“I’m now on #Threads,” tweeted dozens of my friends and colleagues on Thursday as they clambered aboard Meta’s new Twitter rival.
Six months ago, they were tweeting “I’m now on #Mastodon”, certain that Twitter was about to implode, rather like the Titan submersible did in a bubbly cloud of its creator’s wilful negligence and technical incompetence.
Only, they didn’t stay on Mastodon, instead lingering, discontented and embittered, on Twitter, as Elon Musk stopped employing the people and paying the hosting bills that held Twitter together.
Mark Zuckerberg, still smarting from the ruthless mocking of his legless metaverse avatars, saw a relatively low-risk and affordable opportunity to both show up his old sparring partner and make a play for the digital town square Musk paid US$40 billion for in the worst deal since Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought a dying Myspace for US$580 million. Murdoch sold Myspace a couple of years later for US$35 million, a scenario that could well be in Musk’s future, too.
Meta’s new Threads app (available on iOS and Android and in over 100 countries), is little different in its look and feel to the dozens of Twitter clones that have emerged this year. It has a simple messaging interface, with the familiar like, repost and comment icons. The message length is a bit more generous than on Twitter at up to 500 characters, compared with Twitter’s 280-character limit.
A ready-made audience
It feels familiar and intuitive, as you’d expect from the team that made Instagram one of the most addictive smartphone apps in the world. There are no hashtags, a real rejection of Twitter’s original calling card, and no way to edit Threads or search them other than by username.
Leveraging Meta’s Instagram platform, it comes with two massive advantages over any other Twitter wannabe. It has a ready-made audience of users who simply need to log into Threads using their Instagram username and password to access the new social media app. In seconds, you can import all your Instagram contacts and duplicate your profile picture and blurb, taking the hassle out of setting up a new social-media account.
Threads is also backed by the engineering might of Meta. A new spin-out product like this is a relatively simple project compared with the virtual worlds and mixed-reality headsets Zuckerberg is spending US$10 billion a year on in his metaverse division. Outages will be genuinely rare and Threaders are less likely to be plagued with spam from fake accounts.
Threads offers nothing new, nothing particularly innovative or novel. But it doesn’t need to for it to succeed. It’s a spoiler played by Meta, an experiment that can be easily wound down if it proves to go nowhere, causing little in the way of collateral damage to its stablemates Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
But the upside is potentially great for Meta. There is no advertising on Threads yet, but it will come, and those brands keen to reach the Twitterati refugees will be more than willing to pay to feature in a Threads feed free of the controversy and Musk’s erratic content-moderation decisions. Twitter’s ad revenue, as the New York Times revealed last month, is tanking, and subscription revenue from the Twitter Blue verified service isn’t nearly enough to make up the difference.
The content dilemma
But Meta faces a major test in launching Threads. Its content moderation is superior to what a depleted Twitter now offers, but the ghost of the Christchurch mosque attack videos, and numerous other content-moderation failures, continues to haunt Meta.
The company that brought us the Cambridge Analytica scandal and played a starring role in the chilling Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma hardened the resolve of Twitter superusers never to enter the Zuckerverse again. Many of my friends were the first to set up shop on Threads last Thursday, which shows how dire things have got when a Twitter feed is limited to 1000 tweets a day unless you pay up for Twitter Blue.
There’s a big question mark over Meta’s ability to manage a social network that will have more of a digital town-square feel than the Facebook newsfeed, and which will pose the Meta oversight board a slew of complex content moderation cases to consider. Issues will blow up more quickly than Meta is used to, and the culture wars will rage in real-time with an intensity not seen on Instagram.
What I do like about Threads is Meta’s embrace of the ActivityPub protocol to build it. That’s the same technology that underpins open-source social platform Mastodon and many other fledgling networks in the so-called fediverse.
At the moment, you can’t access Threads posts on those other networks and vice versa, but Meta claims that ability will come to Threads, which is a huge departure from the company’s approach up to now, which involves shepherding people into its walled and linked gardens of content: IG, Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp.
The decentralisation of Threads would throw up a range of questions about where Meta’s content moderation begins and ends. But the fact that Zuckerberg has given his blessing to this pivotal shift in how a social network is designed and operated suggests he knows the future of his entire empire is decentralised. Indeed, that’s a fundamental principle of the metaverse he is trying to create and which he maintains will be made up of a broad ecosystem of players hosting interoperable worlds.
With TikTok on the verge of being cancelled in many countries over national security concerns, Zuckerberg finds himself sitting pretty once again, at least in the English-speaking world of social media. For Elon Musk, a death spiral of declining usage and ad revenue is a real possibility. Getting 10 cents back on every dollar he invested in his impulsive Twitter purchase now seems wildly optimistic.
