Twitter, Threads, Tyler Le/Insider
Threads, the newest social-media app from Meta, rocketed past 100 million users less than a week after it went live. The explosive start from Mark Zuckerberg's latest brainchild made it the fastest-growing app in history and took a significant bite out of Twitter's traffic, according to the tracking company Cloudflare. The app has since been hailed as the Twitter replacement people have been clamoring for since Elon Musk's takeover — and bungling — of the platform.
While Threads does look eerily similar to Twitter, there are critical differences. The search experience is limited to finding accounts, with no ability to find people's posts or search by topic. There is no trending page, making it impossible to see what issues are dominating the discourse. The notifications are also a mess, there are no direct messages, and there's no option to see posts from only people you follow. Adam Mosseri, Instagram's head, says many of those features are in the works, but even as the app evolves, it's becoming clear that it will never truly replace Twitter.
That's because Meta isn't trying to fill the shoes of its competitor. While Twitter became popular as a place to stay informed and get access to critical information, Meta wants Threads to be a hangout space for lifestyle brands and influencers. Instead of a newsstand, Meta is building a new wing of its multiplatform mall. That might sound great to advertisers, but it's hard to imagine people will want to be confined to the vapid topics that do best on Instagram.
Why Twitter became popular
Twitter was never the biggest social-media platform, and the company was pretty bad at making money. But it managed to leverage its unique experience in such a way that it became a major part of news and current affairs throughout the 2010s. Politicians, journalists, and other newsmakers flocked to the platform, providing unprecedented insight into their influential roles, while giving them a more direct connection to regular people, and vice versa. Some high-profile users, such as President Donald Trump, became almost unavoidable — his tweets shaped news cycles and public policy. And when big events happened around the world or locally, Twitter was the first place to turn to for real-time updates from reporters, public agencies, and average people documenting events for themselves.
That was Twitter's magic: While there were plenty of influential people on the platform, there were far more regular users sharing whatever came to their minds, spouting off about topics they were passionate about and getting into discussions (or fiery arguments) with one another. The platform gave regular people a degree of collective power. If someone — whether an airline, a celebrity, or just some random person — said or did the wrong thing, users could band together and make the offender address the issue. Twitter allowed people to both know when their train was late and yell at the train service about it. That made it both useful and somewhat addictive.
The platform gave regular people a degree of collective power.
Monetizing the chaotic stream of consciousness was always difficult for Twitter. It was estimated that 90% of its revenue came from advertising in 2021, but even then, it was barely enough to cover its costs. These problems could have been addressed by a new leader with a clear vision to shake up the business. Instead, Twitter got a chaos agent: Musk. Instead of drilling down on ways to boost what made Twitter special, he laid off most of the staff, changed up how the platform worked, and inspired an exodus of advertisers. As the meltdown has gotten worse, the race to absorb Twitter's disaffected user base — and advertisers — has heated up.
Enter: Threads
In a Threads post, Mosseri said that the company's goal "isn't to replace Twitter" but "to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations." In other words, Threads isn't targeting the entire Twitter user base, just a segment of it. In particular, Mosseri said that Meta wanted to welcome people interested in "sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc." who want to have "a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news."
On some level, Threads' aversion to Twitter's free-flowing conversation makes sense — discourse on Twitter can get pretty toxic. But before Musk took over, the platform was trying to crack down on the worst of it. Now, Musk has allowed a large number of previously barred right-wing extremists to return to the platform. And Musk's content-moderation policies and his own frequent boosting of conspiracy theories and anti-trans posts have incensed many users, while scaring off advertisers.
Meta has had its own problems with hate speech on Facebook and continues to be under scrutiny for the harm caused by its ineffective content moderation. But Meta's solution to toxic debate, it seems, is to shut it off any debate at all. This isn't a new idea for the company: Last year, Meta changed the name of Facebook's main timeline from "News Feed" to simply "Feed," which was partially explained by the company "de-emphasizing its investment in news content" and reducing the resources it invested in its news products. In 2021, it briefly pulled news in Australia as the government began to force Google and Facebook to compensate local media. And it's now threatening to do the same in response to similar plans in Canada and California.
The message from Meta is: News content isn't as lucrative as it once was, or it just isn't worth the trade-offs. Ultimately, advertisers want to stay away from controversy, especially at a moment when almost anything can become a culture-war issue. And after the failure of the metaverse, Meta is looking for its next cash cow.
Creating a sanitized space
In 1996, Jennifer S. Light, a technology historian, compared the growth of commercial online communities to the shopping malls that sprung up across the US through the second half of the 20th century. Shopping malls were an attempt to provide a downtown, Main Street-style space for people who had fled to the suburbs. But since malls were privately owned spaces geared toward persuading customers to spend their cash, they weren't very welcoming to people who were not deemed ideal customers — such as people of color and homeless people. Even with our nostalgia-tinted view of these dying spaces, it's safe to say that malls are not the ideal community space. They weren't designed for people; they were designed to make money for the businesses inside them.
They weren't designed for people; they were designed to make money for the businesses inside them.
As the web took off in the '90s, it was seen initially as a public space where people from all over the world would be able to come together and interact. Despite the early excitement, Light wrote, the rush to make money from the new technology meant that the web was quickly commodified like a shopping mall. As advertising became one of the central business models of the web, platforms were incentivized to limit what people could or couldn't do on them to make them more appealing spaces for advertisers to spend their dollars.
On the one hand, this had a valuable moderating effect. Major companies don't want their ads to be placed alongside explicit material, hate speech, or violent imagery, so if platforms can't moderate these types of content, the business side will suffer. The flip side of this desire for clean spaces is that brands also don't want to put up with debates on sensitive political issues, conversations that expose their bad behavior, or even nude images, which have long been banned on Meta's platforms.
This push to oversanitize and limit conversations to benign, lowest-common-denominator discussion turned the internet from a common, public market where everyone could hang out on equal footing into a commodified, poorly lit mall designed to cater to people who had the most to spend.
Threads is unlikely to be the future
The balancing act between providing a place for free expression and catering to advertisers is at the core of the Threads-Twitter fight.
While Twitter had long been used for informative purposes, it was also a place where people could post fairly freely — and that occasionally caused some problems. There was always a tension about how much to moderate content, not just by users who wanted hate speech cleaned up but also by advertisers who wanted less risk to their brands. Instead of solving these issues while preserving what made it unique, Musk has pushed Twitter further into the free-for-all direction. Musk directly cited attempts to increase moderation as one of the reasons he chose to acquire the company and remake it as a "free speech" platform. But, as I already mentioned, that isn't going well for the business side of things.
As advertisers have fled Twitter in response to Musk's changes, Meta is learning from Musk's mistakes and trying to create the shopping-mall-ified, brand-friendly version of Twitter that the bird site could never succeed at turning itself into. Threads aims to build on the success of Instagram, which has been thriving amid Facebook's decline. Instagram's visual nature and strict content moderation make it great for advertising, and now Threads will provide those same brands and creators an additional space to promote their products. This is already clear in how Threads prioritizes users: Influencers and celebrities got early access to the app and have been relentlessly promoted by its algorithm. To jump-start engagement, these accounts started by asking their followers questions like their favorite color or whether they liked cookies — but that's not the level of discussion that will keep people engaged for very long.
It's hard to say exactly how successful Threads will be. Some analysts are estimating it could add $8 billion to Meta's annual revenue by 2025. But after the rush of initial sign-ups, tracking firms are already finding a significant drop in user engagement. Ultimately, how Threads does will be determined by whether users actually want a Twitter-like platform that puts vapid consumption above substantive, useful, and occasionally heated discussion. If Threads does succeed, it won't be the Twitter replacement people are hoping for. In its bid for a cash-cow app, Threads is foregoing everything that made Twitter special — no political debate, no train updates, no crowdsourcing breaking news.
So will there ever be another Twitter? As its disintegration has continued, no app has succeeded in taking its place. Perhaps that's because Twitter is a relic of a waning era in online communication, where trading data for access may not be enough anymore. In a moment where platforms are being forced to prove their business bona fides much quicker, an online mall may be the most realistic option.
Paris Marx is a tech writer and host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast. He also writes the Disconnect newsletter and is the author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation.