Threads:5 reasons why Meta’s network shouldn’t pump – 07/06/2023 – #Hashtag

Koo, Mastodon, Bluesky. Several networks have tried to be the “new Twitter”, without success. The ball of the time is Threads, launched by Meta this Wednesday (5).

In order not to repeat the failure of the others, Meta decided to import contacts from Instagram, a social network with more than 1.5 billion active users. Starting from a huge potential base of new users, however, does not guarantee success.

In this post, I list five reasons why I believe that Meta’s new social network will not be popular.

WHERE’S THE VIDEO?

On average, people watch 84 minutes of videos a day. In the age of videos, there are almost no videos on Threads. TikTok, the video-only social network, has over a billion active users. Since the app broke out in the pandemic, Meta has launched a number of features, including Reels on Instagram and Facebook, to compete with the Chinese platform. Betting on the previous text model is a risky strategy, out of the spirit of the times and against all previous movements by Meta itself.

RECENT FAILURES

From the great civilizations to the world of football, ownership changes hands from time to time. The empire that Meta owns is still gigantic, but it cannot live up to its history in the world of technology. Since Facebook, everything Meta has launched hasn’t caught on, from virtual reality glasses to metaverse. Instagram and WhatsApp are two hits, but both bought at the right time for billions of dollars. Instagram Stories and Reels, these successful ones, were answers (and copies) to Snapchat and TikTok, respectively. Optimists might say that Meta does well in this copycat scenario — and indeed there is nothing original about Threads, which is being called “Twitter 2”. Both Stories and Reels were made within the Instagram ecosystem and not in a separate one, as Threads is, which makes mass migration difficult.

THE NEW SKIN

Twitter has always been a niche social network and much smaller in number of users compared to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, but it has maintained its relevance over the years as it is the internet’s public square. Threads wants to occupy that space by wanting to be the new Twitter. However, no social network has occupied a significant space in history by trying to be an earlier network. From Orkut to TikTok, they all had something original and were released at the right time. Koo, Mastodon and Bluesky show that wanting to be the new Twitter works just as well as the players who were called the “new Pelé” in the youth teams.

FROM BOOM TO FLOP

The script is always the same. In the first days, the new social network exploded, analyzes and articles assumed the death of Twitter, influencers warned the @ on the new network on all other platforms and… nothing happened. There is no real mass migration. Twitter is still Twitter. This time, the threat is much greater because there is Meta’s power and money behind it. However, moving users from one network to another is more difficult than it seems. People get used to a platform and often stay on it for convenience, because they don’t want to have to learn something new. Meta’s own Facebook, presumed dead, has just 2 billion active users. In short, younger people are on TikTok, older people are on Facebook, everyone is on Instagram, who goes to Threads?

ERA OF DEFRAGMENTATION

It’s not that these networks (Koo, Mastodon, Bluesky) are totally irrelevant. They have already captured their millions of active users. But they reinforce a movement that began to gain strength in the 2020s, the defragmentation of the internet. In the beginning of the digital era, we left the real world, turned on the computer and entered the internet. From the iPhone, in 2007, we started to live in the age of mobile phones and applications, which condemned us to perpetual connection. Meta, with Facebook in the first half of the 2010s, and then with Instagram in the second, managed to completely dominate the universe of social networks. The game changed with TikTok’s entry into the pandemic, when it saw its reign threatened for the first time. And the trend is that in the 2020s there will be an increasing diversification in digital consumption: new social networks, podcasts, newsletters, artificial intelligence apps…

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