Meta's Threads Is a Lost Opportunity

Meta could have reinvented social media, but Threads is more of the same.

Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads (earlier known by its codename of Project 92) is out, and has hundreds of millions of downloads, capitalizing on the opportunity presented by Twitter’s downward spiral.

Meta Is Unqualified to Build Next-Gen Social Media

Before we get into an analysis of Threads — this must be said: building our digital squares right is among the most important charges of our time, and who gets to lead this charge matters greatly.

Threads’ stated goal is to build a ‘saner’ platform; Zuckerberg has said Meta will be “focusing on kindness and making this a friendly place.”

Yet, Meta has consistently platformed the worst of human behaviors over decades to make our world more toxic and polarized. It has taken the cake with one of the biggest data privacy scandals of our time (Cambridge Analytica), crimes against humanity such as the Rohingya genocide (for which both Amnesty and UN hold Meta responsible), provided conditions for the Jan 6 US Capitol insurrection (an internal Meta task force report attributes this to the company’s absence of policies on coordinated harm), and been a powerful ally to global authoritarianism. This is before we look at Meta’s advertiser and investor fraud cases with the SECP, damning whistleblower testimonies, or the billions in GDPR fines and suspensions for breaching privacy rights.

These events changed us, but they did not change Meta. That its existing products have not scaled safely is a predictable outcome of its reluctance to invest in safety resources proportional to its scale. Its track record has consistently lacked the vision or policies to create healthier online spaces — and begs the question of what makes it unequipped to build a ‘sane’ or ‘kind’ platform.

If we want new outcomes, Meta’s products are not going to get us there.

Downloads Vs. Retention

Threads has been dubbed Instagram’s sibling app. It is built on the back of Meta’s billions-strong userbases across Facebook and Instagram, and has leveraged every bit of that power. It is no surprise, then, that it has been downloaded as many times as it has.

But as this Atlantic piece reminds us, downloads are not the same as staying power.

It also helps to remember that the first social network to reach the 100-million milestone was Google+, which eventually shut down. Data from this week shows that Threads’ engagement has already dropped off.

Yahoo! news reports that Threads has lost half of its active users in a week, and usage dropped from nearly 20 minutes a day on launch, to 5 minutes after one week. Meanwhile, Twitter and Instagram held steady at 30 and 60 minutes, respectively.

Meta has and will keep running its gamut of known techniques to lock in users and push services (Threads users cannot delete their account unless they delete Instagram, there is no way to opt out of the algorithmic-only feed). But it remains to be seen whether that is sufficient for long-term engagement and retention.

Next-Gen Social Media Must Build For Safety And Resilience

This reinforces something we have known for a while now: we are living in a post-Trump, post-pandemic, post-Musk world — where modern social platforms must proactively build for safety, or stand to lose profits.

Twitter’s advertising sales are down by half because advertisers are concerned about their ads appearing next to harmful, inaccurate and violent posts. Last year, Facebook reported its slowest quarterly ad revenue growth in a decade. A similar failure to center user safety and content reliability led Clubhouse to become a haven for trolls and harassment, and has already led to abuse and outflux from Bluesky.

To see retention beyond the initial hype, platforms need to engineer for anti-misinformation, anticipate platform misuse, actively monitor and swiftly react to problematic user behavior, and catch problems early instead of relying heavily on moderation.

While developing the product — not after launching it — they should ask questions like: Have we built in resilience to bad actors and feature-abuse? What behaviors do the algorithms and architecture incentivize? Whose needs and safety is being centered? How are we engineering the culture and norms we want? Who gets the best experience out of this platform?

Solving for online harms requires innovation—in architecture, design and algorithmic logic. Innovation is not exactly Meta’s forte: it has established itself over 18 years as uninnovative, with an over-reliance on copy-paste to define core features for its products (Reels from Tiktok, Stories from Snap Inc, Marketplace from Craigslist, but also several failed products, such as Bulletin, Meta’s Substack clone).

If Meta’s track record isn’t enough to signal they are ill-suited to build better social media, Threads has already been touted a privacy nightmare and has not launched in the EU yet because it violates GDPR. On the app store, Threads lists the following as data it may collect on you.

Can Instagram Users Seed Another Twitter?

Among the big unknowns about Threads is whether the content and culture of Instagram users will translate to a Twitter/text-only format. Because an Instagram account is required to post, its initial adopters are Instagram users — 33% of downloads have come from the country with the highest number of Instagram users: India.

Both platforms have overlap. According to Pew Research, 53% of Instagram users also use Twitter. But the demographic makeup and user behavior of both varies greatly. There are important differences in users’ gender, age, education, income levels, and where they are in the world. For example, Instagram has a larger younger audience (particularly in the 18—29 age group), and a higher female-male ratio.

These differences translate to different value created by the platforms — 73% of U.S. teens say Instagram is the best way for brands to reach them about new products or promotions. This is one reason why Threads has been flooded by brands upon launch, which some have found intimidating, and attributed to the platform’s fraying engagement.

Twitter’s Value Is More Than Its Text-Based Format

Twitter’s value was never solely its text-based format — the feature Threads is attempting to copy.

Twitter has always been the platform most valuable for news, analysis, real-time updates and current affairs. Its biggest user base is in the US, where it has birthed or galvanized social movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and more recently Iran’s feminist movement. Its role as a platform for political communication, and a global information conduit are part of what make it unique.

But it is clear that Threads’ leadership intends to purposefully distance itself from Twitter’s value proposition. Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri (the default lead for Threads) has said the app is “not going to do anything to encourage” politics and news.

In other words, Meta wants to shut out much of the real world because it is too expensive, too inconvenient and too difficult. And yet, it is only inevitable that journalists and politicians — and news and politics — will make their way onto the platform. In being unprepared for this, Meta is heading towards a moderation nightmare. It is also denouncing the responsibility platforms have to set standards for the quality and reliability of what we see online.

Meta’s leadership has stated that they are not aiming to replace Twitter — which casts even more doubt on their ability to fill the market gap created by Twitter’s Muskification.

How will a text-based platform — that does not want any of the content that made Twitter interesting, serendipitous and electric — excite or retain an exhausted, disillusioned social media user base?

For now, what stands out is that Threads’ leadership has not articulated a compelling vision to create a product that is an improvement on status quo, or an understanding of what made the platform that pioneered text-based format special.

Towards Greater Ambition and Innovation

After close to two decades of seeing social media’s harms and pitfalls, we must have the ambition to build better — from the start.

Our expectations from social media platforms should not be so low that we congratulate and adopt platforms simply for not being Musk-owned. Instead we must ask for greater creativity in building the next wave of social spaces. This means new principles, features, incentives and algorithmic logic. We need platforms to be guided by a human thesis, not tout protocols (BlueSky) or formats (Threads) as the solution.

To this end, we should seek an articulation of vision from founders, on how they aim to ensure that the same problems are not recreated.

Otherwise, we will keep seeing new versions of the toxic platforms that are already too abundant. We will keep giving permission to platforms to punt their jobs, misrepresent their role in the problems they create, and ignore evidence and learnings to tell us it’s ‘too complex’ but ‘we are trying’.

Finally, as researchers like Timnit Gebru and others have argued for years, lived experience of harm is central for understanding how technology intersects with culture, society, and power to create damaging outcomes.

It is unlikely that the future of safe, healthy, valuable and joyful social media — that works for everyone — will be created by another white, male billionaire, let alone one whose first product was a “Hot or Not?” for male undergraduates to rate women.