meimagine a social network where users have invested so much social capital in putting data about themselves that it is impossible to imagine them leaving. Moving to a new location would be a huge risk for users because you would lose your network of friends. The entire existence of the network, according to the theory, is secured by these barriers to start over at a new exit.
That’s how the Guardian described Myspace in 2007, when the first social network had 150 million global users, a number so large it was considered unlikely they would ever move elsewhere. (In the end, Myspace was soon overtaken by Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Rupert Murdoch lost almost all the money he spent buying the site, and Myspace’s once-ubiquitous founder Tom Anderson has traveled the world with the proceeds since then.)
Sixteen years later, Elon Musk’s Twitter also tests the theory that people remain loyally addicted to their favorite social network until suddenly, one day, they give up and move elsewhere. This week Zuckerberg launched Threads, a new platform aimed at winning over people who, in the words of one executive, want a site like Twitter that is “sensibly run.”
After a day of using Threads, one thing is pretty clear: it’s not Twitter. But Threads has the potential to be something different and powerful: Twitter with less grit, more corporate sheen, and enough potential to absorb the remaining life — and ad revenue — of Musk’s struggling network.
The biggest difference is that Threads feels substantially less confrontational, less aggressive, and less based on calling out strangers with different political views than Twitter. The racism, antisemitism, transphobia and general abuse that is prevalent on Twitter is not as visible. Zuckerberg told a user of the site that it was a design feature: “The goal is to keep it user-friendly as it expands… That’s one of the reasons Twitter never had as successful as I think it should be, and we want to do it in a different way.”
Threads has also solved the problem of starting a social network from scratch by taking an existing one from Instagram. Any existing Instagram user can sign up and quickly reconnect their followers to the photo-sharing app, meaning Threads isn’t plagued with the feeling that you’ve just arrived at a new school with no friends. (In a strange Brexit boon for British users, EU countries are currently banned from signing up to Threads because of the feature, which could breach Brussels data rules.)
The flip side is that, at the moment, no one is quite sure why they use Threads. Broadly speaking, three groups dominate the site: users known for posting photos on Instagram who have unexpectedly gained a huge audience on a text-centric app; enterprise social media managers are desperate to stay relevant by jumping on the bandwagon; and people fleeing the increasingly toxic environment of Twitter. They all have a different idea of what they want from the site. A large portion of the posts on the first day consisted of people asking why they signed up.
Threads also lacks the immediacy of Twitter, as the app’s main news feed currently only features an algorithmically generated summary of recent posts. Until this feature is changed to allow users to prioritize material posted in the last few minutes, it limits the use of the site as a home for breaking news. When Keir Starmer was spooked at an event in Gillingham on Thursday morning, the clip was immediately all over Twitter. But it was much less visible in Threads, which also currently lacks a text search feature.
Instead, Threads is more like a cross between Twitter and Instagram, with a TikTok-style approach to getting the juice out of posts. You’re more likely to see a funny post from the Archbishop of Banterbury’s meme account than a serious discussion about a political intervention from his equivalent in the Church of England.
All of this is bad news for Twitter under Musk, which could slide further back into becoming a home for right-wing libertarians arguing about culture war issues. At its best, the experience of being on Twitter in the mid-2010s was like being at the funniest and most interesting party in town. It proved to be one of the best media regulators ever, a perfect place to quickly report shoddy journalism and political lies. It wasn’t necessarily where the vast majority of the world found out about things, that was Facebook, but Twitter was probably where the information was released first.
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It was also perfect for building online communities around shared interests, whether it was political news, favorite musicians or LGBTQ+ rights. But cramming many different communities with strong interests into the same online house party has its flaws. Anger and fury proved to be the best way to go viral and reach an audience. Donald Trump used the site as a megaphone to flood the media area in his run for the White House.
Ultimately, the launch of Threads could be just another step in the disintegration of the 2010s social media scene and its rebirth as a more sanitized, advertiser-friendly environment, rather than a messy discussion and free
Zuckerberg said he expected Threads to surpass Twitter’s 250 million monthly users. “It will take time, but I think there should be a public chat app with over 1 billion people,” he said. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but it has not succeeded. Hopefully, we will.”
