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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 think the "tiktokification of text" is a pretty major downside. Twitter has the capability of being used in a highbrow manner. Instagram was the same way, until they almost destroyed it, and now it's in an uneasy middle-state.
I think ultimately serious, normal adults are not interested in wading through a mixture of adolescent snark and not-subtle, vapid, hail-corporate-adjacent self promotion to actually exchange ideas. I feel like there is still a huge opportunity for substack notes to be "hey we are the serious place" but their app sucks.
Maybe gen z just takes the whole internet and destroys everything good about it. Not sure at this point.
Current adults, sure. But if younger generations grow up addicted to these platforms and we don’t regulate them at all, I doubt they will suddenly grow an immune system upon hitting 18 or 25 or whatever.
Yeah that's what my foreboding final line was supposed to hint towards. Personally I was exposed to a lot of silliness online and in culture and I feel like I grew up, if a little later than I should have. I have a hard time judging which way it will go with the next generation.
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