Threading Twitter
Threads, the Meta-backed platform is the biggest challenger yet to Twitter. What will define the success or failure of Threads and Twitter is the crux of this essay.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk shared the above tweet announcing a temporary restriction on the number of tweets that can be read per day by a user. From a user behaviour point of view, this announcement is counter-intuitive in nature, as never in the history of Twitter a user had to think about throttling its usage. In fact, the company was a pioneer in creating the infinite scroll behaviour.
So, why now? The rising instances of large-scale data scrapping by companies and startups as part of their AI endeavour have been alluded to as the key reason for this restrictive step. The industry grapevine suggests otherwise — it’s more to do with company finances.
With Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, there have been a series of events that have raised serious questions about the survival of Twitter in the distant future.
The latest announcement also coincides with a move by Meta, to launch its newest app, Threads — a microblogging platform. In a span of a day, more than 30 million users across 100 countries have signed up on Threads.
This is huge, as the Meta-backed platform is the biggest challenger yet to Twitter, which has seen a series of potential competitors emerge who are vying for the disgruntled Twitter users. Mastodon, Bluesky and Koo are a few of the platforms that have found some traction in various parts of the world but are far off from posing a serious challenge to Twitter.
We also need to assess the impact of changes which were introduced by Musk since its takeover of Twitter. The most contentious one was the removal of the legacy verified blue tick from verified accounts and putting it behind a paywall.
What’s in store for a Blue subscriber? A Blue subscriber gets the ability to tweet up to 25,000 characters through its NoteTweet feature and upload videos up to 60 mins long. There was a lot of hue and cry post the announcement, but it seems users are warming up to the service. As of April 2023, there were 640,000 paid Twitter Blue users.
The real challenge lies in tackling user inertia which is a phenomenon of the larger social media ecosystem and not just restricted to Twitter.
Threads, the Meta way
Meta, like other tech giants, has a record of copying features of competitors’ platforms and implementing them into its own services. When we look at Meta’s track record in copying its competitors’ features, they have found a good amount of success.
The ‘Stories’ feature is a direct inspiration from Snap, whereas Reels have been a direct inspiration from Tik Tok. Stories now accounts for more than a quarter of Instagram’s worldwide advertising revenue, according to Insider Intelligence.
Is Threads, a threat?
Instagram, the propellor
Threads is piggybacking on the Instagram platform which provides it with an ability to quickly gain traction riding on its ~2 billion monthly active users — Twitter has ~350 million monthly users. The scale seems to tilt in favour of Instagram, but lets remember the fact that, Twitter was still drawing more traffic to its platform than Instagram until last year, which can change in the future.
Visual vs Text
Instagram is essentially a visual medium and that will pose a challenge for its users as Threads is largely a text platform. With its integration at the onboarding stage itself, both feeds are bound to look similar. It’s not that they have not tried a text-only feature on Instagram. They had launched a feature called, Notes that allows users to share a short text blurb with their network. Not sure, how has been the acceptance of this feature, but this seemed to be a precursor to the Threads app.
Privacy concern
Meta is notorious for how it protects and deals with user data. Apple hit them the most with its introduction of a more user-driven consent approach which created a huge dent in Facebook’s advertising business. When we review the permissions that are required for Threads on our mobile device, there are a lot of grey areas. They are seeking access to a much larger set of personal data spanning political and religious affiliations, financial data, health data, and much more.
The service is not available in the European Union, where the regulator has already made it clear it will not tolerate “super profiling” and collecting “data related to health, finances, purchases, contacts, usage data, browsing history and other confidential information” to sell to the highest bidder, pretending this is a “legitimate use”, as well as bombarding users with ultra-targeted advertising.
User conditioning
The sign-up process for Threads is easy, as right at the beginning you are asked to connect your Instagram account and the rest of the things just fall in place. As soon as the sign-in process is complete, users land in familiar territory as the home page reminds people of Twitter — which takes care of the learning curve if there is any.
People will join the bandwagon and lap up a new offering based on the network effect and FOMO (fear of missing out), but long-term user engagement is still a concern. We have seen that with a multitude of offerings in the past — Signal, the messaging app is a case in point.
Decentralisation
A lot of platforms like Mastodon are built upon the decentralisation theme — no single entity/company owns the platform, but the communities own them. This theme has been playing out for a decade now but has recently picked up steam owing to the larger decentralisation wave playing out across domains.
Threads has committed to integrate with the same open protocols used by other distributed social media alternatives, such as Mastodon. That would give users the option to migrate their accounts, along with all their follower data intact, to a rival like Mastodon that isn’t controlled by Meta.
What’s next?
The effects of the online world have truly led to fruition and there are debates playing out not just in the public forum but in the political sphere as well.
- How tech companies be held accountable for their negative impact on society?
- To what extent ‘freedom of speech’ argument be stretched?
- How can opposing voices get a free space to express themselves without the fear of retribution?
- How can users port their entire social graph from one rival to another whenever they wanted?
There are too many variables at play and it’s not easy to pinpoint which variable will play a pivotal role in the success or failure of Threads or Twitter.
What are your thoughts on this? Would love to hear them.
Until next time!
~ Sajid
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Sajid is a Strategy Consultant who works at the intersection of human behaviour, business design and innovation strategy. He blogs at sknotes and tweets @sajidkhetani.
