Meta’s Threads, and why Twitter’s fine.

Threads

As with all other social media platforms, Threads is the latest copycat platform we’ve seen pop up. It surged in popularity, hitting over 100 million users in just 5 days. When I joined however, I felt like my parents and uninspired brands were posting non stop. Nothing felt engaging. Just look at the Google Trends data:

$META's thread's number of daily active users are down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user is down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes, per CNBC.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) July 14, 2023

So what happened? In my opinion, Zuck published a MVP. The app barely had commenting down, but there wasn’t a direction. Even before Elon took over Twitter, Twitter had replies and quote tweets to respond with and actively engage with content. Now there’s things like Spaces to keep the conversation going. Threads also (from what I could find) forced you to an AI-curated list of posts. While Twitter also defaults to this, there’s an easy to access tab that shows you posts from who you follow.

It seems like Threads is suffering a similar issues that right leaning socials like Truth Social face. One of their strongest “pros” is not being run by whoever one group distrusts. The issue is the privacy and censorship issues that people have with Musk or Zuckerberg exist on all the other platforms as well. You’d need a decentralized platform, but all of those platforms just get overrun by bots before they can establish (look at some of the decentralized Reddit alternatives that popped up during the Reddit protest).

I’m not completely knocking Threads, with the existing userbase it definitely has the ability to take over some of the market. I believe that everyone expecting a Twitter killer ended up hurting Threads on its launch though. The platform just needs more time to mature. If Facebook can make my mom and grandmother want to post selfies, Facebook can make them want to post… threads?

Elon and Twitter

I originally had the feeling that Twitter was going to crash and burn when Elon started taking over. It was clear he was disrupting the existing processes and backing that the service ran off of, but I think that is working out to his advantage. While initially misinformation, bots, and other nonsense were spiking on the platform, Twitter has improved significantly in my opinion. The two main improvements? Spaces and Community Notes.

I’ll talk about the blue check in a minute.

I’d describe Spaces as something similar to a live streamed podcast interview. You don’t necessarily have episodes, but someone typically hosts them and you’ll have guest speakers. Then, you have your audience. People join in to listen, and then the host can open up a Q&A session. At least for the few spaces I’ve listened in on, it worked really well. You actually had people conversing with each other, sometimes even with differing backgrounds or beliefs on political policy. Compared to a Fox News or CNN interview where its either an echo chamber or just an echo chamber bullying 1 person with an opposite belief, Spaces is refreshing. Try to join a couple and see what you think.

The next one is Community Notes, and while it has its flaws, I think its one of the larger innovations in social media when dealing with misinformation.

Community Notes aim to create a better informed world by empowering people on Twitter to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading Tweets. Contributors can leave notes on any Tweet and if enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful, the note will be publicly shown on a Tweet.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/community-notes

I’ve seen almost every type of tweet get community noted, and the best ones are from prominent figures. Even Elon Musk gets community noted. I’m not aware of any other platform that offers this kind of corrective exposure.

The verification and blue check mark controversies are probably one of Twitter’s weakest points right now. The requirement of appending “(Parody)” to the end of accounts that could be impersonating someone else, while good sounding, means nothing when an account name gets truncated and the text is cut off. The brand association works well, separating normal accounts from corporate accounts, but the features that come with each vs the value they bring is sometimes questionable. We’re seeing a rise in this corporate behavior though, as companies begin to put taller walls around their content, like with Reddit’s recent handling of their API pricing changes.

We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load. Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 15, 2023

Elon expresses concern over expanding the platform further before they become profitable.

I’m interested to see how each of these companies performs over the rest of this year. Twitter still has some reputation to repair, and Threads still needs to give users a reason to use it over Twitter besides it not being Twitter. Soon, I’ll talk about Twitter’s ad revenue sharing program, and how that’s may impact creators’ expectations of the platform. If you want to read more about that, you should sign up for my newsletter so you’re the first to know!