008 · Threads, Meta, and inhabiting new digital spaces
Why laziness in areas that consume most of our time is bad, actually
I touched on Threads in my latest transmission and provided a few brief thoughts on the platform and my feelings towards new platforms in general. As the initial hype-dust is settling and Threads is not completely DOA, I thought I'd share some additional notes.
BACKGROUND & META-STRATEGY
For those unfamiliar, Threads is the new text-forward social media offering from Zuckerberg's Meta, parent company for Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and more. Users can comprise posts of text, image, and video on a vertically scrolling timeline either from scratch or in response to another post. Basically picture Twitter, then don't change all that much. Obvious copy-cat jokes aside, this homogeneity points to a shift in how the market views and treats new social products.
I think back to the early days of social, and how hyper-segmented it was. Any new company or venture was expected to have a specific gimmick: photos, short-form text, video, live streaming, links to other places, ephemeral posts, adding friends, profiles & individual feeds, and any other niche feature you could imagine. In today's landscape of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and now Threads, all of them accomplish nearly every feature I've laid out simultaneously. Ignoring the lack of creativity, they do this because it's safe & expected. Users care less about whether specific gimmicks are groundbreaking or not, as seemingly evidenced by BeReal's immense hype and immediate simmering, a gimmick was not enough.
Apps have been scaled to the point where the only expectations are that they will inherit all of the primary features of other big apps, and that there will be people there. Having designed several of the largest social platforms to date, Meta has no problem delivering on status quo features and a large userbase. Being like Twitter is exactly the point.
I believe social medias have life cycles with limited windows of time to capture as many users as possible. Meta saw a decrease in popularity of Facebook's younger users as well as fomenting criticism surrounding Instagram. All the while, Twitter is being progressively destabilized by Elon's erratic policy changes, making it a stressful platform to invest time and energy into. Threads was simply the smart play. Users who are deeply entrenched in Facebook & Instagram are not going anywhere, but the newness of threads allows them to capture both novelty-seeking younger generations and stability-seeking Twitter defects.
ZUCK’S WAGER
As I've mentioned before I'm a big believer in signing up for and minimally investing in new platforms as they arise. This is even easier to recommend when your data can be reused or ported from another platform, as is the case with Instagram to Threads. While some fear the thought of overlap between platforms, as echoed in the "I'm not the same person on Instagram as I am on Twitter" sentiment, this is pure conversion efficiency.
In the recent past we've seen quick & volatile cycles with the likes of BeReal, Clubhouse, Lemon8, Polywork, Mastodon, Hive Social, and more. People grow tired of shelling out their email & other personal data to companies they've never heard of only to stop using the service in a month or two. Over time, tolerance lowers and people are more guarded to trade their data for empty promises. In the case of Threads, that data is already in Meta's hands. By enabling a one-click import & sign-up, there is hardly time to second guess whether one should invest. While this does create a link between an Instagram & Threads profile, users are welcome to change details and maintain separate personas between the platforms. A burner Instagram account can even be used for an additional layer of anonymity.
Because people (hilariously) already trust Meta & Instagram, it makes signing up for Threads a no-brainer. When signing up is free, easy, and has the potential to turn into something culturally significant, it's a wager that's worth taking.
SOUP SOCIAL
While Twitter is the clear target in the Threads play, its consequences are mostly irrelevant. As discussed above, gimmicks are largely a thing of the past. All modern social platforms share the same ingredients, only presentation differs. Viewing the same exact picture & caption on Instagram vs Threads may register differently in a user's brain, but it's ultimately the same substance. This reflects widely in our culture as well, with media franchises, movies, shows, games, interactive experiences, and ecommerce steadily homogenizing. Franchises are revived and mashed-up without abandon. You can order groceries from your fridge, pizza from your car, a car from your phone. Specifics are largely uninteresting. What's interesting is the content and the ability to, and in the case of social media, the fact that everyone else is, too.
Threads is providing a vehicle, not a destination.
Ultimately, I think many younger and more-forward-thinking internet individuals are looking for a destination, as evidenced by the rise of Discord communities and the interest in Web3 solutions to provide something in which the endpoint is socialization.
Threads is merely another pass-through channel, allowing links & content to flow from TikTok to Twitter to Instagram to Threads and every spiderweb-path in between. For most people, a shiny new vehicle is more than enough.
IMPLIED SOCIAL MEDIA
In the past decade of media, we've seen many implied efforts. Efforts which derive any & all value from their source material or mythos, with relatively little added in reincarnation. You'll watch this movie because it has all your favorite superheroes! You'll play this game because it's a lot like the last one! You'll love this show because you watched the original as a kid! You'll laugh at this joke because you laughed at it the last 20 times!
This is done because it works! It's profitable and efficient, requiring little new effort and relatively few risks.
We've seen it in social media before, notably with nearly every platform adopting "stories", or short-form vertical video over the past 3-or-so years. If it works in one place, it might as well work in every place. Although Threads isn't the first time we've seen a platform almost entirely copy the layout of another, it feels the most blatant & manufactured.
Threads is the most implied social media we've seen. It looks & functions exactly like a marriage of Instagram & Twitter, it offers absolutely no novel features, it takes no effort to sign up for, and it provides the same content that is everywhere else. People will (and do) use it primarily because it is like everything else. It takes zero risks and requires zero learning curve.
By providing no unique tools, it offers no unique avenues for creativity. Threads' distilled "you know what to do" ethos will ensure a milquetoast user experience, and therefore advertiser friendliness & profitability.
It's too early to predict exactly how profitable or big it will be for Meta, but I'm sure it's not the last we will see of implied social medias. For all we know in a few months Twitter will release an Instagram clone. I'm sure it will be an immense success.
IS THERE NO ALTERNATIVE?
A future of tech companies recursively copying each other's platforms is certainly not the most exciting, but seems highly probable. Big tech cabal has refined what it means to be social online to a point of no return. It's highly likely every large offering moving forward will include profiles, followers, algorithmic feeds, photos, text, inefficient (and dangerous) censorship & moderation policies, data harvesting, advertisements, and (you bet) short-form vertical video.
We will no doubt see a continuation of niche offerings pop up, who will (historically) take one of two paths:
1. Continue to bloat & add features in an effort to scale, compete with the big boys, and remain profitable, eventually defeating your own mission statement
or
2. Maintain a niche, anti-algorithm & anti-data-harvesting ethos which will never scale or become competitive enough to capture mass attention or disrupt the status quo, but will remain a haven for those who have grown weary with the majority of social medias
It seems there is no winning, but what is "winning" anyway?
CONCLUSION
Threads is a highly-calculated but relatively low-effort power play. I hope for the best in terms of what this means for the future of social platforms, but I am not hopeful. I think Threads lowers the bar for what constitutes a social network. With social media occupying the majority of how we spend our collective time online, this is unsettling.
We are on the precipice of laziness in social offerings. Expect more of the same, and keep watch for anything that sits outside the norm. I think a healthy future is one in which people gravitate towards niche offerings that serve their specific social needs, rather than relying on a single source of truth.
I hope you're all well, I hope you download Threads and speculate on its existence. I hope you do some research and find a niche social platform that doesn't do everything, but that functions in a way that meets your needs and sits happy with the way your brain works.
I look forward to talking to you soon.