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Who's on Threads?
99% of social media products fail, even those from established and successful tech (even social media) companies. In the last two years alone Clubhouse and BeReal have been extremely well-funded, seen a surge in users, and then fallen into seemingly terminal decline. The default assumption should be that Threads fails.
Still, it's an interesting product. The most interesting thing about Threads is that it isn't really trying to be Twitter. It has no web app and doesn't seem designed for Twitter's main use cases (breaking news/announcements of various kinds, and anonymous short-form internet discussion and meme propagation through networks of people who follow each other with mutual interests).
Threads has no web app and can't be used signed-out, and unlike both Reddit and Twitter the majority of normal users won't be anonymous, because their Threads account will be linked to their Instagram account. Of course creating a secondary anonymous Instagram account to use with Threads is a possibility, but it's certainly more hoops to jump through than on Twitter.
'Following' on Threads isn't particularly important. You can do it, and you'll definitely see someone's content, but most of the feed is 'suggested content' that the algorithm thinks you'll like. On Twitter, you build your social network and it sometimes recommends good accounts to follow. On Threads, you start with a default pool of content that is maybe 20% your Instagram friends and 80% top trending, and then over time the algorithm corrects to maybe 20% your Instagram friends, 10% top trending, and 70% algorithmic dopamine rush.
Threads is trying to be the TikTok of text.
This strikes me as potentially a far more compelling business case than Twitter, whether or not Zuck actually pulls it off. Reddit, Twitter, various forums and so on are full of vast amounts of compelling short-form text content - jokes, short stories, news, memes, smut, 'ask me anything' type content, gossip, political or current affairs commentary, the occasional compelling chart or graph or whatever - but accessing them requires effort.
On Reddit you're the person who has to go to a specific subreddit (or sets up a custom homepage with your favorites), looks for the content, sorts it, then manually clicks on each link, sees if the post is good. On Twitter, you slowly and laboriously build out your network of followers by weaving in and out of other people's tweets and replies, clicking on their profiles, dismissing them if they're boring, private or post nothing, or maybe scrolling through them and then following them if they seem interesting. In the end you have a custom feed of X followed, but any time you want to expand your circle of interests / followed list, you repeat some form of this process.
Threads, if it works, will distil all this text into the most compelling nuggets of content (presumably with some kind of monetization or influencer model at some point) and then deliver an infinite conveyor belt of them algorithmically tuned to your exact interests. What Reddit and Twitter require their users to do manually, Threads will automate. You like jokes from 'The Office' or short-form fanfiction of Disney movies or thoughtful criticism of video game mechanics or DC political gossip? (Millions of people do.) Threads - if it's able to build a user base big enough (it probably won't) - will deliver an endless supply of these to you directly, no searching or following or whatever necessary, just content. Just like TikTok.
Like TikTok, Threads rejects large aspects of the 'creator economy' that exists on YouTube, Twitch and Instagram (although the latter is moving away from it). ByteDance recognized that most users don't care where their content comes from, TikTok is happy to blow up one post from a small time creator to a hundred million views (if it's really funny or whatever), then never promote any of their other content ever again if the algorithm determines it's less compelling. The magic of TikTok is that while there are many successful creators, much of the content comes from relative randoms who languish in obscurity posting stuff with 5 views until they have one really funny sketch, or one really adorable video of their dog or whatever, then that gets shared unbelievably widely.
Most people aren't consistently compelling content creators, but millions of people probably tell one really funny joke a year, or have one genuinely insightful realization. On Reddit these moments usually get lost in the noise, on Twitter they're buried because they're made by an account with 12 followers that only posts a few times a month. On Threads, the algorithm can recognize that they're something special due to proportional like rates or sharing or whatever, and promote the fuck out of it. Then multiply that by millions of creators, and you can establish this successful force-feeding of content.
You could outline the history of social media kind of like this:
A first generation, in which people primarily followed real-life friends or acquaintances of those friends (and so on). Those real-life friends shared their thoughts, pictures, ideas, inane ramblings and so on. This was Facebook and its predecessors like MySpace and Friendster.
A second generation, in which companies realized that dedicated creators (comedians on twitter, models on instagram, vloggers on youtube) were more compelling than most people's friends, and made content that kept users on the platform longer than your inane high school friend's narration of their mundane life. This is the dawn of 'parasocial' media like modern YouTube, Instagram, Twitch and Twitter. Sometimes people still follow real-life friends on these platforms, but increasingly (especially off Instagram), dedicated creators make up the vast majority of the content they consume. Reddit, as a descendant of forums, gradually evolved into this on many/most mainstream or default subreddits.
A third generation, in which instead of the 'creator economy' being like a grocery store where users search for and pick out products, the software itself does it for you, learning your likes and dislikes and then delivering an endless stream of compelling, dopamine-hit content that you can scroll through at your leisure without ever having to search for anything, with zero friction. This is TikTok's genius, and it's why TikTok is the only major new success in social media in over a decade.
Threads probably won't succeed, but I think the idea of a TikTok For Text will at some point. The model is just too good for the idea itself not to work.
I am, to be honest, a little sad that the Facebook of 10-15 years ago isn't really around anymore. To some extent, the friend network is still there and it's interesting to me to follow what my classmates and friends at the time are now up to. I think there's till a market for a good service like that for mainly keeping in touch and tracking major life events ("births, deaths, and marriages"), but modern Facebook seems to aggressively recommend Instagram-like creators rather than creating an environment where I can see "oh, this friend from college just moved to the same town as me" and stimulate real communities. But maybe I'm just getting old and reaching the "old man yells at
someone else's computercloud" stage.For me at least, this is just a change within the last few months. Up until then my Facebook feed was exclusively activity of my friends, groups I had joined, and pages I had liked (even if it was stuff like "Bob liked a post in Nature Pics") and ads. Now it's probably 60% meme posts from random pages that I've never interacted with.
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Sounds like a failure of Facebook's business model. They've cast the bait and hook and you didn't bite. That's a win in my eyes, but it's bad for business.
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The issue is that there isn't enough content to fill facebook with quality content. People are spending several hours a day scrolling on their phone. There aren't enough childhood friends getting married and second cousins graduating to fill such a massive feed. People are opening their phone 50 times a day. The world isn't eventful enough to provide content.
I think that's because social media follows a Brave New World business model. Everything is geared toward pumping out content to trigger that short-term dopamine rush. There's a great book I read awhile back that took an interesting look at the problem. I think in a way, maybe human beings have strayed too far from their evolutionary niche, and it's making people miserable. Whether it's sex to someone that's never seen porn, or being an urban explorer in your own city as a teenager, or reading about other cultures through books instead of YouTube videos; the world is much more enchanting and fun with the shadow of ignorance cast over our lives.
I sometimes think that a not-for-(huge)-profit social network could work. Something like how Craigslist still has a comparatively austere website but manages to stick around modestly. I'm not sure what I'd want it to be, really: Facebook (driven by a web of social connections) is a very different platform from Reddit (pseudonymous shitposting) in ways that in strongly want to keep both, as long as the streams never cross.
It does seem like the hyper-capitalist market-maximizing nature of social media drives a lot of the dark patterns like introducing unrelated scissor statements and Instagram models into a feed I'd otherwise want to be strictly topical because they're not wrong that it probably increases median visit time.
It makes me glad that places like this one exist (thanks, Zorba!). I wonder if we'll see a resurgence of old-school sites at some point like how retro-style video games (pixel art!) have become popular.
I'm also glad places like this exist. Twitter has never been my thing. Reddit is far too politically one-sided. Other platforms have a hard time generating engagement. And one problem common to all platforms that attempt to have an informative, interested and competitive userbase is that eventually they all end up catering to the lowest common denominator. You used to be able to have interesting discussions on Reddit, years and years ago; hard as that is to believe. It's also why I 'hate' YouTube "Shorts." Adblockers should equate that to spam, ideally. Because it's low information, low content, dopamine driven nonsense. Hacker News is probably the last/only other refuge I can think of where you get good/decent engagement and informative posts.
I went the route of Shoutwire -> Digg -> Reddit. That was the genesis of my early adult engagement with relevant topics of the day.
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