What if the next big social media app is ... Nothing?
The numbers signing up to Threads sound impressive until you understand what Threads actually is: a sterile knockoff of Twitter, designed to make Meta’s commercially dominant brand of social media even more so. Picture: AP Photo/Richard Drew
To be fair, it’s early. Zuckerberg, who recently emerged from paternity leave posing as a jacked-up cage fighter, has been busy quoting the Backstreet Boys, sucking up to mixed martial artists and bragging about Threads’ every success.
His company, now known as Meta Platforms Inc, released Threads in the iPhone and Android app stores the evening of July 5. Two hours later, Zuckerberg said two million people had signed up.
By the next morning, the figure was 10 million. He posted again around noon with an update: 30 million, which “feels like the beginning of something special”. It was at 100 million by July 9. The numbers have dipped significantly since.
Still, the figures sound impressive until you understand what Threads actually is: a sterile knockoff of Twitter, designed to make Meta’s commercially dominant brand of social media even more so.
Zuckerberg has been copying in this fashion for a decade, occasionally with success but often producing forgettable, ultimately failed clones. He’s mimicked Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, Siri, Nextdoor, Flipboard and Cameo, among many others. RIP: Facebook Lifestage, Lasso, Hobbi, M, Neighborhoods, Paper and Super, respectively.
Like Twitter, the latest knockoff encourages users to write short messages. Tweets are called ‘posts,’ and retweets are ‘reposts’. The big difference is that you sign up through Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Zuckerberg’s company also owns and whose two billion monthly users are currently being urged, through various digital enticements, to give Threads a try.
Once they do, the app suggests they follow all their Instagram friends, even if their friends have never written a post. That leads to lots and lots of push notifications — those intrusive phone pings alerting you that you’ve been followed by someone on Threads — creating the illusion of a vibrant community and tempting more users to sign up, too.
You can turn these interruptions off, but Instagram makes it annoyingly difficult. And there’s no way to delete your Threads account permanently unless you also delete your Instagram account. Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, has said the company is “looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately”. Meta declined to comment.
Twitter had seen its influence wane even before it descended into the reality-show chaos imposed by a wealthy billionaire with an unflagging commitment to placing rakes in his own path and then, with great flourish, stepping on them.
When he isn’t indulging in a little antisemitic humour or grumpily tweeting about "college kids these days", Elon Musk has done almost everything possible to destroy the company that cost him $44bn.
Since he took over Twitter in October, usage has seemed to wane, advertisers have fled, and revenue is down something like 50%. The website keeps breaking — probably in part because Musk canned three-quarters of the company’s engineers and also seems to have refused to pay his cloud computing bills.
Threads isn’t the only potential Twitter replacement. There’s Mastodon, Post News, Discord, Bluesky, Substack Notes and many others. On the other hand, it’s possible, and maybe for the best, that no app shows up to replace Twitter.
Over the past nine months, I’ve watched as friends and colleagues have migrated en masse from one knockoff to the next, getting excited for maybe a day or two and then mostly losing interest. My last ‘toot’, as Mastodon’s users call tweets, was in December. I’ve never even done a ‘skeet’, the unfortunate name of the Bluesky version.
The conventional wisdom at the moment is that Threads, powered by Facebook’s technical resources and auto-populated by Instagram’s user base, will be different. But the explosive growth in internet usage that propelled Silicon Valley’s largest companies for 20 years is gone.
Social media behemoths, including Meta, have been laying off tens of thousands. Online news startups that had promised to somehow transcend the normal economics of media by attracting audiences that would dwarf traditional publications have seen traffic collapse, and with it their businesses.
Streaming media giants are suddenly realising there are too many shows and not enough viewers. And the metaverse? Well, a lot of business books were written and a lot of billable hours were billed by a lot of management consultants. But almost nobody has shown up.
Why? The simplest explanation for the stagnation of social media is attention is not endless. There are only so many hours a day for scrolling social networks, watching new seasons of and perusing travel guides that read as if composed by a dull AI (which they were).
It’s only natural to think some new app will be the next Twitter. That’s been the way since Friendster was replaced by the even bigger MySpace, which was replaced by the absolutely massive Facebook, which was replaced, sort of, by Instagram, now at least partly replaced by TikTok.
In all these transitions, it wasn’t so much users of one social network migrating to the next one; it was large cohorts of people coming online and realising the older social network wasn’t for them. The internet was growing, and in each case it outgrew the dominant platform.
And so it went for a couple of decades. In 2000, many people still didn’t use the internet, and those who did were spending maybe an hour and a half each day. But with the rise of mobile phones and broadband, the figure ballooned, with social media moving to the centre of modern life.
In 2013, the market research company GWI found the average internet user spent a little more than six hours a day on devices. That rose an additional 41 minutes over the next four years.
In 2017, Reed Hastings, then chief executive officer of Netflix, was asked about the prospect of competition from Amazon.com, which was writing enormous checks to Hollywood stars to lure them to make content for its streaming platform.
Hastings said Amazon was a nonissue because the market for streaming video was more or less unlimited.
“Think about it,” he said. “When you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up very late at night.”
Amazon wasn’t his competition, and neither was any other entertainment offering. “We’re competing with sleep,” he said.
Maybe it was because of Hastings’ track record at Netflix, or maybe because his leadership style is revered in business schools, but somehow few people noticed Hastings was suggesting Netflix’s growth depended, at least in part, on promoting unhealthy behaviour.
Years earlier, Coca-Cola had endured some very bad press after its marketing executives had bragged in private about soft drinks sales driving down milk consumption. This was seen as both a testament to their marketing wizardry and a monument to their industry’s moral rot. But unlike Coke, which apologised after a whistleblower told the story, Hastings made his boast proudly and in public. And he was richly rewarded for it.
Consumers talked about bingeing on shows, and investors bought into the narrative that there was an almost limitless ocean of time to exploit.
Netflix’s stock price jumped more than 50% that year. Six months later, at a conference in Los Angeles, Hastings reprised the line, adding a coda: “And we’re winning!”
Netflix wasn’t the only company that seemed to break away at this time. The entire tech industry — Amazon, Facebook, Google, Salesforce and on and on — performed well. And all those companies, not to mention a generation of startups that attempted to ride their coattails, bought into the idea that the internet would grow forever.
Facebook, riding high on a related theory that people would share twice as much information about themselves every year (Zuckerberg’s Law, as it became known), started building giant drones that were supposed to blast its social network over the air to the most remote corners of the world; Google had a similar program, except with balloons.
Almost nobody stopped to point out how unrealistic this all was. Facebook was frantically trying to find ways to give the developing world internet access in part because its core business was stagnating.
In early 2018, reported that Facebook’s engagement — the amount of time people were spending sharing and reacting to content — was falling in the US. The company compensated by sending manipulative push notifications seemingly designed to trick people into logging back in. The endless Threads pings may have a similar purpose but for Instagram, which also appears to recently struggle with engagement.
Time spent online decreased slightly in 2018 and 2019, but these drops were erased during the pandemic, when nobody had anything to do except stare at their screens. Industry executives told themselves increases in daily online time — 10 minutes in 2020, five minutes more in 2021, according to market research company GWI — were evidence of a new normal rather than a public-health crisis.
Zuckerberg, working remotely from his compound in Hawaii, suggested half his workforce would eventually be fully remote, too. The following year he changed the company name to Meta to reflect his belief that the future of socialisation and work was in virtual reality. Even if we could go back to in-person meetings or drinks with friends, why would we, as long as we had Zoom and the metaverse?
But then the pandemic ebbed and, with it, the era of expanding attention. Employers, including Meta, backtracked on remote work, and surveys showed record decreases in time spent online.
“We used to always talk about this as a growing market,” says Chris Beer, a data journalist for GWI. Beer first noticed the drop in time spent last autumn and was stunned. He’d gotten so used to watching the figure go up that it had been hard to imagine people tiring of their devices.
“It was the first time we looked at that data and thought, ‘Hang on, that’s not the case anymore,’ ” he says.
In 2022, according to GWI, daily time spent fell by 13 minutes. It’s now six hours and 43 minutes a day, slightly lower than in 2017. The drop, the biggest since the company began tracking the topic and suggested, as GWI put it, “that we’ve reached a kind of internet saturation point”.
Maybe the pandemic wasn’t some sort of great tech accelerant, as the venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs believed it to be. Maybe it was a high-water mark for a certain kind of business and a sign we may have found the limit to how much time humans can spend looking at a glass rectangle. It’s seven hours a day, tops.
This isn’t to say social media is going away. It’s just increasingly contorting itself to keep users from spending more time in the real world. The only successful startup in the industry to emerge over the past decade is TikTok, which is often described as a social media company, but it doesn’t really act like one.
The Chinese-owned app, unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and all before it, isn’t focused on your friends and the things they share, but rather is about serving a steady stream of videos meticulously tuned to your interests by an artificial intelligence algorithm, with advertisements unobtrusively mixed in.
Social media companies have tended to play down the role of their algorithms in deciding what we see, but TikTok is all algorithm — and, for most people using it, an entirely passive experience. It’s more like a super-addictive YouTube or reality television. The main characters aren’t your friends and family; they’re Will Smith and Olivia Dunne.
Social media itself has been in decline for years. Partly because of a growing awareness of the way these apps invade privacy and, partly because of a growing awareness of their innate tackiness, most of us have stopped posting about our beach trips, or latte art, or even our kids. (In a telling rebuke of Zuckerberg’s Law, the man himself recently posted a family photo with the faces of his two older daughters deliberately obscured.)
The decline of engagement meant there wasn’t enough in our feeds to keep us coming back. So Facebook and other platforms conjured up new content, an endless scroll of influencers, memes and outrage porn. As our friends got too busy living actual lives to document them on social media, Facebook and Instagram copied TikTok, replacing feeds of friends with feeds of influencers you’ve never met and probably wouldn’t want to.
There’s no room for news or debate in this new version of social media. After years speaking in grandiose terms about its role in public discourse, Facebook says it no longer wants to feature news prominently, which is why Threads won’t either.
Any media companies hoping the new app might fill the void created by Zuckerberg’s decision to deemphasise their industry will be disappointed. Threads won’t ban news or discussions of politics, “but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals”, said Instagram’s Mosseri, posting his comments using the new platform.
“There are more than enough amazing communities — sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc — to make a vibrant platform.”
The result is a place that’s perfectly safe for advertisers and vapid enough for influencers but that feels devoid of much of anything interesting or provocative or fun. This may be why Meta’s stock price barely moved after Threads was released, even amid reports that it’s the fastest-growing app of all time.
It’s not a new social network; as Ryan Broderick, who writes the newsletter, , observed, it’s “a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again”.
In recent days, Musk has sued the law firm that helped Twitter force him to close the $44bn deal he agreed to and threatened to sue Meta for hiring the employees he fired without paying their severance.
He has also challenged Zuckerberg to a fight and a “dick measuring contest” and called him a “cuck,” an insult favored by Shakespearean fools and, today, alt-right ones.
Like many people, I’ve been looking for a replacement for Twitter. I’m still addicted to it, despite my better judgment, but it’s gotten easier to notice how pointless it is and how my time would be better spent in almost any other way.
My feed is dominated by right-wingers, self-promoters and advertisements for chewable generic Viagra. I remember when Twitter banned Donald Trump and political reporters treated it as an event of cosmic significance.
Trump, it seemed, would never be able to dominate the news cycle and slake his ego without access to his feed. Musk lifted the ban eight months ago, and seemed very proud of himself for doing so.
Trump ignored him and went way up in the Republican primary polls, his Twitter feed as empty as Zuckerberg’s metaverse.
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