Initial Verdict: Threads + Twitter Split the Market
I see a split market with no winner after studying the platform over the weekend. The feeling I get from Threads on day five is the TMZ comments section turned into a Twitter feed with a subsection of Instagram’s user base.
Day one exploratory posts are being overwhelmed with influencer engagement bait posts. Examples of engagement bait posts are any references to celebrity drama or Elon Musk.
I’ve spent about a half hour each day for the past five days blocking all accounts sharing content I had no interest in (celebrities, sports, Elon Musk, thirst traps). The Threads algorithm seems incapable of learning anything.
People are craving connection and conversations. There were signs of opportunities for deeper connections emerging at scale in the first 24 hours. People were sharing how they were doing and people that knew them were responding in comments. This could have led to people becoming friends that were just acquaintances before.
Those signs were dying after about 36 hours. Five days in, those signs are non-existent. In its place are parasocial interactions with celebrity managed accounts and meme accounts.
Parasocial interaction (PSI) refers to a kind of psychological relationship experienced by an audience in their mediated encounters with performers in the mass media, particularly on television and on online platforms.[1][2][3][4] Viewers or listeners come to consider media personalities as friends, despite having no or limited interactions with them. PSI is described as an illusory experience, such that media audiences interact with personas (e.g., talk show hosts, celebrities, fictional characters, social media influencers) as if they are engaged in a reciprocal relationship with them. - Wikipedia on Parasocial Interactions
The distinct lack of an option to see content only by people you follow seems to be intentional. What’s the motivation of not allowing users to see content from only people they follow?
Increasing the follower count of established accounts (namely celebrities and influencers)
Hoping the increased follower count leads to increased usage from established celebrities and established influencers
Here’s what I see happening after five days:
Most people are going back to sharing primarily on stories
Periodic experiments at a declining post rate
Wellness influencers are very active posting inspirational quotes of one form or another - this saves them the energy of creating visual content on Instagram
The current trajectory is a split market of Twitter’s previous market.
For Twitter - Technology, Politics (Leaning Right), Hard News
For Threads - Wellness, Politics (Leaning Left), Art
Split Market - Celebrity Gossip, Sports, Entertainment
In a way, Threads is repeating Clubhouse’s mistakes at an accelerated pace.
Clubhouse had a highly engaged user base of people interacting with each other. They decided was direct followers towards their most popular accounts during their rapid expansion phase of February 2021. Clubhouse concurrently showed the largest rooms first which were filled with the loudest voices.
Threads is following the same playbook and getting similar results. The vast majority of users are already going back to sharing primarily on Stories.
This leaves Threads with a split market held up by the following categories of people:
People with significantly more Instagram followers than Twitter AND previously had active or semi-active twitter accounts
Aspiring influencers who were too late in building an audience on Twitter to be a leader in their niche
People who strongly dislike Musk
This result serves the purpose of providing a persistent feed of training data to Meta’s large language models. It’s disappointing in that it misses the boat in being what Facebook was circa 2004 - 2006. A place where strangers made friends on the internet with mutual connections serving as a proxy-intermediary.
Zuckerberg earlier today announced that Threads has 100 million users. It’s important to note what exactly these users are actually doing behaviorally. They are probing and most are going back to stories because the Threads algorithm is prioritizing large legacy Instagram accounts. This makes the Threads experience more in line with TikTok where most users are observers and not participants.