Meta Threads a Needle

Some quick, initial thoughts on Meta’s Threads service

Fuck, it’s good.

I both thought Meta should try to go after Twitter (yet again). And thought it might actually work this time. But I honestly didn’t expect Threads to be this good, this fast. I chalk that up at least half to Twitter itself, which adds new performances to the shitshow daily at this point. Threads is good, in part, because so many of us want it and need it to be good. Because Twitter is so fucked.

At the same time, putting it all on Twitter’s chaos is a disservice to Meta. As the company has proven time and time again, they’re really good at this social stuff. Namely, taking an idea hatched elsewhere and engineering the shit out of it. I mean, how many times has a company pushed up the launch of a massive new product (on top of launching it faster than they normally would have, as has been reported, thanks to the aforementioned Twitter fiascos)? That’s what Meta did yesterday — launching it several hours ahead of their original countdown clock.

That threw me for a loop as it was the middle of the night in Europe, where I am at the moment, and so by the time I actually signed up for Threads, I was user #9,231,036. For a certain subset of us nerds, that’s just embarrassing. We pride ourselves on early sign-ups. I was user #24 of Instagram, for Chrissake. But that is just how fast Meta was scaling Threads. It went from basically zero to ten million users in seven hours. Sweet Jesus.¹

One of my first posts (aside: what are we calling them? “Threads” seems too generic and, of course, the name of the product. I do love ‘Threats’. But we need a name...) was to ask, in all seriousness, when Threads might overtake Twitter in terms of users? It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time. Will it be days? Weeks? Months?

And that leads to the hard(er) part: retaining those users and figuring out with those users what the network actually is. What it’s for. Yes, many of us are hoping for a 1-to-1 Twitter replacement, to end the said Twitter madness. But it’s not going to be that. While Meta was smart to leverage the Instagram network here (critically, in a new app), it’s a network that was not scaled the same way that Twitter’s was.² And while image-based networks and text-based networks have more or less merged at this point, Instagram’s follow graph was built more like a hybrid of Facebook’s and YouTube’s. Friends and interests and influencers. Twitter, on the other hand, was more like (early) influencers mixed with news and more recently (thanks in no small part to Elon’s ‘For You’ changes) memes. Sure there were some friends sprinkled in there, but it was never similar to Facebook’s graph. Which is why Facebook’s early attempts to clone Twitter’s functionality never worked.

Anyway, the point is that this new Threads network is likely to be something new entirely. Meta allowed you to auto-follow everyone you follow on Instagram, but those who did that also seemingly unfollowed a lot of accounts rather quickly, because again, image-focused graphs are different. I decided to go the opposite (and much more laborious route) of trying to manually re-follow accounts based off my Instagram graph but more tailored for this network. We’ll see how that goes.³

Meta seemingly did a great job getting a number of big time publishers on Threads early to try to fill in the news void that Twitter is opening up. But Google also did a pretty good job of this back in the day with Google+. And we all know how that ended up. Again, the key will be retention. Of users, of publishers, of everyone. And actual usage — not faux usage. It’s too early to tell, of course. But there are some good signs, namely again, in just how good the product actually is. It’s barebones, but it’s still sort of fun to use. That’s important. Very important.⁴

While I disagree with some of the design choices of the feed — the social buttons are way too large compared to the actual content, especially if it’s short text — the whole thing works incredibly well. Better than Twitter, in many ways, which has had to tack on many features, from replies on down, after the fact, of course. There are still a number of obvious things missing, but I suspect Meta is going to ship early and often here. Hell, they may ship more features in the first couple of months than Twitter has in years. That’s not an exaggeration or a slight — well, it’s sort of a slight — it again just speaks to the prowess of Meta here. They’re both impressive and ruthless.

Especially when they have a clear target in their sights. When there’s a greenfield in front of them, they seem almost wayward. But when there’s a challenge, they’re bruuuutaaaal.

At the same time, they don’t always make the right choices. And often do some pretty tone deaf things. They also have a tendency to launch things and make promises — to journalists in particular — and then rather quickly go back on those promises and kill off what they just launched. If you need any proof of that, just scroll through my Twitter feed and look for the number of times I use the Lucy-pulling-the-football-on-Charlie-Brown GIF. It’s a lot. There is, of course, a risk of that here as well. It feels smaller, but it’s a risk.

So I’m fascinated to see how this all plays out. My guess — again, a few hours in — is that Threads shoots past Twitter in users relatively quickly, but that it doesn’t kill Twitter because it doesn’t control the real-time zeitgeist in the same way as a news and information network does. Meta is going to try, of course. But I just think it’s a network that ends up slightly different, tangential to what Twitter’s network is.

If Twitter dies, it’s by its own hand. But Meta has made that a slightly easier pill to swallow today. Color me impressed. So far.

¹ And now they’re apparently past 30 million. In about 12 hours. Wild.

² Though, ironically, Instagram’s graph did get a jumpstart by leveraging Twitter’s graph early on (before the two quickly started warring with Facebook’s acquisition of IG — famously beating out Twitter, despite Jack Dorsey being a seed investor).

³ Thankfully, Threads seemed to quickly backtrack on the notion of making you manually accept every single follow request coming over from Instagram. For people with many Instagram followers, that would have taken hours.

⁴ Then again, I’ve been wrong on such first impressions before… (To be fair, I turned fairly quick and fairly harshly!)