I say this as someone who loves twitter: it's cooked. I spent time on threads earlier today and it is the answer people have been looking for. Nobody has a better track record of giving the users the features they want, even if that means cloning them wholesale from competitors. And more importantly, nobody does hyperscale content moderation better than Meta. If you're a public figure and can get the same/larger engagement as you would on twitter, why continue to bother with it? Twitter is more hostile than it's ever been. Right now my For You tab is filled with content I wouldn't have dreamed of a year or two ago, fight videos, videos of people dying, race war, gender war, you name it. Elon is egging it on, it's a complete mess.
My prediction is twitter will remain the refuge of the long tail. Niche people and communities will stick around, as will I. But that doesn't support billions in ad revenue. Threads will become the "place things happen". The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz and the screenshots are of Threads, you'll know I was right.
Some very obvious features are missing, but for a v1 launch the app runs smooth, feels clean, is easy to get started, and has a jovial early internet feel.
Meta will ship most every feature the average Twitter user would want in the next month or so and then it's game over.
Aside, it's amazing how Elon's antics over the last year (or many years) have somehow made Zuck seem both personable and competent
>The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz...
How do you reconcile these two statements?
I feel the performative "mic drop" moment is a major source of toxicity on Twitter. A breath of fresh air would be a place that promoted thoughtful and empathetic conversations.
Thoughtful and empathetic conversations is something few people want though. People like controversy and to some degree toxicity. So any new microbloging platform that wants to reach the user base of Twitter will have to turn into a version of Twitter at some point.
I suppose it's hard to have vitality+engagement and more tame discussion at the same time.
I like Mastodon, because it doesn't chase growth at all costs, but chooses to foster well-behaved communities (it's more like connected phpBB forums than Twitter). I can talk to a random stranger and actually share ideas, instead of getting caught in a loop of outrage and dunking.
I think that they meant that you'll know Twitter has definitely hit it's decline when other media is focusing on what's happening on other platforms instead of Twitter.
Exactly! I'm sure lots of people will stay on Twitter. But ad buyers, celebrities and brands are not very interested in the niche communities, and thus Twitter as business will be extremely hurt.
This made me think of the ad business on Twitter which I think might be its real killer.
If a community builds up on Threads (and why wouldn't it, reserving spots for 2B Instagram users?), the ad value will then probably be much greater there, and businesses (and thus influencers) will see a more lucrative environment there.
Why?
1. Meta harvests more data from your phones than Twitter which provides more accurate ad targetting.
2. Twitter is poorly ran and struggles even with basic things like not pissing advertisers off as they keep making controversial decisions for the network.
The news of rate limits must have spread like shock waves through the ad community, as one example. Reducing reach by now walling their garden and killing embedded tweets to make it harder to get to their ads another.
As for celebrities, they already have good community contact on Instagram since the visual medium lends itself extremely well in that regard, and I'm 100% sure Threads will ultimately become an extension to Instagram.
Isn't it funny how Elon has hunted his X.com idea for a "social network for everything"?
Instagram is far ahead than him now. They have Instagram photos, Snapchat stories, TikTok reels, and now Twitter threads.
> Twitter is poorly ran and struggles even with basic things like not pissing advertisers off as they keep making controversial decisions for the network.
This trope of "pissing advertisers off" is repeated ad nauseum, but there is no evidence that rational advertisers have preferences regarding which content surrounds their advertisements. They only care about paying less money for advertisements than they make in revenue attributable to those advertisements. And therein lies a Yogi Berra-esque paradox: if all the advertisers leave Twitter, then the advertising prices will decrease, and advertising to Twitter users will become cost-effective ("Republicans buy sneakers too.")
What advertisers do care about is angry mobs of people harassing them about all the wrongthink their ads are appearing next to. It would be more accurate to say that "advertisers don't like being harassed by a mob of people who are pissed off at the platform that hosts the ads."
Given how many social networks have launched, for me the interesting questions aren't "what technology" or "what policy", but "what people are using it" and "what are they using it _for_".
This may take some time to evolve. Indeed, sometimes it evolves with the platform; Instagram basically _created_ "influencer" as a job description. Youtube created its Youtubers. So what's happening on Threads? Anyone got any good launch content to post here?
I don't know what kind of content you're interested in but my for you page is full of porgramming related tweets, football and retro computing. The only keyword I had to mute is chatgpt. You get the stuff that triggers you the most.
> The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz and the screenshots are of Threads, you'll know I was right.
Oh boy, sign me up! I need a space where I can cheer my team on and we can dominate the conversation through censorship and shadow banning of the opposing team like twitter used to be. Echo chambers make me feel good because it's a fun, friendly place where you never have to engage with opposing arguments and we all upvote each other.
> Right now my For You tab is filled with content I wouldn't have dreamed of a year or two ago, fight videos, videos of people dying, race war, gender war, you name it.
I don’t know anyone with a “For you” tab like that. What’s the explanation? Are you engaging with that kind of content?
I’m talking about self reporting by people I know, as well as what I hear in public online. I think it’s quite obvious I don’t literally look at anyone else’s Twitter feed.
Don't worry. The Rohingya genocide accelerated by Meta is all forgotten. /s Elon Musk is now the villain of the month and we now want Meta to have a social media monopoly with Twitter to completely collapse into the ground.
Once TikTok gets fined out of the US and Twitter collapses (any minute now /s) out of existence, we will now have Zuckerberg be the arbiter of truth on a third social networking platform.
None of those have anything to do with the part that you quoted, where you conveniently cut out the meaning of the sentence (which was "Noboday has a better track record of giving users the features they want"), presumably so you could just go off and harp about whatever particular thing you wanted.
I don't think "banned" is the right word because Meta chose not to release the app until they've cleared the account sharing. They're just being cautious.
It doesn't seem to me that logging in to your account from multiple apps should be a GDPR issue. Lots of companies have that kind of setup where they offer separate mobile apps for different user roles.
> "I say this as someone who loves twitter: it's cooked."
This is just some growing pains as Elon Musk is working on improving it. This is why he is so visionary, the ones before him didn't dare to go through challenges such as this one, so it shows why they needed him to step in and be the adult in the room.
> Right now my For You tab is filled with content I wouldn't have dreamed of a year or two ago, fight videos, videos of people dying, race war, gender war, you name it. Elon is egging it on, it's a complete mess.
Censoring the aforementioned topics does not make them go away, time has shown that. And Megacorps controlling the public Overton window has just lead to society boiling and rumbling in the dark.
There's a vast gap between censoring them and shoving them in the face of people who don't want them. The "For You" tab has a tendency of big swings in the type of content it shows, possibly based on what you engage with, which often results in it swinging towards content that angers you because that often leads to the lengthiest discussions. Getting it "back on track" to show stuff you want to see afterwards can be tedious.
> Censoring the aforementioned topics does not make them go away
Perhaps, but not censoring those topics makes the user go away. Most people are simply not interested in wading into the constant mudfight that current twitter seems to have devolved into, so if the platform makes it impossible to evade those topics on the platform itself then the user will evade the platform altogether. A similar thing can be said for advertisers, if a platform cannot guarantee that a companies ads will not be shown next to hate content then the advertiser will eventually just start evading the platform altogether.
for you tab isn't about censoring, it's about pushing content that will increase engagement, and pushing "fight videos, videos of people dying, race war, gender war" is one way to do it
My prediction is twitter will remain the refuge of the long tail. Niche people and communities will stick around, as will I. But that doesn't support billions in ad revenue. Threads will become the "place things happen". The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz and the screenshots are of Threads, you'll know I was right.