If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg over the years, it’s that he loves a little competition. Whether or not his cage match against Elon Musk comes to pass, we’re seeing the tech CEOs fight it out in real time as their rival companies battle for the attention of the extremely online, and a status as the internet’s “de facto public town square”.
Unfortunately, Musk’s Twitter has lost a lot of its credibility since the billionaire took over the social platform last October: shedding headquarters, advertisers, core employees and tried-and-tested policies as it attempts to correct a supposed leftwing bias and become profitable.
Following what was perhaps the website’s darkest hour (a period where the number of tweets a user could view were allegedly rationed on a per-day basis), Meta decided that it was the perfect time for its own Twitter clone to shine, or more like strike. And they weren’t wrong! Billing itself as a “text-based conversation app”, Threads is exclusively accessed through one’s Instagram account. It’s a strategy that has brought in over 100 million downloads, gaining ChatGPT’s previously record-busting user-base in mere days rather than two months.
In an apocalyptic era of intermittent mass outages on Twitter and invite-only access to Bluesky (Jack Dorsey’s latest attempt to right the wrongs his original text-based creation inflicted on the world), internet users are desperate for a coherent online experience – add to that the fact of Instagram’s two-billion-plus users, ripe for importing, and Threads’ exploding popularity is hardly surprising.
But you shouldn’t count all its users as fans. Though the app’s interface is simple and functional (characteristics now woefully absent from Twitter’s increasingly cluttered UX), many are lamenting the quality of the posts shown in Threads’ main feed. Like Twitter’s For You feed – a feature best known on TikTok, they’re literally all at it! – the page uses an algorithm to present you with posts it thinks you’ll want to engage with, rather than the traditional chronological feed of posts by users your account follows. This of course can lead to mixed results, especially when a platform is in its infancy.
In July, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri announced that the app would implementing stricter rate limits than the existent curbs. “Spam attacks have picked up so we’re going to have to get tighter on things like rate limits, which is going to mean more unintentionally limiting active people (false positives),” he said via the platform . “If you get caught up those protections let us know.” However, unlike Musk’s specious limits – which seemed to allow users to view a specific number of tweets in a certain period of time – Threads’ policy focuses on common spammy behaviour, limiting ‘actions’ rather than ‘views’. For example, this includes the amount of comments made over a certain period, or the number of users that an account can follow. Fair enough!
But there are also concerns about user privacy as it launches in more than 100 countries. Zuckerberg has proven himself to be fairly untrustworthy with his users’ data (lest we forget the Cambridge Analytica scandal) – and do we really want to enable this man into extending his tech monopoly? Tech analyst Faine Greenwood recently posted (on Bluesky) about the “Terrible Uncle Problem” that may come to plague the app: “Meta ensuring Threads integrates with Facebook and Instagram means your weird older relatives will easily be able to find you there. A lot of people do NOT want that.”
There’s something exciting in the air nonetheless: it’s the breaking of dawn on a new day, the first day of class at a new school. The thrill of new player in the social mediascape is certainly blunted by the reality that it’s being pioneered by an opportunistic old one, but here we are anyway, tapping those buttons and giving our permissions away. So we beat on, boats against the current…