Threads: launch is a return to the beginnings of Twitter – 7/6/2023 – Tech

It feels like it’s 2006 all over again. A new social network has set the internet on fire, with comments and discussions.

More than anything, Meta’s launch of Threads on Thursday (6th) is a nostalgic trip for those of us who signed up for Twitter in its early days. It’s an emotion the Instagram spinoff intentionally sets out to elicit, positioning itself like Twitter but without spam, harassment or Elon Musk.

Within hours of launch, over 10 million people had already opened Thread accounts, thanks in large part to the ability to import their friends and followers from Instagram. My own Instagram account (private, somewhat relegated to the background) is more personal than the professional self-promotion that works best on Twitter, but thanks to it, my Threads feed was instantly populated with familiar faces.

These people are not even a representative sample of humanity: they are mainly other journalists, people from startups and geeks. But many seemed highly energized by the opportunity for a fresh start. I felt more or less the same way, although I regret very much being forced to leave my @tim handle behind on Twitter, since Threads defaults to the username on Instagram. (Would the Financial Times have hired a rookie reporter in 2008 if I were merely @timbradshaw? Probably not.)

That punch to my ego was offset by the dopamine rush (as well as constant in-app alerts) I got from accumulating a few hundred followers within the first few hours of joining Threads.

This instant networking, coupled with a solid, if unspecial, design that resembles Twitter enough to avoid any kind of learning curve, will allow Meta to easily outpace other apps that have wanted to step up to Twitter rivals like Mastodon, Bluesky or Post, which seem clunky compared to Threads.

Meta’s technical infrastructure must be reliable enough to avoid the kind of bugs and crashes that have plagued Twitter and its smaller rivals. But I had some problems with loading, when millions of users simultaneously rushed to try the latest thing. It’s too early to assess the other advantage Meta has over Twitter – a more robust system for quelling bots and fighting trolls – but the ability to hide replies containing offensive words or unwanted emojis is a good start.

The rest is all familiar stuff: snappy posts (with a 500-character limit), likes, replies, and reposts, all present and correct. In the grand tradition of Facebook’s many imitators, the app is functional if unspectacular. The absence of ads is unlikely to continue for long, but for now, at least, it helps make Threads a nicer place than Twitter.

But if Threads borrows the best of Twitter, it also boasts one of Instagram’s worst features: an algorithmic timeline that inserts posts from people I don’t know, based on some unfathomable “engagement” metric.

Addam Mosseri, president of Instagram and now Threads, says the ability to see posts only from people you follow “is on the list,” but the option to launch the app without it turned many people off on day one. “Same old Zuck, same old Instagram, same old tricks for growing up, same old shit,” complained Om Malik, a San Francisco-based tech blogger turned venture capitalist.

Algorithmic timelines are one of those features that some users say they hate, but social platforms insist most people like. The success of TikTok, whose feed is purely algorithmic, supports the second claim. But if Thread’s more enthusiastic early adopters mirror Twitter’s, Mosseri might do well to include an alternative option on his priority to-do list.

That discussion aside, the fact that so many early Twitter fans are applauding Threads is kind of ironic, considering how long Facebook’s parent company was seen as the evil empire and Twitter as the brash little rebel.

Twitter was one of many experiments launched in the first decade of this century that tested how much ordinary people could be persuaded to share about themselves online. There were apps dedicated to sharing cooking photos (Foodspotting) and Wall Street news (StockTwits). Some highly hyped startups, like the Foursquare locator app, have disappeared; others, including YouTube, Tumblr, Friendfeed and Instagram, were bought by what we now call Big Tech.

From that Cambrian explosion of “Web 2.0”, only Twitter -despite an underdeveloped economic model and the revolving door of its direction-, managed to reach the initial public offering stage, in 2012, as an independent company. When Elon Musk, one of the richest people in the world, bought Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg was able to play the underdog again — a stance I suspect is meant to bolster Meta employees, frazzled after a year of brutal cutbacks.

The bigger question is how far nostalgia for the “good old days” of social media, repackaged and resold by a huge corporation, will take Threads. In an increasingly visual culture, how many people who aren’t journalists or politicians want a primarily text-based social platform?

The push given by Twitter’s toxicity in the Musk era and the social pull of Instagram could be enough to make Threads bigger than Twitter in no time. How long those millions of users stick around will indicate whether we need something to kill Twitter or whether we can just let it die on its own.