A day after America celebrated sticking two fingers up to the British, Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook, Meta, and that infamous meme fame) decided to stick his own up to Elon Musk by launching his own version of Twitter. Only it’s not Twitter, it’s “Threads”. And it’s not the same, except it absolutely is.
You know how on Facebook messenger you can set a “theme” for a chat? Well, Threads is like you’ve selected the Instagram theme for Twitter. It’s got all the multicoloured, smooth-edged graphics of Meta’s photo sharing social media platform, with all of the content of Twitter’s short-message broadcasting format. It’s like they’ve had some weird baby – which I guess was Zuckerburg’s aim.
Zuckerberg is keen to note he sees Threads as a bit of “friendly competition” for Twitter – a choice of wording that is best explained by the fact that Zuckerberg’s knowledge of human emotion is based on what he’s read on Wikipedia. There’s nothing friendly about what seems to be another in a long line of underhand attacks between these two billionaire robots, who are now tempting us with talks of a cage fight. This is giving me big Pete-Becker-from-Friends vibes.
But enough context, because I’ve downloaded and trialled the app so that you, dear reader, don’t have to waste your time. What can I say, I’m a servant at heart! So here are my big take-aways from the new frontier of social media.
1. It’s linked to your Instagram…
I was desperate to get a unique username, but alas – as it’s linked to Instagram, my username followed with me. You can choose to bring across your bio, profile picture and invite all your Insta friends to come and join you (but please don’t, no one wants to be that person).
It’s not the worst thing, but I am really hung up about not getting simply my first name as a username, so I’m marking it down. Plus, by being able to link and sync and merge things up, it just feels like an extension of Instagram, which admittedly it is, but it makes it feel less exciting.
2. But your following isn’t
You don’t automatically follow linked accounts of the one’s you follow on Insta (although you can, if you so choose). Pretty good, because I think I’d put my head through a wall if I had to put up with some people’s Tweeting (or do we now say threading?)
3. Aesthetically more soothing than twitter
I said what I said. See above for my comments on Meta’s graphics.
4. No ads?
Dreamy. But it does raise some serious questions about how it makes money – unless Zuckerberg is determined to one up Musk enough that he’s sinking his fortune into it. I’m not 100 per cent sure I want to know what they’re doing with my data…
5. A refreshing crackdown on spam accounts
To offer an alternative to Twitter’s bot overloaded existence – how long this will last is yet to be seen…
It’s not as dead as I expected – much like Subway on a Saturday. The first 24 hours were definitely just people posting about how they’re on Threads now/the death of Twitter/all hail Zuckerberg, but 10 million users in 7 hours? Fair play (also shoutout to the Taylornation account that’s been posting some excellent Threads-themed Swift lyrics – you’ve done some proud service for your country).
So is it worth it? I think it’s yet to be seen. There’s nothing groundbreaking about its format, its only available as an app (no webpage format) so it’s just going to be another app clogging up your phone. It addresses two fatal flaws of Twitter: advertising and bots. But if it can’t keep them out, then I think we might have seen the end of Twitter.
But like any social media platform, the proof won’t be in the pudding, but in whether it can attract enough users to make it a must-have. If it can keep up its impressive performance so far? Then maybe. But I just have a feeling that this is a step too far in Instagram’s evolution. There’s buzz for now, but I can’t see enough sustenance to feed the hype.
“Mark Zuckerberg at Carnegie Mellon University” by Anirudh Koul is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.