It’s been about nine months since Elon Musk spent $44 billion dollars to shit the bed harder than it’s ever been shit on before. In that time, there hasn’t been a serious competitor to Twitter’s claim as the premier western microblogging service. Sure, there was Post. Mastodon. Spill. Spoutable. Hive. And most recently, BlueSky. But none set the world on fire. There are a lot of reasons why, but a huge part of this is because none of them had existing tech stacks, and as such none of them could hit quick critical mass. As one example, Blue Sky is still invite only, and even then hit major load when Twitter had major technical issues.

All the same, if one were Elon Musk, one could perhaps conclude that despite all of these tiny little clones, Twitter was very safe. Maybe his users actually did love what he was doing. Maybe he could find a path to profitability.

About that….

Over the Fourth of July holiday, Elon and company had their worst days yet running the service. Through some combination of bad tech and not paying their bills, most Twitter users were limited to only reading 600 posts a day – an amount that a moderate Twitter user consumes in one trip to the shitter. The day after the holiday ended, Meta (formerly Facebook) launched Threads, a microblogging service meant to directly compete with Twitter. And so far, it’s launch has been a couple of orders magnitude larger than the other clones – in 24 hours. A few notes:

  1. Threads hasn’t won yet. It is very hard to dislodge someone’s social media presence, and Twitter was – before Elon – the default social media network for celebrities, corporations and the press. In particular, the people who seem to have the most people letting go of Twitter are the people who found it incredbly useful to do their job – the media. They will probably cling to Twitter until the lights go out.
  2. And yet, Facebook was uniquely positioned to this fight. What does Facebook have that BlueSky doesn’t have? Well, for starters, an infrastructure that can handle throwing 30 million users on it on day one. This dramatically increases the chances that Threads can hit an early critical mass. If a significant portion of that 30 million users sticks around, Twitter could be fucked very quickly.
  3. Meta was also able to leverage preexisting networks. One of the roughest things about starting on a new social media site is that you start with an empty feed and friends list. On Mastodon and Blue Sky you can get around that with tools like fedifinder but you have to be fairly technically savvy to know that. Meta, on the other hand, was able to preseed most people’s friends list with their Instagram contacts, which meant anyone with an Instagram account started with a lively list. The impact of this simply should not be underestimated. If Threads becomes something, this will be a core reason why.
  4. Meta needs a win as much as Elon does – and have the cash to chase it. Meta just spent more than 30 billion dollars trying to build the Metaverse and pulling the plug. But they do have money in the bank, and a lot of it – they have about $40B in the bank and make about $100B a year. Meanwhile, Twitter’s money making capacity was absolutely annihilated both by Musk’s purchase and his poor leadership. Mark Zuckerberg needs a win to get back in Wall Street’s good graces and erase the stink of the last few years. If Threads keeps showing signs of life, expect Zuck to push his chips all-in.
  5. Meta is betting big on ‘Friendly’. A huge part of the destruction of Twitter was Elon’s abandonment of community management in order to embrace a view of ‘free speech’ that ensures that everyone’s post is full of white supremacists, homophobes and antivaxers at all time. By comparison, the message put out by Zuck and other Threads employees over and over again was ‘friendly’. Do they mean it? Who knows. Remember, Facebook has evolved into a right-wing echo chamber that is still a major reason why people think vaccines don’t work and Trump won the last election. But it does at least tell you what Facebook’s market research tells us is Twitter’s core weakness.

6) Threads also appears to be taking an aggressive stance against misinformation. Given that misinformation is something that has absolutely blossomed under Elon’s management, this is also almost certainly a reaction (and a smart one) to that.

7) When you first go to Threads, the first thing you notice are the celebrities. My first foray into Threads put Tom Brady and Eva Longoria on top of my feed. Other celebrities were actually talking. There are two important takeaways from this. The first is that celebrities were here and at least experimentally active — one can’t help but remember how Elon has been treating celebrities like actual dog shit on Twitter for quite some time, and so it’s not surprising that celebs are more than eager to try alternatives. But even more significant and important is that, in this environment, you know who celebrities are. In my last Twitter article, I talked about how one of the bits of magic of pre-Elon Twitter was knowing you were rubbing elbows with real stars. That is completely absent in post-Elon Twitter, as Elon was happy to sacrifice that in order to coax $8 bucks a month out of CatTurd. I said it was a mistake before, but it wasn’t until I went into threads that I realized HOW much of a mistake it felt like. Twitter seems small and provincial now, especially since the biggest ‘celebrities’ that talk are right-wing asshats you want to block reflexively anyway.

8) And the advertising situation is very different. Elon’s bad decision-making has utterly destroyed their advertising revenue – their only significant revenue stream. A year ago, I was seeing ads for Acura and Jeep. Now, they’re an embarrassing cornucopia of weed gummies and cheap dropshipped bullshit that even wish.com would be humiliated to stock. Threads doesn’t really have any advertising yet – I wouldn’t expect to see any for a while, while Threads tries to gain a foothold (they have cash to burn to keep your feed clean for a while). But what they do have are brands – and major ones like McDonalds. You can almost feel their joy in knowing their posts won’t be adjacent to white supremacist bullshit and antivaxer crap. I know it seems stupid, but even the commercial angle of Threads feels significantly less cheap.

9) ‘The everything app’. One more weird thing: one of the huge things driving Twitter into the ground is Elon Musk attempting to reinvent Twitter into an ‘everything app’. He already has pushed hard into video (with absolutely hilarious results) and is also pushing hard to advance a payments business and do things like book restaurants and order Taxis. Humorously enough, Facebook already tried that – and ended up with an enormous pile of bloatware that is underused and complexifies the user experience. I strongly suspect that Threads will remain simple and clean, kind of acting as a throwback for the company, and Twitter will look even shittier and more unfocused as a result.

I’m not sure I’m going to permanently entrench on Threads – I’ve been more at home on Bluesky, frankly, and I’m taking a wait-and-see approach to yet another new social media network. Also, let’s be frank, Meta has not exactly been a benevolent force for good tech-wise. They probably helped Trump get elected, they destroyed countless media outlets with fake stats that pushed to video, and Facebook is one of the primary vectors of antivax and other right-wing quackery in the world.

That being said, Elon Musk took a beautiful thing and destroyed it, so I’m pretty okay with at least rooting for Threads to drive Twitter closer to bankruptcy. And frankly, it brings a tear to my eye that about 30 million Twitter users and counting agree with me.