Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg formally challenged each other to a cage fight on June 21. Out with free-market capitalism, in with post-liberal tech feudalism, and accompanying duels!
However entertaining, this whole debacle was spectacularly stupid, for two core reasons. The first is that the jiu-jitsu trained Zuck would clearly obliterate the rather portly, older Musk. The second is that this came as a response to a Twitter post on their real fight, with $44 billion on the line, between Musk’s Twitter and Zuckerberg’s clone competitor of it, Threads, which launched last night. It had 2 million users within two hours; 10 million with seven hours; and this is without any mainland Europeans, as the EU continues to be led by the moronic.
As soon as you log into Threads, it’s immediately obvious that this platform fight will end just as the cage match would. Namely, Threads is going to curb-stomp Twitter. And don’t even think about niche Twitter competitors such as BlueSky, T2 or Post. You’re not going to remember their names in six months, let alone use them.
The core problem with starting a new social media platform is that the very quality that you use a social platform for is absent when you launch; namely, the network. It doesn’t matter how compelling the interface is, and how many great features a Twitter competitor may have, a club with no members is pointless. You can’t just copy the décor and expect people will turn up. And yet Zuckerberg solved this, by linking Threads to Instagram.
Rather than set up a brand new account, with new usernames and so forth, you instead just log in with an existing Instagram account. The username carries over, as does the profile picture; and, with a single button press, you can follow all the same accounts you did on Instagram. Joining Threads is effortless — and, with more than 1.4 billion Instagram users, to Twitter’s paltry 300 or so million, Zuck just needs to persuade a fraction of his existing base to join Threads, and he’s won.
It’s worth noting that this is still a nascent platform — tappable hashtags, a following-only feed, content search, web posting and account switching are all on the horizon — but the core of the app is here; it all just works, and most accounts I’d want to follow are already set up. Interestingly, many Instagram users love the short-form text format but were put off by Twitter’s negativity and overly political focus. So, by importing Instagram’s social graph to Threads, it has, by default, a far friendlier, more civil userbase — which continues to pull in new users.
Despite it being just day one for Threads, I’m not missing much from Twitter. In fact, in many ways it’s far better. The reply-focused interface is much cleaner and easier to read. The recommendation algorithm is far, far superior. Link previews are beautiful — and also just work, which is no longer true on Twitter. Most impressively, there is no better place to peruse pictures of fashion, cars and art than Threads. There’s little compression, and layout for images isn’t simply better than Twitter, but it’s better than Instagram (which I expect will focus on friends rather than creators, and further integrate messaging, becoming somewhat like Snapchat).
The only serious missing feature of Threads — deliberately so — is direct messages. CEO Adad Mosseri states they would rather Threads prioritize public content, and avoid “inbox fatigue”; a fairly understandable position given that Meta currently has three different messaging services: Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. (Ironically, they used to have a standalone Instagram messaging app also called “Threads”).
Given the popularity of Instagram DMs, however, and the importance of messaging for Twitter, it’s only a matter of time before they link Threads with Instagram DMs. This would also ease the inherent tension between Threads, and Instagram’s new Discord-competitor, Broadcasts, which would be to function like Twitter Circles.
The other glaring absence is advertising, which will come when Threads gets enough scale. Twitter ads are the worst online; spamming, impersonalized and unlucrative for both the brands and the platform. By contrast, Meta runs the best ad network on Earth, mining user data to place ads relevant to your interests and current activities. When they apply this to Threads, they will do what Twitter never could; make a profitable, ad-supported microblogging business.
Strangely, while he should have been preparing to combat Threads, Musk has instead his time memeing and crippling his own app.
You now need to log into Twitter to see a tweet, nuking their shareability in group chats. Twitter’s power-user extensions, like Tweetdeck, Tweet Hunter X and TweetBot, have all been killed or crippled by Musk’s API limitation. The latest “tweet reading limits” was not a harebrained attempt to reduce doomscrolling — which Musk has recently praised — but a spin on disastrous server cost-cutting. And ask Indian users whether Twitter has got better for free speech under Musk (it hasn’t).
As it stands, Twitter therefore has two remaining, strong features, that Threads is unlikely to mirror: Community Notes and pornography. The former is the best new social media feature in years (introduced under Jack Dorsey), but would be difficult to fit into Thread’s clean interface, even if Meta had not abandoned social media fact-checking systems. On the second: Twitter’s handling of nudity has been utterly terrible — those who follow sex workers rarely see their content, but trending topics are flooded with nudes (along with crypto scams). By contrast, Meta will continue Instagram’s “community standards” regarding nudity — a sad state of affairs for those who want a hornier internet.
What path forward does Twitter have? I really don’t see one. Maybe Musk can make a profitable subscription-based social media business, which competes with Reddit with edgy content, OnlyFans for premium porn and Breitbart comment sections for political commentary, but I don’t believe it. Reddit will always be better for memes. OnlyFans will be better for subscription porn. Breitbart will still exist. Even the few who fit all three have little reason to use Twitter. For good and ill, the normies have the internet.
Even before they step in a ring — if they ever do — it seems obvious that Zuckerberg is the winner here. As he posted: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
Unless they royally screw up, I think Zuckerberg is being overly pessimistic here. There’s no “hope” needed. Twitter is dead. Welcome to Threads.
