Weekly Scroll: Political Implosions

Threads turns one, political disasters, and historical poaster energy

Threads at One

It’s now been a full year since the folks over at Meta dropped Threads on us, so let’s take some time to reflect on how the year has gone for the potential Twitter-killer. It’s also good to revisit my initial predictions about whether or not Threads or BlueSky could end up dethroning Twitter. From last year:

Is Threads the Actual Twitter Replacement?

Will this work? Nobody can know for sure. I emphasize again and again that network effects are really, genuinely, incredibly strong. It’s very hard to defeat an incumbent. Adam Smith once said “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” after a British defeat in the American Revolutionary War. His point was that despite the news of a ruinous defeat, the British Empire was in such a strong position it could be ‘ruined’ over and over and over before the ‘ruin’ would stick. This is basically how I feel about Twitter. There’s a great deal of failure in a dominant social media site. Elon does seem to be walking down that path, and the actual core service of Twitter is suffering in a way it hasn’t for years. Even with Elon’s lunacy, Twitter will have to fail over and over and over before it can actually, permanently fail.

But! If Twitter does fail, I suspect that Meta’s Theory of Scale will end up defeating BlueSky’s Theory of Status. BlueSky is indie and open-source and cool and has the best shitposters, while Threads belongs to Meta and Mark Zuckerberg who are very much not cool. But Threads is going to have a userbase several orders of magnitude larger than BlueSky and ultimately that may matter more than what seems high status.

I think I nailed this pretty well. Twitter is indeed suffering and lessened from what it was a few years back. But the people who said Twitter would die quickly were wrong. Network effects are simply too strong, and as long as Musk is willing to keep losing money, Twitter/X will stick around. In addition, Threads is much better positioned than BlueSky. The latter has much better posting quality, but Threads is something like 20-30 times as large and size usually wins out for social networks.

How did Threads get here? Where exactly are they, even? How should we characterize their first year of existence?

The Good

• Thread’s mere existence is a technical marvel. It took only five months to complete the technical build and launch the app. All told, the time between the first Zuckerberg/Mosseri conversation and launch was seven months. That is incredibly impressive. Most of the tech giants have become victims of their own size, unable to do anything fast and unable to ship without their products being buggy disasters.¹ It’s remarkable how fast Meta can still move.

• Within five days, Threads had 100 million users. Is this somewhat of a rigged statistic, given that it piggybacked on the Instagram app? Yes. Is it still impressive? Also yes. Reaching true network scale is the hardest thing for any social media app to do, and Threads essentially solved the problem from day one.

• Threads ships features fast. Whether it was adding the desktop site, editing posts, trending topics, search, Following tab, etc, the Threads tech team keeps adding requested features at a steady pace and without a ton of drama. Overall I’m incredibly impressed by the engineering behind Threads.

The Bad

• Threads is cringe. We saw this early, and it’s still true. There’s very little quality posting there. It feels tame, corporate. BlueSky is orders of magnitude smaller but gives you a much higher chance of running into something truly funny or viral.

• Threads, at least when I log in, is often filled with AI slop and very low quality engagement bait. It’s gotten better recently, but this has been a big feature of the site for a while.

• The ‘For You’ algorithm still basically sucks - at least for an infrequent user. It seems like the stuff I see it totally unrelated to who I follow. So much of it is unrelated to what I care about, there’s still a lot of algorithmic work to be done.

Remains to be seen

• Threads, from the beginning, insisted they would de-emphasize political content and news. They didn’t want the experience of logging into Threads to be the same sort of doomscroll that so many of us get on Twitter. I think the jury is still out on this one. It was a really poor policy to emphasize at launch, because the class of people most desperate to escape Elon’s clutches were highly engaged political junkies - and you basically told them DON’T COME HERE in big flashing letters. But I do get the desire for Threads to have a different vibe than the politics-poisoned parts of the internet.

Mosseri had an interesting quote on the whole politics/news angle:

Take a hot issue — the war in Gaza, right now. Do you really want to be showing people content that is a really strong opinion, that is either pro-Israeli or Palestinian, to someone, from an account they did not decide to follow? That is a pretty precarious situation, and a presumptuous thing to do. Could you maybe drive some more attention through that? Probably. Is that really worth it? Worth the risks that come along with it? Worth the anger might create with the mistakes you might make? Hard to say that it's worth that. 

Mosseri also emphasized that Threads isn’t banning political content, it’s just trying not to inject it into your feed if you don’t follow political accounts. Time will tell if it’s the right approach.

Threads has the numbers to be successful, but at some point they’re going to have to find the actual posting quality to back up those numbers.

Politics! Politics! Politics!

Not sure if you’ve heard, but boy oh boy did we ever have some politics in the last week.