Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 07/06 – Uh, Did Threads Just Win?

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

There’s only one story today. Threads. Threads. Threads. Has Threads already won? Links: Meta launches Instagram Threads in a direct challenge to Twitter (CNBC) Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says (TechCrunch) Instagram Threads works, but it’s sterile, dull and worst of all – it’s still run by Mark Zuckerberg (iNews) Meta unspools Threads (Platformer) So where are we all supposed to go now? (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Thursday, July 6, 23. I'm Brian McCullough today. There's only one story today. Threads. Threads. Has threads already won? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It turns out I had to do a show today because it's not a slow news day after all. In fact, it might end up being one of the most impactful days in tech for a long time. Around the time I hit publish on yesterday's show last evening, Meta launched Instagram, Instagram's Threads, their Twitter clone, available on the App Store and Google Play in more than 100 countries. Users log in via Instagram and can follow the same accounts as they do on Instagram already. And look, I'm just going to come out and say it. It's not even been 24 hours yet, but did Threads just win? Mark Zuckerberg says Threads passed 10 million signups within seven hours of launch, up from 5 million within four hours of launch, and 2 million within two hours of launch. And as I am recording this, he just announced that they've already passed 30 million accounts. Celebrities like J-Lo already have follower accounts in the millions. You can follow me, by the way.

I'm Brian MCC. Follow me because, you know, that would be cool, but also because I'm in the midst of putting my following list together. So if you look at who I follow, you can find some of the key people that I use to put the show together every single day. So again, B-R-I-A-N-M-C-on-T-E-S-C on threads. to get a good tech following list together for yourself pretty quick. Let me quote, CNBC real quick to give you a summary. Threads shares Twitter's visual aesthetic as a text-based social messaging app in which users can post short messages that others can like, share, and comment upon, according to screenshots of threads that are available on Apple's App Store.

People will be able to follow the same threads accounts that they follow on Instagram and reply to other public posts in a way akin to how people use Twitter, although Threads is linked to Instagram, with users able to use their existing Instagram usernames. The Messaging Service is a separate app that people will need to download. Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what will be trending tomorrow. Instagram said in a description of threads on the Apple App Store. Whatever it is you're interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things, or build a loyal following of your

own to share your ideas, opinions, and creativity with the world, end quote. said in the blog post that people's individual feeds on the new messaging app will include threads that were posted by other users that they follow, in addition to recommended content shared from creators who users may not know. People will be able to publish threads posts that are up to 500 characters long, and while the app is geared toward text, people will also be able to share links, photos, and videos that can be as long as five minutes. Instagram users will also be able to share their threads posts via the app's story feature, in addition to, quote, any other platform you choose, the blog post said.

Meta said that it developed threads, quote, with tools to enable positive, productive conversations, and people will be able to manage who is mentioning or is replying to them within the app. Quote, like on Instagram, you can add hidden words to filter out replies to your threads that contain specific words, the blog post said. You can unfollow, block, restrict, or report a profile on threads by tapping the three dot menu, and any accounts you've blocked on Instagram will automatically be blocked on threads, end quote. Now, there's still a ton not there on threads. At least so far, there are no hashtags. There is no web or desktop version. Basically, the only search you can do right now is for user handles. But as that CNBC piece headlined,

the second half of their piece, quote, racing into the gap as Twitter implodes, end quote. Like, what if Zuck held the key to killing Twitter all along? The grafting on of the existing social graph of Instagram is sort of a masterstroke. Yes, there is. There is. some degree of network building required, as I already alluded to. But for new users, it's pretty seamless. You have your same handle as Instagram. You follow the same people. This creates an instant feed already populated with content and things to read and do and interact with, so you don't have to wait for stuff to happen. It's already happening. My thesis all along was that people just wanted Twitter like they had it back in 2021. And if anyone could just provide that to them, people would jump over.

It's the exact argument I made when Ride Home Fund invested in T2. And Threads is making the jump over pretty dead simple. Like, what odds would you give me at this point that they have 100 million users in like a week or, I don't know, 48 hours? Now, caveats, meta's supplemental privacy policy for Threads says, quote, your thread's profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account, which is surprising a lot of people, quoting TechCrunch. The rationale meta elaborates on the policy page is that,

a threads profile is part of the user's Instagram account. The discovery of this stipulation has surprised many users in a threads post. Mark Zuckerberg explained the vision he has for the new app, quote, I think there should be a public conversation app with one billion plus people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn't nailed it. Hopefully we will, end quote. And some people are saying this is exactly the sort of Me Too copycat product that you expect to get from meta. In other words, it's kind of boomer, no offense. Quoting Chris, Chris, Stokel Walker in I News. Threads drives a middling sedan in silver that it has ownership of thanks to the company it works for. In short, threads smothers any enjoyment it engenders by its dullness.

That's problem number one and a significant one that will threaten its future success, end quote. But here's Casey Newton's sort of take on this from his newsletter this morning, quote, meta ultimately decided to build its Twitter competitor in a decentralized way, setting it up to be interoperable with Macedon and whatever else might get built in the future on Macedon. Ultimately, Adam Mosseri told me in an interview today, the company hopes to let you take your audience with you when you leave the new app. That's a level of freedom. The users of Facebook or Instagram are really any other big social app have never had. It's nothing fancy, but it's already much easier than following people on Macedon, the original social app built on the

Activity Pub Protocol. To follow someone on Macedon, you have to know their server and complete username. on threads, it's as easy as typing in their Instagram handle. It's a small thing, but I suspect one that could make a big difference. From there, it's basically just Twitter. You type your sentences and add a photo if you like. You post your stitches, strings, threats to the feed. You check your notifications in a tab represented by a heart emoji. You can search for other users. You can reply. It's basically Twitter in 2010. In other words, with one nice feature that has been added since then, the quote tweet, which Mastonon has avoided adding but turns out, I think, to be an essential feature of the modern-day Twitter experience.

Had meta launched this app in 2019, it seems safe to say everyone would have rolled their eyes. Its big new feature is logging in with Instagram, come on. But by the standards of Twitter 2.0, though, it can feel like a miracle. Reading unlimited posts for free on a robust network that basically never goes down. That is monitored by a robust team of content moderators following a stable set of community guidelines. The past week's astonishingly foolish decision by Elon Musk to limit free users to viewing 600 posts a day, enough for maybe 20 minutes of scrolling, maybe less, has sent a fresh wave of Twitter users looking for alternatives. Only a few dozen people are working on threads at the moment, a relatively small team by meta-standers,

but at the same time, that might be the biggest team of anyone currently working on true Twitter competitors in the United States. If the Threads team can push out new features and improvements to the user experience faster than its rivals, which feels like a low bar, it could become the one to beat, end quote. Finally today seems like a good day to share this post from David Pierce and the Verge that I've been sitting on all week. When Elon took over Twitter, it seemed so seismic to me because the social media landscape had seemed so stuck in amber for so long. Sure, new entrants like Snap and TikTok popped up occasionally. But for about a decade, our constellation of social media platforms and their use cases seemed obvious and fairly stable. No more. Twitter set up limits. Reddit alienated its users. Tick-Tock could get banned. Instagram has turned into an entertainment platform, and now Threads is maybe in less than 24 hours the new, new thing.

This is all part of the same sort of zeitgeist, according to David, quote, An era of the internet is ending, and we're watching it happen practically in real time. You could argue, I suppose, that this is just the natural end of a specific part of the internet. We spent the last two decades answering a question, what would happen if you put everyone on the planet into a room and let them all talk to each other? And now we're moving on to the next one. It might be better this way. But the way it has all changed and the speed with which it has happened has left in everybody-sized hole in the internet. For all these years, we all hung out together on the internet, and now that's just gone. Why is this all happening right now? Lots of reasons, actually, most of them at least somewhat defensible. The economy has gone sour and after more than a decade of low interest rates and access to nearly unlimited and nearly free money, companies are finding their funding sources to be fewer and more finicky than ever. Those investors are also asking for real returns on that funding, so all these companies have had to switch from growth at all costs to actually make some money. Few social networking companies have ever made real money, and so they're scrambling for

new features and pivoting to whatever smells like quarterly results. The rise of AI is also sending all these companies into a tizzy. Large language models from companies like OpenAI and Google are built on top of data collected from the open web. Suddenly, having all your users and content publicly available and easily found has gone from a growth hack to capitalistic suicide. Companies around the industry are closing their walls because they're hoping to sell their data to AI providers rather than have it all scraped for free. Much of Reddit's current chaos started with CEO Steve Huffman saying that the company realized that the platform is filled with good information, end quote, we don't need to give all that value to some of the largest companies

in the world for free, end quote. On Saturday, Elon Musk introduced Twitter's new login gate and view count restrictions, quote, to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, end quote. Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways. It's going from public to private. It's shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff. and it's turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there's no money in connecting people to each other, but there's a fortune in putting ads between vertically scrolling videos that lots of people watch. So the social media era is giving way to the media with a comments section era,

and everything is an entertainment platform now, or I guess trying to do payments, sometimes both. It gets weird. As far as how humans connect to one another, what's next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to to a time when we mostly just talk to the people we know. Maybe that's a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the Global Town Square were a bad idea. But I find myself desperately looking for new places that feel like everybody's there. The place where I can simultaneously hear about NBA rumors and cool new AI apps where I can chat with my friends and coworkers and Nikki Minaj. For a while, there were a few platforms that felt like they had everybody

together hanging out in a single space. Now there are none. I'd love to follow that up with, and here's the new thing coming next, but I'm not sure there is one. There's simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out. It's not just that there's no sufficiently popular place. I actually think enough people are looking for a new home on the internet that engineering the network effects wouldn't be that hard. It's just that the platform doesn't exist. It's not LinkedIn or Tumblr. It's not upstarts like Post or Vero or spoutable or hive social. It's definitely not clubhouse or be real. It doesn't exist. Long term, I'm bullish on Fediverse apps like Macedon and Blue Sky because I absolutely believe in the possibility

of the social web and decentralized universe powered by activity pub and other open protocols that bring us together without forcing us to live inside some company's business model. Done right, these tools can be the right mix of everybody's here and you're still in control. But the Fediverse isn't ready, not by a long shot. The growth that Macedon has seen, thanks to a Twitter exodus, has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform and more importantly, how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you're there. Lemmy, the go-to-decentralized Reddit alternative has been around since 2019, but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies.

The platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Reddors. Neither is Kben, which doesn't even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is very early beta software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I'm not exactly confident in meta's long-term interest in building a better social platform, end quote. Well, as I said, this post was from earlier in the week, quoting his conclusion.

For all its mess, the social networking era did a uniquely good job of just putting people together in a single place. You didn't have to pick a server or declare your interest ahead of time. You just showed up, set a password, and got to work. Because everyone was together, these platforms were able to make it trivially easy to find people you like and content that interests you. They were able to learn about you over time and proactively show you those people and that content before you even had to ask. This all, of course, came with huge downsides. Retweets and quote tweets made it easy for good content to travel, but it also made it easy to mass harass anyone on Twitter. Meta's knowledge of its users makes your explore page more interesting and only extends the dossier on you available to advertisers.

I'm not sure it's possible to have the good without the bad, and I think the bad might outweigh the good. As a white guy in America, I also experience the bad far less than many users, and I suspect I'd feel differently about the end of this era if I weren't quite so privileged here. But I can't help but think it's possible to at least do better. Maybe we should all embrace the downfall of social networks, and maybe my and our need for a global water cooler is just a vestigial feeling we'll all be rid of in a few years. But even before this era fully ends, before Twitter and Reddit turn into MySpace and friend feed and basically disappear from my life, I find myself longing for what they once were. Still are, maybe, just not for long. I miss everybody, and I don't know if I'll ever

find them again, end quote. So I will have a show for you tomorrow now. In the meantime, again, download threads. Follow me at Brian MCC, B-R-I-A-N-M-C. Look at my followers and actually know my following list so you can see who I'm following so you can quickly reconstitute a pretty good tech thread I guess talk to you tomorrow