Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - The Threads Episode: How We Got Here, Meta Obstacles and Advantages, Everyone Hates Twitter (And Uses It Every Day)

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Tracing the recent social media history that led to Threads, 70 million users in three days (and whether Meta can keep them coming back), an early contender for worst Thread of all time, and the dysfunction at Twitter that has now opened the door to a wide variety of challengers.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and sitting across from me, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? I'm doing well, Andrew. You know, I had a brand new tech experience this morning. You ordered coffee for us via Starbucks mobile ordering, which does not exist in Taiwan, I don't think. So I've never actually used it before.

But boy, what a great idea. I was flabbergasted that you. were not familiar with the mobile ordering concept. No, no, I knew. I just never set it up. And I don't know. I didn't go to Starbucks that often. Yeah, well, it's one of my favorite tech use cases.

It does come, it's a bit of a double-edged sword, I would say, because I used to really enjoy walking into Starbucks. I had like a couple baristas that I knew pretty well and had some fun back and forth with them. And now it's very impersonal. So it's sort of like a parable for what tech does to us more generally. stripping us of our humanity. But it's so goddamn convenient.

I can't believe you had never used it. And I'm glad I was able to introduce it to you. It's a role reversal for us. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I'd already stripped everyone of their humanity by wearing AirPods like a normal person. So it probably wasn't that big of a deal. But yes, you know, always great to have a new experience.

That's what, you know, Vegas is all about. We are, you know, watching some league games, recording some podcasts. We're basking in the afterflow. And talking about it on social media. basking in the afterglow of a legendary Victor Wimbunyama debut. It was legendary. Oh, boy, I'll remember that uncomfortable experience for the rest of my life.

No, it is pertinent to what we're going to discuss, but we'll get to it in a moment. We will. And it's good to be back. You know, there were two big events during the holiday week. Number one, last weekend, Twitter implemented a variety of changes and then started rate limiting users and All sorts of people were freaking out. No idea what they were doing. Exactly.

It's still sort of unclear what the strategy was. Clearly, the execution wasn't great. And then second, not coincidentally, meta launched its long rumored Twitter competitor threads, which then added about 70 million users. Let's be clear. Actually, this is all important to this context. We are recording on Saturday, a Saturday morning. This is going to be published.

I believe the goal is published on Monday or Tuesday. So number one, opinions could change over the intervening $48. We'll see what happens. Yep. Number two, certainly dynamics could emerge between, you know, Twitter and Facebook or better or whatever it might be. And number three, that's 70 million number is as a Friday. I was going to say.

So like by the time this publishes, you could be significantly higher. Yeah. Who knows what the number will be when all is said and done. But I'll start by reading a question from six months ago. So this is Matthew, Sharp Tech listener back in November. He says, I was listening to your convo on meta, and what else could they be building if not the metaverse? Wouldn't now be a great time for them to go after Twitter and the more public slash broadcast social media market? If a lot of individuals and advertisers are looking for a new town square, I can't think of another company better positioned to meet that need fast, either through changes to the Facebook app or with a new

standalone offering under the meta umbrella. So Ben, now that we're here, I'll let you decide where you want to start. This is actually kind of fun because I haven't talked to you about threads very much. We were too busy talking about Victor Wembeyanama. Exactly.

Rhapsodizing over how impressive Victor Wembenyama was. What? For people who did not fall basketball, that is a lie. He was terrible, which was actually a far more compelling story than him being amazing.

But sorry, continue. Yes. Well, so what's most interesting to you about the way this is setting up and the way the past week has played out with meta appearing to rush this to market in response to the Twitter kerfuffle a week ago and capitalizing on the opportunity there? So I should ask you, how deep do you want to go on this? I'm happy to go as deep as you want. We're doing all for that episode, right?

Okay, so everyone lock you in. We're doing a full hour on threads. No skipping ahead. Because I actually think there is a ton of context that is important to understanding this space that goes beyond just this week. Now, the bits about this week are super interesting. It's very clear that meta-watched threads early. Like there was people saying, oh, we had this marketing. There was a little teaser around the logo and how, like, when you refresh and it fills, whatever, that was going to be a tease.

And the guy, it was very funny. the guy there is like, well, this was going to be a cool marketing video because I made this logo, but now that it's already launched here, here's the video. I still, I enjoy it in the app, actually. It's one of my favorite things about threads. Right. But there's other indications that meta did launch early precisely to take advantage of yet another Twitter sort of screw up. So, which kudos to that. There's a, there's a broader point about, and it's a point we've made it getting in this podcast. I think, you know, we've, I think we've been pretty consistent in just Nelly Meta, but there's a bit where meta is the one large company that is still founder-wed,

and it feels like it, right? Like, the fact that they, you know, this app was probably built in the last five to six months, which is an insane timeline for something of this complexity, that they launched early, that they built up to 70 million users to date, and I've had no scaling issues that, perceptibly speaking, like the app works fine. It's incredible, yeah. It's no, it's unbelievable.

Like it's, it is actually one of the most bullish indicators of meta, just its vitality and capability that they could even do this from an operational basis. Well, like, like, like, like, Google can barely get a presentation done in six months. Yeah. Like, like, it, I think this is, it can't be overstated how impressive just the execution on this was even before you get to all the. various things around it. And I think the reason it launched when it did is obviously Twitter was a mess once again. And I imagine Zuckerberg, Zuck, my guy picked up the phone called Adam Assyria and said, let's get this to market as soon as possible. But at the same time, I'm sure it was like in testing. Clearly it was it just ready to go. But they're like, no, let's do it this week. Right. And I also think

there was a secondary benefit there where it was a holiday week. Nothing was going on. It was the day after 4th of July is when this officially launched. And so a bunch of people were just sitting around and we're like, all right, I'll check this out. I'm sitting in my family now. I don't know that it was like planned that way months in advance, but it wound up working out really, really well for meta. And now we'll see what they can do with it.

So that's the other part of the conversation. No, for sure. So I do want to back up. And there's an article I wrote ages and ages ago, the social communications map or something like that, where I was basically trying to, it was very clear to me, super early. that the inclination of analysts was to put all social media companies in the same bucket. They all do the same thing. And this was a thing, you know, this is why Twitter is the next Facebook or, you know, Facebook

replacing MySpace and everything's going to replace each other. And there's only one that can win. And it was super clear to me that actually there is a wide array of potential social media companies that serve all sorts of experiences. There's public versus private. There's broadcast versus messaging. communications, all of which certainly came out to be true. If you go back and look at that map, you can still put on social media companies into

those different categories on there. It was like a 3D sort of concept sort of thing. But that's important for understanding, I think, the context of what's happening here. So I look at this question, and for example, this person talks about either through changes in the Facebook app. Well, Facebook has always been fundamentally different from Twitter in one, important respect, which is Facebook broadcast to your network, your friends and family. Yep.

And actually, Facebook's first FTC consent decree was about them trying to respond to Twitter and making your posts public. Oh, that's right. Yeah. And so they retroactively made posts that when you wrote them were only for people in your network to see and they made them public. And the FTC, and I think fairly so. you sort of said, well, you can't do that, right?

Like people had the expectation. You told them this was only to be seen by their friends and family. And now it's seen by everyone. And that was an early benefit of Facebook, by the way, is that you're only broadcasting to people that you know that was like a selling point. Well, it's kind of funny because one of the early controversies about the news feed. So Facebook starts out and you just do, you just do posts on your page, right? And it was kind of like MySpace in that regard.

It was easier to use than MySpace because every page was the same. People long for like everyone's MySpace looking different. and it would play different music and all that sort of stuff. Totally unwieldy, right? And hard to manage. It was actually harder to create your page. You had to make so many choices. Facebook, every single profile page was the same.

You just, and all you had to do was add a status, right? Or add a picture. But to see all your friends, you had to actually go to all your friends' pages. And so if you're, you know, at Harvard back in whenever it was launched, you would have a routine of going on there and click, click, click, click, click through all your friends to see their status. And then the news feed came out. And the newsfeed collated all of those statuses into one sort of stream. And that was a transformational product, not just for Facebook,

before internet publishing generally. The concept of the feed, we talk a lot about how the V1 of products mimics what came before. V2 is native to the format, and that's where you can actually make money. The feed was that. It's an infinite feed. You can't have an infinite newspaper, right? It's an infinite feed that can dynamically change based on you, based on time, based on advertising if you want to put that in there.

Like that's the foundation of meta is that newsfeed product. And there was a ton of pushback from meta users who were like, I didn't know everyone was going to see my stuff. Yeah. Now, in that case, that was okay because they were, the newsfeed was still only showing you the stuff in your network. Your stuff was still being shown to who you was promised to be shown to. It was just much more convenient because you could see it all at once.

Now, you fast forward a few years, and that gets to the FTC issue where they changed it to anyone can see it, the sort of broadcast by default, but they did it retroactively. Anyhow, this is the, we're going to the weeds. I told you we're going deep.

But this is important because it's, it's an area where Twitter has always been different in this specific regard where it's a broadcast medium. It's not, there's a network aspect, but it's fundamentally a broadcast thing. And that's why you would have people get in trouble

for tweets where they throw off a tweet, There was the famous like, you know, I'm going to Africa tweet. Yeah, sure. It was the first one that was really, you know, a big issue here because you did it for your network, but it could go broad because it was public by default. Twitter's always been public by default. Now, the reason this matters is Instagram comes along and Instagram starts out as a tool to make your crappy early iPhone pictures look better and they have tools to push it out

to other networks. and they get your original network because this was in the Helsian days. There you go. We did. We mispronounced collated earlier. I think you threw out a collated. But Halcyon nailed it. Great work by you.

So tell me more about the Instagram Halcyon days. So this is the Web 2.0. Everyone's going to have an API and interconnect. It's going to be beautiful and wonderful. And so Twitter had an API and you could like pull your network and stuff like that. So Instagram connected to the Twitter API and you could go on Instagram, which everyone thought about is just a photo editing tool and say click a button, find me all my Twitter contacts on Instagram. And so you would bootstrap the network. So the Instagram network was bootstrapped off of the Twitter network.

Right. And and it was funny because it was a huge thing when Twitter finally cut them off. And people were mad at Twitter. It's like this is violating this. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, no, we've talked about that. It's part of the irony that, you know, a decade later as all these APIs are now being restricted, like, that story began a long time ago.

From a business perspective, they should have been restricted from the beginning. It was nuts for Twitter to be giving that away from sort of a business perspective. So anyhow, so Instagram is boosted out of this. But the key thing is Instagram was also public by default. It was a broadcast media. Now, again, post that you saw were limited by who you followed. But there's an asynchronous nature to this, right? With Facebook, it's you and I agree to follow each other.

It's a double handshake. Or it's a handshake, I guess only one handshank. One shag I, it's just two people. I've actually reached my hand out towards you right now. It's one of the benefits of being together. But so you, both people have to agree. With Twitter, it's one way. I just follow you, and you don't have to follow me back.

Now, you can block me, but it's not like a, you have to affirmatively let me see your posts. And it's easy to share with third parties also. That's right. And so all that stuff sort of interconnected. So Instagram was like Twitter in that regard. Now, why did Instagram be Twitter? First and foremost, I think, just because photos are more compelling than text. Like, and this gets back, we've talked about this in the context of Twitter. Twitter, in my estimation, is both fundamentally limited in their TAM and their total addressable market because most people are not primarily text. But the people that are primarily text really are primarily text. Like, they don't want to deal with photos and videos slow, and I am 100% in this camp. Like, people send me, like, YouTube clips or short videos about something. I mean, I don't have time for that crap. Like, that 30 seconds, I could spend scrolling through like 100 tweets, right? I feel like such a jerk, but I hate when people send me funny YouTube videos, even if they're 20 or 30 seconds long.

The other thing that I would add, though, to your point on text-based users, those are also some of the most. powerful people in the world. And that's been to Twitter's benefit. Right. That's because that's how Twitter has been the social media of media. Right. Right. Because the media, politics and corporate America. All of this is textual base. Yeah. Yeah. And so there's a whole, if you want to get really deep, there's a whole cultural historical aspect of this. Like there's this, there's that book called the weirdest people in the world. It's like Western educated, industrialized, something or other. But basically talking about how the way that brains are wired via culture and being text-based is just different in like countries that have been tech space for a very long time.

Like it actually like changes so many things in the whole legal system, rule of law, like engineering. All this stuff is predicated. Like it's all about logic, right? It's like all laid out very clearly in text. And this is different from the like broad historical human, which is like oral based, right? Like the oral tradition, stories passed down, you know, like, and that's a much looser organizations.

And you can understand what that's like a competitive advantage culturally, right? You can actually like develop and like what does what is reading and text lets you do? It lets you build on knowledge, right? Because you're actually, that's locked in. We have a book about it. Now we can build on top of it, right? And we do that culturally. I would say I do that individually as a trajectory.

Like people joke and I will joke about me citing my old pieces. But that's literally what I'm doing at a small scale, right? I'm building an infrastructure of my understanding of the world that depends on, like, text being a thing that's sort of locked in. But the reality is, is the vast majority of people of the world, this isn't a judgment per se. They would rather watch TV, right? Like, that's why TV is, like, the decline of newspapers has been very stark in the last 20 years. But the reality is, if you consider the opportunity costs, newspapers have been declining for a century. radio comes along what happens

the advertising market expands but newspapers don't capture that it all goes to the new thing they stay relatively stable TV comes along market expands hugely newspapers don't get any of that their share of advertising has been collapsing for years it was just the overall

what the internet did was sort of took away that bit that they retained but this idea of newspapers and books being less and less important has been a case as long as other means of coming along. People prefer other mediums by and large.

So this is all, I promise this all actually essential context to this whole debate. So you get to Instagram comes along, its video, or it's pictures, then they add video, and it's just a more compelling product

to a wider array of people than Twitter is. This is leaving aside any sort of managerial things. The fact that Facebook's always been a much better managed company than Twitter, has executed much better.

The fundamental format of Instagram, I think, was it just had a larger addressable market than Twitter did. And it became a much bigger product. And then you plug in Facebook has this incredible advertising infrastructure. The format of the advertising for Facebook ports perfectly to Instagram. Right. And so you have this sort of monster that validates the point.

There's different types of social network. In this case, Twitter and Instagram are the same. They're both broadcast. They differ in medium, image versus text. Yeah. And they've also evolved differently. That was my first. thought when I heard that Threads was launching through Instagram and was going to be competing with

Twitter, I have a very different circle on Instagram than I do on Twitter. And part of that is probably related to the medium where you look at like the tone on Instagram is different. And I'm, you know, I'm posting to people that I went to law school with, people that I went to college in high school with. And I'm a different person on Instagram than I am on Twitter. And I think a lot of people use the two social medias very differently. To your point in that like not all social media is is sort of like fishing in the same pond there. And, and it's going to be a real obstacle, I think, in terms of like creating mass adoption here and actually getting this off the ground. I agree. And we will get to that. But I still.

have more context to add. Please. I'm on a context crusade today. So I agree. I think that's all very true. And you built up sort of a different network. And that early bit about bootstrapping off the Twitter network only took you so far. Like Twitter can't look back and say Instagram success today is because of that, right?

That got them started. But obviously, Instagram is scaled drastically beyond that. And I think this does matter to your point of there is a social media aspect to both Twitter. Like you follow people. you know personally. But a lot of Twitter is you're following funny accounts. You're following like team accounts or like NBA Twitter or like who's like the people that are most active sort of in that space.

We'll sort of be an example. Maybe you follow me or something for because you're interested in tech. You know, I used to tweet much more back in the day. Instagram is different. You're following people based on different interests. Maybe is one way to put it, right? Well, I follow 200 people on Instagram and I follow 1,000 people on Twitter. because I'm a news consumer, Twitter's useful for news.

I don't need to follow a thousand people's photos on Instagram. Right. And I think what people follow on Instagram is, like, they may also follow friends and family, but they also follow, in both cases, you're following influencers. But the nature of the influencer is very different. An Instagram influencer is going to be more visually oriented because it's pictures and videos, right? A Twitter influencer is going to be more textually oriented, right?

And so both you and I, as I look at you and if I look over in a mirror, we're more suited to Twitter. Like that's going to be a better sort of like influencer there. So, but so this gets to your point about the fundamental nature of the networks has developed very, very differently, right? I imagine there's a lot of Twitter followers I really don't want to see. And there's a lot of Instagram followers that I maybe don't want to hear from. That's right. So this is sort of a difference that's sort of evolved.

There's one other point that I want to bring up, though, which is to, TikTok. TikTok comes along. Well, actually, no, we're fast forwarding. We got to hit Snapchat quick. Snapchat comes along. They come along with this. So they start private.

There's another one of those parts of the map, private versus public. Snapchat starts private. And they tapped into this discomfort with Facebook about I'm showing everyone my status and including my like aunts and uncles. And that's very weird. Right. And they were cool. And also all your photos are deleted immediately.

Right. You know, never mind you could screenshot wherever it might be. But like, so you have that. And then they added on a public part. The public part they had on was stories. This idea where you could have something that was broadcast and people could see your story and sort of click through it. And so Instagram comes along. They just lift stories straight from Snapchat, right?

And I wrote an article at the time called The Audacity of Copying Well. And I'm like, dude, kudos of beta. Like on one hand, it's super embarrassing. They're just straight up copying this thing. but number one on day one it worked better than snapchats like the performance was better like it was so fast it was super fluid and all they're doing is just layering on their network you already have the stories i want to see are from the people i'm already following on instagram and what they did to snapchat is they didn't kill snap they just completely neutered their growth like snap stopped growing and they were just super stable

and they did start growing sort of in the long run before like a year just totally level right when they're going to an IPO. Like it was a total disaster. Snap had a lot of momentum and was gaining market share and then a lot of people had no more incentive to try Snap and just did it through Instagram. That's right. And rebuild their network, which is very, you know, a long sort of process. And so that's the snap context. One more piece of context is TikTok. Okay. What made TikTok different and why I think it was such a blind spot for Facebook is TikTok is not a social network at all. You can follow. people. It doesn't really have any impact on what you see. TikTok is a user-generated content network where it's completely algorithmically driven. And their goal is to understand what you

want to see and to find the best short-form videos across the entire network that are interesting to you. It's completely customized to every individual person and it's not a social network at all. And you can see whether there's a blind spot for Facebook where they're like, we just killed Snap or not killed Snap, but we neutralized Snap by leveraging our network. And You're telling me that our network is actually, it's not just not a help against TikTok. It's a constraint. Because if you're limited to showing what your friends and family have, you're not showing the best stuff. And so what Reels did, and it took them a while to figure this out, but Reels embraced that concept.

And the reason they were able to pull it off, and I think they have by and large pulled it off, is that shift I talked about where social networking was actually becoming more into messaging. And so to lose the social network aspect of your primary feed was less of a sacrifice because that was actually less and less important over time where the public part is entertainment. No one's going to put anything risky out there. It's all about sort of that aspect. All the risky stuff is in private sort of messaging. And by the way, if we glue these together, suddenly we could share reels into messaging super easily.

It's super seamless. All this sort of connection. And by and large, it took them a while. took a huge chunk out of their future growth, but from what I've seen, they've neutralized TikTok. TikTok's growth has sort of leveled off. They, you know, Facebook's not necessarily going to get all those users back, but there's a lot of people who are like, why would I try TikTok? I have hilarious videos in my Instagram feed, right? And, and, and so. And that's success, if you're meta. It's success. There's a lot of foregone growth and people who are gone that they won't get back, just like happened with Snap. I think there's way more with TikTok than with Snap.

And those are costs for sure, but I think the overall threat in both cases has been has been neutralized. So how does that algorithmic approach relate to what meta is trying to do with threads? Thank you for asking. Yeah, I just teed it up for you. So all this is interesting for threads. So number one, you have this bit where this is about broadcast. It's about sort of putting stuff out there. Number two, you have this cold start problem.

And just in general, how do you build a better network? TikTok showed this It's sort of the sort of algorithmic driven sort of bit And this goes back into the history of Twitter Where Twitter's always had an onboarding problem How do you find interesting tweets to follow? Because Twitter is compelling

Because it's an interest-based network You follow what you're interested in But the mechanism was following people And so of course you can follow me For example because you're interested in tech But that's not a perfect mismatch if I start tweeting about sports or the bucks, like during a game, so your post is, your feed is filled with a bunch of stuff you're not interested in.

I solve this by having the no tech bank account, but most people, you know, by and large, that's not going to happen. And I think particularly over the last seven, eight years, as things that become more politicized generally, and there's been, you know, like, look, I'm interested in in sports. I'm not really interested in, like, partisan politics, or maybe my partisan politics are different than my favorite sports tweeter. And it's kind of annoying to get this sort of in there.

there's been, I think that tension has actually come more and more to the fore where this conflation of people with interests has actually delivered a less compelling experience to folks. And so for Twitter, if you built up a good feed, if you got the right people to follow, it's so addictive. Like you can't stop reading it. But how do you get from here to there? There's been this huge barrier to actually build that up. And so I think first and foremost, the most compelling or one of the most compelling, or one of the most compelling, about threads is the bit you open up threads for the first time and it's fully populated with content. Now, that content may not be that interesting to you, right?

Right. Particularly depending on who you followed on Instagram, mine was actually quite compelling because I was so early to Instagram back when they were still copying over from Twitter. So most of my Instagram, and I don't use Instagram that much, so I haven't added a bunch of people I'm following. So it's all like 2012 Twitter. 2012 Twitter people who I'm still, you know, and they're friends with or they're all in tech or whatever it might be. So mine was immediately pretty tech-centric.

Yeah. And then like people that I knew. But I think for most people that isn't necessarily the norm, but I think the longer you use threads, I would expect it to get pretty good at giving you content that you're interested in if you stay around long enough, which obviously remains an open question. Right. Yeah.

I'm glad you got to experience the Halcyon days of tech Twitter. Fourth of July week there. Thanks, Zuck. And speaking of Zuck, he says, it'll take some time, but I think there should be a public conversations app with a billion people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn't nailed it.

Hopefully we will. So when you look at how they hope to nail this, is it basically founded on the strength of their network and the ability to immediately kind of bootstrap people based on their Instagram following, or is it also about that sort of algorithmic for you approach that they're adopting here? Yes.

I mean, it's both. No, it is, it is both, but I think this is the sort of the really important point here. Meta will succeed not by killing Twitter. They will succeed. I think this tweet is actually, or this thread, or tweet, whatever it is from Zuckerberg, is actually the exact articulation.

meta will succeed by capturing that market that Twitter never did. They will succeed by making non-Twitter users into tech-based social media users. And this also is why TBD on thread sort of long-term outcome. My view is just capturing what Twitter is is kind of a failure. There's a reason why Twitter is a bad business. You have just, you don't have that many people. who are super locked in. Their textual cortex is like locked in.

They're arguing. They're using logic. Again, not saying that people on Twitter are logical, but they're in a text-based sort of mind, right? And one of my things, the issues I've had with Twitter and the reason why I said that Twitter should go straight subscription, not this backdoor, let's make the experience horrific, so you have no choice to be it an experience.

I said, no, just make it a subscription, $5 a month. Why? Because that mindset of Twitter, number one, I think is so unique and so compelling that people would complain about it, but I think they would pay number one. And number two, I just think Twitter is fundamentally unsuited for advertising. Your mindset is not conducive to ads when you're on Twitter, right? And again, not saying you're being logical per se, but you're indie, I'm engaged, I'm leaning forward, I'm into this, and you think about what are the great advertising formats.

You're laying back on the couch. you're watching a sports game and an ad comes on. Oh, yeah. You're on Instagram. It's a longstanding Ben take. My question, though, when you look at the differences, so Twitter has succeeded in large part because it is a Twitter is not succeeded. Okay.

That's no, this is important to the point. Twitter is a failure. This is a nearly 20-year-old company that has like made a profit like once or twice a year ever has not even come close to recouping the money that's put into it. It's a, it's not a, there's business speaking, it's a failure. So here is my response. I'll read an exchange that happened on threads in the past few days. By the way, it's a little difficult to share these threads.

So hopefully they can work on that as they continue to iterate. Yeah, it's very annoying that just the threads don't have the, they don't have the username of the person that wrote it. Like, so, you know. Searching for stuff is difficult. In any event, Alex Heath, reporter for the verge, threaded the following. He said, we'll be interesting to see how the news is very important. Exactly. We'll be interesting to see how the news industry does or doesn't embrace threads.

Meta as a company has spent the past few years actively distancing itself from news and literally downranking it in Facebook and Instagram, killed the news tab, etc. Now threatening to pull all news in countries proposing laws that would require payments to publishers to host their links. But if this app is going to be a real Twitter competitor, it's going to need the news industry to embrace it. Is meta ready for that? And then Adam Masseri responded to that thread with a threat of his own and said, The goal isn't to replace Twitter. Almost threat of his own, but no, it's threat of his own. He says the goal isn't to replace Twitter.

The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter. and for communities on Twitter, parentheses and other platforms that are interested in a less angry place for conversations, but not all of Twitter. Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on threads. They have on Instagram as well to some extent, but we're not going to do anything to encourage those verticals. And so what I find interesting about the needle they're trying to thread here is one of the reasons Instagram is more popular among Normie. than Twitter is because the subject matter that you're consuming on Instagram is like photos of people's kids, photos of celebrities. You're not bombarded with current events. And frankly, current events just don't

appeal to that many people. But then when you flip over to Twitter, Twitter's, maybe it's not been a business success, but it's been a tremendous cultural success over the last 15 years. Right, which goes into that being the social network for media. Right. And their relevance is derived almost entirely from its influence on the media ecosystem. And without that outsized impact on the media and the agenda setting functions that we've talked about in the past, like Twitter would have sputtered out a long time ago. We would never talk about Twitter on Sharp Tech. It just wouldn't be that important. And so when I look at meta. Right. It's like Dropbox or something.

Right. Exactly. And so when meta is. saying we want to create a version of Twitter without the current events and news aspects of Twitter. To me, it sounds crazy. It's like saying we want to pattern our game after Steph Curry, but without the three-point shooting. Like, I just wonder how far that's actually going to get them in terms of providing utility to users. Right. And I think, so I think there's a couple ways to look at it. Number one, if you want to give credit to meta, it's that actually, this is all a big head fake. So Mark Zuckerberg, his first tweet in 11 years, right?

He does the Spider-Man meme pointing at each other. And the implication is obviously we're creating a replica of Twitter. Right. Right. But it's not a replica of Twitter. You just articulated it. It's not. It's a Twitter for the rest of us, whereby us, I mean those other people, not me because I'm a Twitter addict, right?

It's a Twitter for the rest of you. And I think that is potentially, And I don't know how large that market is, right? There is a, the bet here is that there is a large market for distribution, like a content distribution system, whether that, you know, that's not images, right? That is text-based. Text is very versatile. There's a reason why it's so powerful, right?

You can be used for lots of different things. And that the fundamental problem for Twitter is just an unpleasant place to be and it's hard to get started. So we're going to make an alternative that is pleasant to be and is easy to get started. And the reason we can do both is because of the algorithm, because it's AI driven, right? Via AI, we can suppress the unpleasant stuff. Some people would say censor. We can promote the interesting stuff.

Right. And we can also make sure you have content from day one. That's interesting. We will tune it relentlessly so that your feed is perfect for you, just like TikTok taught us how to do when we're doing in Instagram and Facebook and all that sort of thing. And that's the product that I see in threads. And it's not a Twitter competitor at all. So I, no, you could say that maybe the less generous interpretation is that Facebook thinks they're building a Twitter competitor. And it's not actually one because they don't actually understand what makes Twitter compelling.

I would lean towards the first explanation. I think I'm going to give Mark Zuckerberg and his team the better to the doubt. and understanding social media. They have to know why Twitter has been as important as it has been over the last years. Are they after cultural influence or are they after? Look, there's a huge business opportunity that Twitter is completely squandered. We're happy to scoop that up and Twitter can take all the arrows.

Sure, they can be culturally relevant. They can have this whole thing going on. But they're not going to make any money. They haven't made any money. And oh, by the way, we. we just completely took away any prospect for future Twitter growth. Right. What we did to snap, what we did to TikTok.

Because if you just want texts, you, Mark Zuckerberg said that in his, in his thread. Get used to it. We need new words. New era is here. New era in social media started July 5th. He said, look, Twitter's had the chance to, to, and I've been on this for years. Twitter needed, like, Twitter needed a better algorithm. They needed a better cold start problem.

They needed a solution for this sort of thing, and they just never built it. They've been the opposite of meta at every step in terms of execution and vision and the ability to sort of get things done. And, you know, and locked into what they were. I mean, look at what, look at how meta has transformed Instagram again and again. Like, again, that's a founder sort of mentality. They have. So they have. But they've also, they've been introducing complementary features to,

No, but Twitter couldn't do any of that. They were stuck at 140 characters. It was like a multi-year debate to go to 280. Like, I say that in contrast to Twitter, which was like not founder wed or then the founder left and came back and was he the actual. There was the F period. It's been a mess from day one. It shows how important that that aspect is to sort of, I think particularly in social

media, to have this sort of execution. And it's another reason, by the way, to be more bullish on Facebook and bearish on TikTok in the long run. TikTok's founder, you know, or you want to say bike dance is founder of the overall company. He was forced out by the Chinese government a few years ago, right? Like they're just sort of trundling along to a certain,

you know, they've done exceptionally well, but you do have to question, you know, are they going to be able to sort of shift and pivot in the long run? It seems unlikely to me. Are they ever going to actually build, be a profitable company,

build a viable business also seem sort of questionable. Chinese government can be pretty efficient when they want to. Yeah, I don't think they're, maybe they'll put the call in, you know? I mean, maybe there's a reason to not worry about TikTok

because it's just going to sort of like fade itself into relevance in the long run or it's going to only ever be in the corner that basically meta, you know, is built all the way around it, right? Sort of built the fortress around it. And so my take is this isn't a Twitter competitor at all.

It is broadcast. It is text and that is similar. But the, the fact, the algorithmic bit, the fact that it's focused on. And, and, you know,

they say, oh, we're going to bring a chronological timeline. I think I mentioned this to you yesterday. Facebook and Instagram of chronological timelines. Did you know that? I did not know that. Nobody knows that. It's buried deep in the settings.

It's one of the all-time examples of stated preference versus revealed preference. When Instagram watched their algorithmic timeline, there was a huge outrage about it. And I could actually remember this. I remember I was in Europe at the time. I was writing at some bar. I was willing to see a picture in my mind. And I'm like, this is hilarious. Everyone's complaining about this.

And I guarantee no one's going to actually end up using the chronological one. And that was completely the case where people like it better when they see content they're interested in. Like a chronological timeline and people are going to get annoyed at this, it is an algorithm. It's just the dumbest algorithm possible, right? Like it's based on time. Who happened to tweet first? Least imaginative algorithm. That said, it is super important for live.

last night when Victor Wemayama was crashing and burning, what was I doing while watching the game? You were tweeting. I was on Twitter. I was tweeting. I was watching the responses. And arguably, Elon must shift to the for you being the dominant interface sort of thing. It makes sense in a, that was the way for Twitter to grow in the long run.

Because that was the way to bring new people in. You needed to solve the cold start problem, have something compelling. It was dumb, though, because the problem is Twitter has already wasted its chance to get people. Everyone in the world has tried Twitter. Most people decided, no, thank you. Not for me. And so you're trying to build something that actually to appeal to an audience that arguably no longer exists. And your best value is the part you're now trying to devalue, which is being live, being real, being like,

raw. Like that is being like if that means being angry, that means partisan politics, whatever it means, Facebook has basically said, it's all yours, Twitter. So this is why I don't think Twitter's doomed. But I think that they're like there's Facebook has built that fence all the way around them. And to push back on the idea that threads isn't a Twitter competitor. So one question that emerged from our group chat was, can Twitter and threads both succeed? Similar to how vertical video works across multiple platforms where TikTok might be king,

but you also have YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, and video in a lot of different places. What do you think of that? Because I look at it, and my first reaction when threads launched was to shrug my shoulders and say, okay, this is the next in the succession of Mastodon, blue sky, substack, no,

it's a bunch of, you know, second tier options relative to what Twitter is because everybody has their existing networks on Twitter. And, you know, by the way, we should budget some time for an in-memorium blue sky episode somewhere down the line. We've had a great three-week run there. But I now I'm sort of rethinking it because obviously Threads has a massive amount of users through just a couple days here. And then also, you and I, when we're...

we've talked about social media in the past. We've talked about how the future of social media is probably going to be more compartmentalized than it has been in the past. There's not going to be like a monoculture on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, like there are going to be more specialized niche options in social media. So as someone who has put forth that vision in the past, it feels plausible to me that this is just the first major step in fracturing the social media landscape as we know it. Well, I would push back and say that the Atlantic is fractured. That is sort of, but, but I think what you're getting at is fracturing the text-based social media sort of right. And, and if I'm Twitter, I definitely feel like that's competition that I'm worried about.

Oh, for sure. No, I've overstated, you're completely right. I've overstated my case to a degree about this is not competing with Twitter. But it's a different product, which is... Well, I think you're putting your finger on where I think is actually one of the most interesting dynamics here in which may make... So I think it's reasonable to wonder, to make the case that threads will be larger than Twitter. It's a question of, is Twitter not as big as it could be because there's not that many people that are interested in text? Or is not as big as it could be because no one actually built a decent algorithm that showed you stuff you're interested in? That's question number one.

If it's number two, then threads could be larger than Twitter. even, you know, and acquiring that audience, as Zuckerberg said, that was there to be acquired and Twitter just couldn't do it. If it's number one, then threads will peter out because, like, look, there's not that many people in the world that want a wall of text as their social media network. But the other interesting bit is the Musk factor. So there, you know, Musk has for very funny, it is just kind of weird, where Musk, you know, the environmental, you know, we're going to do cars, uh, sort of, you know,

the very exploratory personal life has been coded as right wing. Uh, Mark Zuckerberg, the sort of like very boring, like family man is now like coded as, I guess sort of like left. We, not like way for say, like kind of normally Democrat sort of bit. Mm-hmm. And I find this very interesting as far as the dynamics of this is a big question goal. All Zuck needed was for Musk to just refuse to log off. off for about three years straight.

And suddenly he's back in the line light. He's back, right? Everyone's favorite son, sure. Dude, the number of like Zuckerberg is back articles, I'm warning you now over the next few months, it's going to be sickening. It's going to be overwhelming. And by the way, I just want to note, I just want to note. Okay.

Facebook stock is approaching all-time highs. It's still like $60 a way or whatever, but it's at 300-something. When Facebook stock hit, I think, $90. It's Nadir. I think either that day or the day before is when Stratory wrote Meta Miss saying this is ridiculous and it was ridiculous. So you have this run of Facebook stock just on a crazy run

and it's justified because number one, it never should be that low to begin with. Number two, we have the last couple earnings where meta is growing again. No one else is growing. They figured how to work around ATT or whatever it might be in a way no one else has. And then they're going to have this social network.

and you have this bit where the media is cheering for Zuckerberg. I don't think there's any question about it. And that started on Sharp Tech about a month ago when I declared my allegiance to Zuck. That's right. You know, so influencing the influencers here. That's what we do. And yeah, so it's going to be very interesting to see at what point people start asking like, all right, so what is this product and why should I keep using it every day? Well, so this is the interesting bit is I think when the single most underrated, everyone knows it's true, but it's still underrated.

Motivators of consumer behavior is convenience. People will do what's easiest. And that's why shaving off a couple of microseconds or doing, you know, reducing the number of clicks in a flow makes a big difference. Like there's, you make the FTC's like, oh, Amazon is too many clicks in the flow. And it's like, well, that actually does make a difference. There's a reason there's a lot of quicks. My argument is that's their right as a business to do. And it's not like, like, I think the quicks are pretty straightforward.

forward. But it is true, more clicks, you know, like convenience is an important factor without question. So you have this bit where convenience is a huge motivator. But I think there might be a motivator out there that is harder to leverage because it doesn't come up often, but is actually even more powerful, which is resolving cognitive dissonance. People hate being in situations where they can't cognitive dissonance. And I think the media has been in this for six months or nine months or long it's been where they detest Elon Musk. They, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, whatever he's doing with Twitter, but they love Twitter. And so yeah, so it's been like a subject

of mockery where it's like, everyone, everyone predicting Twitter's doing, like, typing away, right? They, they, they, they want it to happen, but they love Twitter. And so there's, there's, there's, like, there's been this issue. And so I, one, one, one of the things that I feel like is happening over the last couple days is there's this groundswell of I want a platform like Twitter that's not owned by Elon Musk. Right. And like there's this like if I, if thread succeeds, it resolves my kind of disprolom. And never mind the fact that three years ago I was super anti-Zuck or two years ago or whatever, that's in the graveyard of memory.

I just want to be in a place where I feel okay about being there and I get the context that I want. And that actually, I think, is the threat to Twitter. Again, Twitter's not a successful business, so I don't see the threat of Twitter no longer being successful business because they were never a successful business to start with. But the threat to cultural relevance is this, where the cultural makers or whatever they might be leave Twitter not because threads actually might not be as good at Twitter at what they care about, but it's not owned by Elon Musk. and there's a sufficient audience, unlike a blue sky, unlike a mastodon, that actually they could feel okay doing that. Yeah, I mean, it definitely seems like in the early days here, it's a political act to get on threads and talk about how much fun you're having on threads. Right, but that was the same to the blue sky, but the problem there was no one there.

Right, exactly. And it only carries you so far, which is why I come back to the question, all right, if it's going to be a text-based platform, that doesn't feature news as much and deemphasizes news and current events, how much value is there actually going to be? Like, that's been my experience early on. A read, the worst thread I've seen thus far is from an actor named Josh Gad. And he says, when I open this app right now, it's like a beautiful stream of water with birds chirping all around.

Then when I crack open my Twitter account, it's like a dog kennel filled with rabid pigs and one really sweet canine trying to keep the pigs at bay while a group of bandits with shotguns are urinating in the pig trow as a political junkie is doing play-by-play commentary with a train exploding in the background.

Just utter nonsense. Well, not just utter nonsense, but the second one sounds way more compelling. Exactly. That's the point. It's like, that's where all the creative juice went. It's like, oh, a stream with birds chirping. How creative.

Then it's like, wait, why are the pigs in the dog kennel? like what's going on here? It's the ultimate stated preference versus revealed preference situation where what people claim to hate about Twitter. And look, since Musk has taken over, that sentiment has been amplified where people are constantly saying, how did Twitter get so bad? Remember when Twitter was so great? It was always bad. Not only that. It was for the last like eight or nine years. Complaining about Twitter has been a core part of the Twitter user experience for at least 10 years.

It's a bonding experience, and it's just a reflex at this point. It's like how people reflexively complain about the media while consuming huge amounts of media on any given day. And so I just wonder, like, I do think Twitter faces real long-term headwinds, but I would guess that if Twitter's influence is going to recede, it won't be because there's a generation of Internet, users who decided they'd finally had enough of Elon Musk and Twitter. Because realistically, one of the things that's continued to keep Twitter relevant is there's

like a huge swath of the professional class that built their careers on Twitter, certainly in media. And it's just like addicted to media and addicted to Twitter and addicted to monitoring what's on there. And I don't think those people are going to migrate over to threads and be satisfied. at least for very long. But I think the long-term threat that Twitter faces is that there's also an entire generation of Internet users who never really used Twitter.

Yep, that's right. And as those people become more central to the professional class and the media and everything else, that's when you're going to start to see Twitter's cultural relevance start to really erode. This is a side note to listeners. I am restarting my comment because I just spent five minutes, restating what you just said. It was perfect.

It was perfect. People are on Twitter to complain about Twitter. Complaining is more compelling than like talking about streams and birds chirping. And revealed preference of state preference rules everything around us. It's an excellent articulation. And the only change I would make is that is just to double down the fact that Twitter's always been a bad business. It always has been. It was always going to have an issue of relevance in the long run.

And this is a bit where maybe. Maybe people who are on Instagram, like my daughter's generation, that's where they do their instant messaging. And maybe they'll just go to threads. They'll be like, man, never understood why you guys were into Twitter and stuff. It's kind of boring. I go on there sometimes. They will never have understood the frisson of Twitter, just the stupidest arguments imaginable. Like, you know when you see that comic, like, honey come to bed.

I can't someone's wrong on the internet. I think that was written. That's a year's old comic. That was probably in the days of like forums or whatever. but that comic is really about Twitter. Like that's what it is, right? And there is the reality of the human experience. And this is a bit where maybe Facebook is on to something,

maybe they're not, or maybe they're missing the boat, is people enjoy the unpleasantness that they claim to hate about Twitter. It's exciting, right? The dog kennel with pigs in it is way more compelling than a stream with birds chirping. And look, half of what's unpleasant on Twitter

is just a reflection of what's going on in the world. And that's not what a lot of people want on a daily basis. The big issue here is that Musk bought a crappy business for way too much money. Like that's just, that's the fundamental problem here. I think the best way to make money, again, as I said, I think Twitter is so unique that a subscription would actually work. And actually, this might be a point.

This might be an argument. If threads does not succeed with all the advantages that it comes from being a part of meta, with a huge watch, if it ends up sort of petering out and Twitter is still Twitter, again, limited in its growth opportunities, but still trundling along. I actually think that's an affirmation of my take that Twitter, what Twitter should have done from the beginning. I wrote this when Jack Dorsey stepped down and, you know, six months before Musk took over, is that, look, just slap a subscription on it. And everyone says, everyone, this is one of my most out there things. Everyone thinks I'm nuts for this.

You don't put advertising or you don't charge a subscription for social media because all the arguments you're hearing about must now. These are the people who are actually providing the value, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My take has always been that Twitter is so unique that people will pay and it's so unique that it will never be a good business otherwise. There's no other way to do it. And maybe that will be the case. Maybe that won't. But it is what it is. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere despite this sort of threat.

But maybe I'll be wrong. It's going to be very, very interesting to watch for sure. Yeah, well, and I should add that I'm kind of underselling how toxic Twitter can be when I say, yeah, it's just news that people don't want it. No, no need to sugarcoat it. It's exceptionally toxic. This is a situation of you want to be somebody ahead of the curve. I just stop posting on Twitter. Right. Despite the fact, it almost certainly was bad for my business, right? I felt the mental toll and I would be, I would tweet something and I would just, it would, it would.

it infused this latent anxiety because I knew what was coming. That I just chose. It's not worth it. It wasn't worth it to live my life that way. Yeah. Well, and even as a Twitter consumer, putting posting to the side, like, I don't leave Twitter feeling better about the world. So, like, it incentivizes these combative interactions. It flattens good and bad into a binary that's oftentimes problematic.

It's just frustrating all around. Well, there is one of the bit too. Elon Musk came in with all this talk about, you know, the public square and the town square. I think there's the reality is, and I believe I wrote this at the time, but this is a reason to be bullish for threads, by the way, is I don't think people want that. People don't want that. They are upset by seeing stuff they disagree with. I think one of the foundational reasons why we had free speech for so long is because people

actually didn't see the speech of the people that they disagreed. Agreed. And maybe that's where we're headed, where there's going to be a safer, more aggressively policed information environment. And this is like this is the bulk case for threats is it's not just that it's more policed, but also there is an entire cadre of people who are tech space, who are XYZ. And I would say primarily sort of left wing sort of progressive, you know, mainstream media sort of thing. They just don't want to deal with it. They want to be. in amongst themselves and threads is now a place to go

where they can feel like they have an audience they have lots of people that are there and that is to the extent that Twitter, the big bear case for Twitter here is it ends up dwindling to being some combination of primarily sort of you know coded

right ring where we want to be live stuff probably sports will still be there and then the people that just want to go in and wage war like people people might not want town squares, they do want battlefields. And Twitter has been and probably always will be the battlefield of the internet. Yeah. Well, and I think that's generally fine for what it is. Like I've said this in the past. I think where Twitter became particularly problematic and frustrating over the last

10 years is people started allowing the conversations on there to set the agenda for institutions throughout society. Right. And we're not talking, and just to be clear, because I think it's worth highlighting this. This isn't yet another complaint about the New York Times. I think for you and I, the institution that we're most frustrated about for Twitter influence is ESPN. Like, why is a sports network having its coverage dictated by Twitter? Well, I just everyone has become more risk averse because if you're a billion dollar corporation, it doesn't make sense to risk a potential Twitter controversy or something else. when really I just think it would be healthier for everybody to look at Twitter more like Reddit,

where it's half entertainment, half information resource, but take it all with a grain of salt and don't put too much stock into it or treat the consensus on Twitter as representative of like a broader sentiment. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. But within that context, I also recognize that there are a lot of people, who hate Elon Musk. Elon has made a lot of questionable decisions. Like we've gone deep on threads here, but I mean, a lot of questionable decisions in the last week.

Yeah, like this idea that you have to sign in to browse tweets, tweets weren't embedding for a little while. Like it's a very rickety operation right now. So Twitter is ripe for a challenge, and it certainly looks like that's what's coming. I just want to be super clear. I wrote that bit about subscription. again, six months before Elon took over when, I don't think that, like, Musk, because I do get emails about this,

oh, Musk is finally following Ben's advice. No, my advice did not include eight months of pissing everybody off, making everyone, like, making a blue checkmark into an object of derision that, like, that is not part of the plan of getting people to sign up for a subscription, to be clear. I don't endorse it. I don't think it's going to work. I think their subscription product is going to be mired in a tiny, tiny little business that has sacrificed far more on the advertising side than it ever sort of gained. I just want to be clear, I disown this version of the subscription business. It is not what I was talking about. Just have to get out there for the record. Okay.

Well, one other note for the record. Threads in my experience through the first four days has been really, really boring. And I hope that it gets more compelling going forward. Maybe I should have grafted onto like a. 2012 Halcyon Days network that I had. No, it's still pretty boring. There's just a lot of like generic prompts. Like what's your favorite movie?

Who's your favorite athlete? Like I wonder whether some of these celebrities are being paid to get on there and try to like gin up engagement. We'll see. I'm sure we'll find out more in the days to come. But early on, that's where I wonder how high the ceiling really is for this particular project. Right.

But this is a bit where we are. are the absolute worst people to judge it. Exactly. I don't want to extrapolate out too much from my own biases. Because we are Twitter addicts, right? We are Twitter addicts. I don't think it's a product for Twitter addicts. But that goes back to,

that's why I think that Zuckerberg comment is the most important. Masseri said the same thing. There's hundreds of millions, billions of people that don't like Twitter. That's a big market. It's a much larger market than people who like Twitter. All right. So final question.

Is this all upside for meta here in the summer of Zuck? Oh, for sure. I mean, just I think the PR, burnishment of like Zuck and you know their operation like we spent like the first I jumped in as it aside we have to really praise better right now right job they're doing a founder led company finally so I think it's already paid off in spades uh and yeah if it turns into a big thing it's big thing if it peters out well that that's an interesting warning and I don't think anyone will care okay well we went deep had a good conversation hit a lot of different beats throughout

that. Anybody who has follow-up questions, email at sharptech.fm, I'm sure we'll continue to talk about threads as the summer unfolds here. But for now, I have to go to a goat meetup here in Las Vegas. So anybody who's not listening to the greatest of all talk, you can go to the show notes, click on the link in there, dive in just in time for a Victor Wemanniamma breakdown. I know. It's too bad you did not have an emergency pod after this game because I do worry. he's going to be awesome in game two. It's not going to be nearly as entertaining. You know why?

Because I'm a Twitter addict and I like bad news. Oh, man. It was so much fun on Friday night. Such a bizarre scene. But for now, Ben, it's good to be back. We'll keep it rolling. And I'll see you out there on the thread streets, you know? Can't wait to see what this turns into.

I'll talk to you later.