The story so far: In July 2023, the Instagram-based app Threads exploded with a burst of enthusiasm from users desperate to flee Elon Musk’s X, the app formerly known as Twitter. That faded in the first few months, when the number of daily active users (DAUs) halved. Still, Team Threads was working diligently to add many of the features a disgruntled Twitter user could desire — a web version, a reverse-chronological timeline — while Musk seemed to be doing his best to tank his own service.
“Don’t be surprised if Threads becomes the go-to place for all things trending by the end of 2023,” I wrote in August. This was a risky prediction. Musk himself mocked it, and that guy knows a thing or two about missing predictions.
Now here’s what we learned this month: “Threads DAUs in the US passed X in December 2023 and it has not looked back,” according to Apptopia, a company that tracks app usage. Had my prediction had come to pass, just under the wire? Not exactly, because the picture is a little more complicated: X is still ahead in monthly active users (MAUs) — even allowing for what researchers believe are inflated numbers from the now-private company — while DAUs are notoriously difficult to parse.
What is undeniable: it is springtime for Threads. Millions of users came back after the August dip. In Meta’s earnings report in April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg trumpeted 150 million Threads MAUs, a 50% increase on the July high, and 30 million more than it saw in February. Zuck’s service, unlike other Twitter alternatives, is picking up media buzz along with users: “Is Threads the Good Place?” the New York Times opinion page wondered in March.
Meanwhile, Musk’s service has turned into a sleazy bot-filled soup of misinformation and dull promoted comments from pay-to-play “blue tick” accounts. Advertisers have fled as their content shows up on literal Nazi accounts reinstated by Musk, while the timeline for regular users who refuse to pay has never seen more misleading low-rent ads. It isn’t working. Usage is declining, even by Musk’s own admission; more unbiased reports suggest usage is down by a quarter since he took over. And the patient continues to bleed out.
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Equally undeniable: Threads, at least for partly-reformed Twitter addicts like me, isn’t quite there yet.
On the surface, it is indeed the Good Place — a kind of heaven for some of the greatest accounts you might recall from the 2010s, back in the days of peak Twitter. And it is easier to share their output with friends: iPhones now recognize Threads links, so that witty meme or clever cat can be seen right there in Messages without clicking through.
But that doesn’t mean the content itself is equally shareable. Look at both X and Threads over this past weekend, and there was no question which one had the most viral activity. Kristi Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, tried to explain away that whole puppy shooting thing on Twitter. If you wanted to tell the governor what a monster she was, that’s where you had to go: the Bad Place.
Meanwhile, over in the schadenfreude section of the social media giant, Derek Guy, known as the menswear guy, took apart some tasteless influencer who thought he dressed like Cary Grant, nailing their stylistic differences in dozens of expertly-tailored tweets. Now, Guy does post on Threads — but only 10 times in all of April. He deconstructed his target on Twitter, because that’s still where you go to do verbal battle in front of both friends and foes.
In an age when we are ever more siloed, Twitter is still the arena where all sides meet. Just about.
Drop the algorithm, Zuck
Why isn’t Threads the arena with the must-read conversations? In part, the answer has to do with Zuckerberg’s weird skittishness about centering news stories. But there’s something else. The longer a Twitter veteran spends on Threads, the more they notice what might be described as big Meta energy — and that’s not a good thing.
“Replies here feel way more like Facebook comments than Twitter replies,” one user wrote this weekend, responding to another who complained about all the overly earnest responses she was receiving to half-baked thoughts on Threads. “Every time I post an idle thought or complaint I’m flooded with a ton of accounts I’ve never interacted with trying to give me unsolicited advice or tell me how it’s all my own fault.”
A former colleague and social media veteran concurred, in more brusque terms: Threads users could do with understanding the concept of shitposting, she wrote. “I swear the majority of Threads users have only used normie internet and it shows.”
There’s something off, something very not-Twitter about the feel of the conversation, but why? In short, and a little more politely, too many Threads users are coming direct from Instagram and unwittingly relying on the Meta algorithm’s pick of the Threads it wants them to read — regardless of whether they actually follow the accounts posting them. You may know it better as the “For You” tab.
Or you may not know it at all, because the current design of the Threads app on your phone hides the fact that you can switch to “Following,” a.k.a. the classic reverse chronological timeline that made peak Twitter the must-read creative maelstrom it was. You have to know to tap the logo at the top of the page to reveal “For You” and “Following.” And the damn app defaults to “For You” every time you open it. No wonder the writer of that Times piece seemed not to even know there was another option.
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Musk may be putting his fingers more heavily than Zuck on the scale within his “For You” option, an algorithm which often seems to center Musk’s favored accounts — but at least on Musk’s iPhone app, you can still see “For You” and “Following” by default.
It isn’t rushing to judgment to say Zuck wants to center the algorithm in Threads. This is the Facebook playbook: let the algorithm grow large and in charge, let it learn all the ways we like to be engaged and outraged, let it be (or look like) the only option. For six years the algorithmic option swallowed the chronological option on Instagram, which became a tangle of ads and posts from “suggested accounts”. Instagram restored the Following option in 2022 — but again, you don’t know if you don’t tap the logo.
If Threads becomes just another bloated, bland wasteland of provocative content from accounts you’re not even choosing to follow, Threads will simply be Instagram with fewer pictures. It will never capture the elusive energy of peak Twitter. Creative Twitter types will simply give up on producing the constant stream of content that made the service compelling.
Musk will remain in control of the social media arena, even as it crumbles like the Colosseum. To choose another Roman metaphor for these hapless gladiators: it’s time to see if at least one of Zuck’s apps can cross the Rubicon into the risky territory of reverse-chronological news. If he can focus on Following, a permanent boost in users will follow.
This column reflects the opinion of the author.
