Some Threads on Threads

Meta - the company formerly known as Facebook - have released a new app called “Threads, an Instagram app”.

Somewhat confusingly, it isn’t actually an "Instagram app" - in the sense that you can’t post to Instagram with it, or see other people’s Instagram posts in it. Instead, its actually more like a Twitter app - except you can’t see Twitter in it either; its like a whole new Twitter (although not to be confused with the other recent ‘new Twitters’; Bluesky and Mastodon), except this one is made by Facebook (who are actually now called Meta) - which makes it easy to follow the same people you follow on Instagram when they post their threads on Threads. (I’m not actually sure what the posts are called- I’m assuming a post on Threads is a "thread".)

So far, so straightforward…

For some context; I’m not an Instagram user (I’ve ‘been there’ for years but never actually posted anything), but when Threads appeared I was thinking that I should probably update my Instagram profile, set up a Threads profile and figure out what its all about - if I want to be a ‘professional’ who knows what they are talking about when it comes to digital/social media etc. So I wasn’t particularly excited about the news about a new Instagram app - it just felt like a bunch of work to do.

Also; these days, I’m not really a Twitter fan - I used to be, but found my interest in it kind of phased out around mid-2016 (IIRC, mostly prompted by the timeline changes that seemed to ignore the actual timeline users - in other words, long before the new ownership.) The Twitter that I loved was ‘old Twitter’ (or ‘small Twitter’); a place where people talked to each other, rather than shouting at each other. I remember being disappointed when they brought in ads, thinking that a social network that never cracked the onboarding problem (Twitter is only really good if you know who the ‘good people’ to follow are - and until Twitter knows who you are, it can't tell you who the 'good people' for you to follow are unless it takes a broad opinion of who the 'good people' for anyone to follow are instead) could never be big enough for a solid advertising proposition, and that some sort of freemium approach (ie. let 'normal people' use it for free, while 'business people' pay for business accounts, analytics, social listening data etc. etc.) was obviously a 'better' way to monetise.

I still feel that all the ‘bad’ decisions that Twitter made were really a result of that early misstep, so while the new owner tries to take it all apart and put it back together again the way he wants it… Well, good luck to him. In my eyes, it was already broken beyond repair and he seems fixed on a strategy of making it even worse. Whatever he's doing clearly isn't for people like me though.

I’m not a big Facebook fan either - I wasn’t ever really ‘into' the platform like I was with Twitter. I liked hearing about friends’ lives - especially the ones I didn’t really see much any more - but my feed these days is pretty much devoid of 'social' stuff; its almost entirely sponsored and recommended posts. There are some Groups I'm in that I like, but if it wasn’t for those communities, I’d have deleted the app long ago.

But I’m interested in Threads...

Obviously right now Threads has a lot of people talking about Threads. You could argue that this is a broad feature of the internet - the first telegraph communication was “What hath God wrought?” (a line from the Bible; Numbers 23:23 - which is particularly interesting if you’re into the 23 Enigma and that sort of thing), but the first website was all about websites, Twitter has always been full of people talking about Twitter, Mastodon still seems to be full of people talking about Mastodon (and Twitter), TikTok seems to be full of TikToks of reactions to TikToks of reactions to TikToks of reactions to TikToks... After all, Marshall McLuhan observed that old media becomes the content of new media; maybe we're at the endgame half a century later where "new media" has become different versions of "old media", and media just eats itself?

So; back to Threads - there are two parts to Threads (or any social networking thing); there’s the network of users - which means right now, the people who have just walked into a party and are trying to figure out what sort of party it is (Is it a Twitter party? An Instagram party? Some other kind of party?) and how they 'should' behave - and then there’s the platform; the app, the protocols, the infrastructure etc. etc., which is going to (in part) configure the kind of behaviour that works well within the network.

This is about the 'platform' stuff, and how I see it shaping the 'network' stuff.

Its a Twitter clone, but moving in the opposite direction

  • When Meta have cloned other social networking products before, its typically been by integrating them as a feature of existing products. (ie. TikTok and Reels, Snapchat and Stories.) So its interesting that this isn’t a new Instagram tab, but a new Instagram app. One way of looking at it is that the app is a new feature of Instagram. I think a better way of framing it is that its a new feature of the Instagram identity graph.
  • Threads promises to 'federate'; on sign up, one of the messages is
    “Future versions of Threads will work with the fediverse, a new type of social media network that allows people to follow and interact with each other on different platforms, such as Mastodon.”
    There is no timeline for when that will happen - and it’s entirely possible that other members of the fediverse will choose not to federate with Threads. But this is worth highlighting as maybe the most fundamental difference between what Twitter is and where it is going (ie. shutting down 3rd party apps, shutting down API access, limiting how many Tweets you can see) and the thinking behind Threads - being a part of an open platform where you get to choose where you want to post, who you want to follow, and what you want your timeline to look like etc.
  • Interesting but maybe kind of irrelevant - this is actually the second version of Meta’s “Threads” - the first one) was a Snapchat clone that got shut down in 2021. The thing that makes it interesting (to me) is that it was at about the same time that “Facebook, Inc.” was rebranding as “Meta Platforms Inc.” In other words, the big “metaverse strategy” would have been underway.
  • I spent a lot of time in 2021 (ie. before “Facebook, Inc.” became “Meta Platforms, Inc.”...) learning about the concept of the metaverse. Now- forget about the whole VR headsets/“immersive worlds” side of things - part of the metaverse vision (that Zuckerberg was talking about back then) is that its an open platform that nobody “owns”. (And no, the metaverse does not exist... still.) If the metaverse is a decentralised platform where your virtual identity can own virtual goods, then first you need a decentralised platform where your virtual identity isn’t owned by a centralised platform. This looks to me like a step in that direction.
  • Also - centralised Twitter needs to be accountable for ‘verification’. Debt-ridden Twitter tried/tries to monetise that service (I don’t think its going well...), and I doubt that Meta are going to go down the same road... But, an open, decentralised equivalent makes self-verification possible; what if you want to know if @somerandomnerd@mstdn.social is the same person who posts on somerandomnerd.net (ie. me)? Well, there’s a verification system that proves that whoever owns that account (me) has the ability to put content on that (this) website. (Or at least, has had that ability at some point, which isn't quite the same thing...) Want to know if someone is actually a government official, or a Guardian journalist? Well, the UK government can set up an @gov.uk server, or the Guardian can set up an @guardian.com server that they have full control over (ie. only staff can get accounts, the same way that only staff can get company email addresses - and when they leave the company, they lose their account. Or - unlike email addresses - migrate them to another server.)
  • Bottom line here is that the 'central platform' of computing used to be Microsoft Windows. In the late 1990s, despite Microsoft's best efforts, it shifted to the World Wide Web/web browser. Around 2010, it shifted to the smartphone app. My best guess is that the next significant paradigm shift is going to be in the direction of decentralisation - nobody really wants to build a business on the whims of the mobile app stores (in particular their 30% cut of all transactions), least of all the big platforms like Meta or Amazon. They have tried and failed at building their own competing platforms - if they aren't big enough to build a centralised competitor, then surely their efforts are going to be behind a decentralised alternative. (I've explained before why I think its Mark Zuckerberg's plan to get ahead of the shift.)
  • In the context of Threads being a 'Twitter clone', I think its also worth noting how much of Twitter wasn’t really “made” by Twitter in the first place; all sorts of features started out as user behaviour that became conventions, and then got adopted as ‘features’. People started mentioning each other with an “@“ before their usernames long before Twitter would turn “@mentions” into links and notify the people that got mentioned. Similarly, people tagged their tweets on a particular topic with #hashtags before Twitter turned them into links. Retweets (which originally worked by just typing in “RT @username” and then copy/pasting the originally tweet - sometimes editing it to fit the 140 character limit, because adding the “RT @username” counted towards the character limit) also emerged from user behaviour that then got adopted by the platform. (Even the Twitter mobile app started out as a 3rd party app.) So in that context, I find it funny that one of Twitter’s ‘adopted behaviours’ that never really got adopted as an official ‘feature’ - replying to your own Tweets (usually with a “1/n” tag to help make sure that the order is clear, in case you see a post from the middle of a thread and don’t realise that it has a broader context) to make a ‘thread’ - seems to be what has given Threads its name.

In a nutshell - how the 'federation' stuff will work is going to be the most important part. If it separates out the networks from the platforms, so that anyone can build a 'fediverse' platform that can interact with the Threads platform (like the old days of 3rd party Twitter apps), then this could open things up massively - all of the "free speech" principles of open platforms, but you get to choose how you want it to be curated/aggregated.

Of course, Meta Platforms Inc. will have a view on how they want to monetise it, which will probably involve advertising. But if someone else can build an alternative app that lets you see just the posts from the accounts you want to follow in a reverse-chronological timeline, then that seems like it should be an option in the future.

Which feels like there's a door open to getting something like 'old Twitter' back again. And thats interesting to me; if Threads is, as Ben Thompson has observed on Stratechery, "Twitter for the billion people who tried Twitter and didn't like it", then it has the potential to be a truly "public" platform.

From The Guardian;

Replying on his new Threads account to MMA fighter Mike Davis, who had asked if Threads could become bigger than Twitter, Zuckerberg wrote: “It’ll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with 1bn+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

Is Threads a "conversations" platform, or a "broadcast" platform?

  • Network effects mean that the more people join a social platform, the more value that gives to the platform. But within the platform, there's something similar - for every Twitter (or YouTube, or Reddit, or Digg before that) there will be users with the biggest followings, which means they get the most 'engagement', which means they get the most data, which means they can optimise their activity to get the most new followers - rinse and repeat. At some point, that means they flip from talking with their followers to talking at them.
  • One trajectory that leads to is the TikTok model, where it isn't about 'profiles' and who you follow, but 'content' and who engages with it. Which isn't really "social media" anymore.
  • The other is, for want of a better name, the 'celebrity' model - the people working the platform (or gaming the algorithm) the best get the biggest audiences. Of course, "celebrities" get a head start (seen in the "One Direction effect" - they were in some ways bigger than TV- but anyone can become a celebrity on the platforms; the Insta-influencers, the YouTube superstars. So its interesting that although Threads is happy to put posts from people you don't follow into your timeline, it doesn't have trending topics, engagement analytics seem to be pretty minimal. Maybe they are just still a work in progress - or maybe Threads is heading in a different, more 'social' direction. We will see…
  • It’s interesting that out of Meta’s various social graphs (including Facebook, WhatsApp, and the VR one… Meta Quest?) they chose Instagram to build Threads on top of- I guess because it’s the most ‘public’. This is probably a pretty strong signal of where Meta expects/wants Threads to be heading; your Threads identity is a 'public' one, piggybacking off your Instagram one (which still belongs to InstaMetaBook.) But its also separate - if you have Instagram friends you don't want to follow on Threads, or vice-versa, then thats totally fine.
  • It’s text-based - which is good news for me; I like text-based. I like to read, and I like to write. Photos are great for sharing glimpses of your life - where you’ve been, who you were with etc., video is great to watch for entertainment, passing the time etc . etc. but text is better for simply sharing thoughts; its easy, and its quick. But there’s a problem with putting thoughts into text - it’s so easy that the sort of “route one” thoughts (ie. the obvious, unimaginative, unsurprising choice) that you’d probably abandon if there were any degree of friction tend not to get filtered out. So you get dozens of replies making exactly the same observation, because it’s easier to write the same reply than to see if anyone else has already said the same thing. The bigger your audience, the bigger the “route one” crowd becomes, the bigger the signal-to-noise ratio becomes a problem - and the less “social” your social media behaviour becomes. (Push this idea to the extremes and you end up with one-way broadcast media; which seems like exactly the thing that social media was supposed to be a reaction to.)
  • The launch product doesn’t have “lists”, and doesn’t have DMs. Both of which are “private” in nature. Threads is very public, by design - although you can set up a private profile, it’s not clear why you would bother. Now - there’s an underlying problem with social networks in general, in that ‘people contain multitudes’; or in other words, people don’t stay on topic. I might follow someone because I want to hear what they have to say about technology, but I also have to put up with what they have to say about sports/their family/other stuff I have no interest in. Google attempted to solve the problem with “Circles” - which meant you could put all your tech people in a “tech circle”, but didn’t solve the problem of ‘your tech people’ posting about things that weren’t tech related. (Twitter did the same with “lists” - which has the same problems.) Reddit solves the problem by putting posts in topic-related spaces - I can post my tech related thoughts in r/technology and have a separate set of conversations in, say, r/StarWars or r/TedLasso. My guess is that Meta have plans for something interesting here to separate out “identities” (ie. you have a single identity) and “personas” (ie. you might have a “work” persona, a “family” persona, a “tech nerd” persona, a “Star Wars fan” persona etc. etc.) Now, I’ll admit that I’m only guessing that because I really want someone to solve this problem - it touches on some big and serious issues around privacy, trust, anonymity/nymwars, data ownership/portability etc. etc... But Threads seems to have left a big open space around where this problem exists so... we’ll see.
  • Anyway- my prediction here is that if you want to have a private conversation off the back of Threads, it will probably be funnelled towards WhatsApp rather than a DM system.

New platforms, Old problems

  • My timeline is still full of people I don't follow. Maybe thats early days - I haven't followed enough people to have a well-populated feed, or I haven't 'engaged' enough for the algorithm to know what I personally do or don't want to see. Some of that is interesting, some of it is boring (for example, I like watching clips of great football goals/plays that I get served up in Reels, but I have absolutely no interest in the club/player news that I get served up in Threads.) But the nature of the algorithmic timeline means that so long as other people are clicking, liking and replying to posts like these, then they are going to appear in my timeline.

Now, I know that there’s plenty of stuff like this on Twitter - but as I generally stick to the “Following” timeline, I don’t generally see it. (When I was more active on Twitter, I’d get stuff like this as spammy replies sometimes - but in general, its something I think you’d have to actively seek out to find.) On Threads, it appears in my feed. Which is... fine? I mean... I’m not bothered by it. In a world full of misinformation, disinformation, scams and hatred it isn't really the worst thing about social media - if thats how people want to use their own platforms (assuming that they own their platforms - again, I believe the point about identity and verification above is a fundamentally important one.) The fact is that these days, I’m more bothered by what it might do to my recommendations if I linger too long. (My Facebook feed is full of Doctor Who and Star Wars memes - not because thats what I want to see, but because they tend to get my attention when I see them - so I get shown more and more of them...) But a) it is the kind of thing that I’m going to think about when my kids ask me if they can use the app, and b) its the underlying problem that what we want to see and what we tend to look at are not the same thing.

To put it another way - if you tracked what drivers slow down to look at on the roads, you would conclude that what drivers really want to see is more and more terrible crashes.

(Also - now I’m wondering how much of this kind of “Instagram/TikTok model, but check out my OnlyFans for the naughty stuff!” content gets surfaced by the Instagram/TikTok algorithms, and what it means for me in terms of my responsibilities as a parent of teen/pre-teen children.)

In conclusion...

I don't really have a conclusion. Its obviously very early days - Threads might become a part of a bigger, open, federated network of networks, and it isn't at all clear whether thats a good thing or not. (With 100 million users in the space of week or so, it could just as easily overwhelm/extinguish all the other networks in the fediverse.) It might just be another app where we go to see what our friends are posting and come away disappointed/distressed by the news/adverts/etc. Or it might be another app that gives us content thats just engaging enough to keep swiping in the hope of seeing enough of what we actually want to see among the content that grabs our attention.

Hopefully, sooner or later, we'll all learn how to tell the difference.

[Edit to add - Oh yeah - you can follow me (@somerandomnerd) on Threads. I can promise that my posts there will be a lot shorter than this.]

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