things are just not going well. Starry-eyed founders and venture capitalists want to fill the coming vacuum.
Most of these efforts have not gotten traction. I’ve tried several of them, and they’ve all lacked not just Twitter’s community, but its classic ease of use. One hopeful, Mastodon, is so confusing and chaotic that it makes Twitter look like a picnic in a meadow. Another, Post, feels too much like a personal blog and not a Twitter replacement. Another, Substack Notes, is geared toward people who read and write newsletters, and that just is not a big or exciting enough crowd to sustain a Twitter clone. The most promising attempt has been Bluesky—where former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is involved—which offers customizable feeds that go a bit beyond a typical following list. Bluesky has generated buzz and scarcity with an invite-only gatekeeping system, and it now fosters some of the rebellious posting spirit that used to be a hallmark of Twitter. I haven’t gotten bored there yet, and I hope Bluesky does as well with the rest of the public as it seems to be doing with journalists and some prolific Twitter defectors.
But after less than a day, a new warrior has taken the clear lead in the Twitter wars. It’s Threads, the Twitter copycat from Meta. The app rolled out on Wednesday, and within seven hours, Mark Zuckerberg said it had cleared 10 million users. By Thursday morning, it was north of 30 million. (Zuckerberg and Meta are a bit more constrained than Musk in their ability to lie about the success of their initiatives because Meta is a public company and Musk’s Twitter is not.)
Is Threads good? In my opinion, no, not now. It’s a messy, purely algorithmic social media experience that has not put stimulating information in front of my eyeballs during my first handful of hours using it. But being good isn’t exactly the point. Facebook is not good, and yet it has billions of users. Meta’s Instagram used to be good, until Meta started trying to make it more like TikTok. (Now it’s good in the sense that I use it a lot, but bad in the sense that my time there is not well spent.) Maybe Threads will become good, but that might be a luxury rather than a need. Zuckerberg will have to try really, really hard not to own the leading Twitter alternative when the dust settles. Let’s see if he can pull it off.
Why is Threads an instant hit? It got all of those sign-ups because of a wildly easy setup process that links to Instagram. If you’re logged into an Instagram account on your phone, as billions of people are at any given moment, Threads presents a simple login button. Your Instagram username is reserved for you on Threads, and you can port over an entire bio and profile picture with just a few taps. But most importantly, you can automatically follow everyone you follow on Instagram, and everyone who follows you on Instagram can in turn do the same.
That linkage to Instagram offers a nice head start in building a community on Threads. It lets users skip the thankless task of typing into a void for a while as they build a following on a new platform. It’s an appeal to our collective vanity, and it might work well. I have been toiling in the posting mines on Bluesky for weeks, and I have only gotten (as of publication time) 546 followers. It’s a nice change of pace, in a way. I have 29,000 Twitter followers, and the drawdown to a tiny following means I can say reckless things on Bluesky and not get into fights with strangers about them. But it is also humbling to rebuild from scratch, without the instantaneous feedback of that retweet and like counter whirring and purring, and it takes real commitment to the craft. On Threads, though, I cleared a thousand followers in a few hours, many of whom just hopped over from Instagram without any effort on my part.
One could imagine how these instant network effects would multiply many times over for the heavy-hitting influencers that Meta already relies on a great deal on Instagram. MrBeast has a million followers on Threads already, which appears to be multiples more than Bluesky’s whole user base. And Threads hasn’t even gotten to most of the Instagram big accounts yet. What happens when it does? How many of those mega-influencers’ fans will follow? What if Kylie Jenner makes the jump? What if Taylor Swift does? Threads could become a monster in a few hours as their die-hards click just a few times to join them.
Once in the app, Threads has all the things you’d expect in a Meta product designed to hook you without offering much of a high-quality experience. Most people will allow notifications from the app, because being notified of things is more or less the point of being on social media. The default notification setting is for Threads to ping your phone every single time you get a new follower or someone interacts in any way with anything you post. For me, the experience was dizzying. I signed up. Within seconds, I started getting notifications that Instagram followers of mine were now following me on threads. There was so much dopamine rushing through my body, ping ping ping, as my new social media kingdom fell into place. I tried pausing notifications, but Meta would only let me do it for eight hours. I went deeper into my settings to change my notification settings after that. Finally, something that required effort.
The actual feed is a garbage hose. Threads lacks the feature that became the foundation of Twitter’s rise: a simple feed, full of posts by people the user follows, appearing in the order they were posted. Over time, Twitter started sorting those followers’ tweets via a ranking algorithm, and under Musk it has shown users a mix of content they want to see and content from accounts they don’t follow that post about things like A.I. and menswear. Threads has neither a chronological feed feature nor a feed of only followed users. Instead, it shows you content from across the entire platform. This algorithmic ‘you’ll eat what’s on your plate and like it’ feed is the only one Threads has, and that is even more of a bummer because the algorithm is not good yet. I freely admit that, on Instagram, Meta’s machines have become great. They have figured me out in copious detail, whether with golf instructional videos or crafty dinner recipes. By contrast, the Threads feed feels totally irrelevant to me. It’s almost entirely influencers and publications that I don’t follow and don’t care about.
Ideally the algorithm will get better with age, but Threads should have a chronological feed that is fully under the user’s control. That will make it useful for all kinds of experiences, not the least of which is live sports. The football season lurks, and Twitter remains the internet’s indispensable place to gather and talk about society’s last dominant form of live entertainment—sports games—with like-minded people. Sports were essential to Twitter establishing itself as a dominant platform for short-form text, and they would be essential to Threads, too. But for now the app is useless for that purpose, as well as for reliable real-time updates in general. The head of Instagram says a follow-only feed is ‘on the list’ for Threads.
It would be astonishing that Threads launched without this feature in the first place except that this is a company that sets money on fire because it believes you and I are only a light shove away from being fully immersed in a fake world on which Meta spends tens of billions of dollars. The company’s bona fides in doing obvious, easy things that people will like are not well established at the moment.
These are severe shortcomings, and they will make Threads unattractive for a bunch of people for as long as they go unaddressed. Every user counts, and Meta will lose business if Threads can’t be anything more than Instagram with worse tech and fewer pretty things to look at. It could also lose a certain segment of the non-Twitter posting population to Bluesky, which could become the place for rugged, authentic posting while Threads becomes the land of the normie sellouts. And of course Twitter will still exist, probably, for at least a while. It’s not as if everyone will leave for new pastures in one blink, though the company’s practice of making its product worse and charging more for it could accelerate the bleed.
But those sellouts include some of the most overwhelming forces on the internet. Combine their presence with the ease of transition between Instagram and Threads, and this new app will have tonnage that no new competitor can match. When Bluesky is no longer invitation-only, and when the arms race is happening in full force, Meta will always have the biggest gun. Or at least that’ll be true until TikTok decides it wants a Twitter for itself. At least those guys will have your best interests at heart.
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