Today, Explained - Can Threads unravel Twitter?

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

As Meta launches its Twitter competitor, The Verge’s David Pierce says that we are watching the end of the social internet in real time. This episode was produced by Amanda Lewellyn, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael with help from Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It began, for me anyway, on a sultry Wednesday. I logged onto Twitter against my better judgment, and everyone was talking about Mark. Mark Zuckerberg just posted on Twitter for the first time in 11 years the Spider-Man meme. Of all things, the Spider-Man meme. Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Which, I mean, who are you? What did it mean? The Twitterati said it was a clever reference, a message to Musk.

A threat? Maybe. Something new? Certainly. Threads. An app to rival Twitter from Facebook creator Zuckerberg's meta accessible via your Instagram. Millions of people signed up within days so quickly that records were broken. So, some say, is social media broken? Maybe dying? Coming up on Today Explained, laughter at a funeral. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas.

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Today, today explained. Today explained. Perfect. Okay, David, before we begin, there's a very funny note here that says to me, remind David that our audience is not tech heads. So what I gather Amanda is trying to tell both of us is just remember normal people, normal people. At the end of the day, my mom has to understand this too, okay? So starting by saying, what's up, nerds, is probably a bad call. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Cool. That's good, what's up, nerds, is probably a bad call.

Exactly, yes. Cool, that's good. What's up, nerds and grannies? Okay, my friend, go ahead, give me your full name and tell me what you do. Sure, my name's David Pierce and I'm the editor-at-large at The Verge. Can we talk about Threads?

I would love to talk about Threads. What is Threads? Threads is a new social app from Meta and I've come to find two ways to explain Threads. What is Threads? Threads is a new social app from Meta. And I've come to find two ways to explain Threads. One is just that it's Twitter. Like if you just picture Twitter, that's it, you've pretty much got it. The other thing is like, it's as if you took Instagram comments and made a whole app out of them. So you can you can talk to each other, you can reply, you can like stuff. But the whole app is designed to be based on sort of individual posts rather than, you know, big feeds of images. It's much more like

tweets and messages than it was. Are you on it? I am, begrudgingly, I would say. Not so much that I have to professionally, but because I'm sort of drawn to it like a moth to a flame to any new social platform. I just feel obligated to be there and spend all of my life pouring all of my attention into these apps. It's just what happens. Why was Threads created and launched? What's its purpose? So Threads has an interesting and sort of complicated history. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has spent a long time, some combination of envious of and in direct competition with Twitter.

For a long time, Facebook and Twitter were kind of the two major social platforms. Facebook, obviously much bigger, much more successful. But Twitter was always kind of zeitgeisty and culturally relevant in a way that Facebook never really was. It just always struck me. I always thought that, you know, Twitter should have a billion people using it. So Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have always admired that and looked for ways to make Facebook products more like that. But the more recent answer and the one that I actually think

really leads to threads is that Elon Musk bought Twitter in the fall of 2022. And by all accounts basically started immediately running it into the ground. Reports say thousands of Twitter users were not able to access its site or struggle with delays and difficulties. Twitter's advertising revenue has declined about 50 percent, maybe more, since Musk took over. He's really alienated a lot of advertisers with some of his erratic decision making. The overwhelming feeling came to me that there is opportunity for a new kind of social media place, a new social network, a new place for people to post and hang out that felt

better, that was better moderated, that was more sanely run. And I think for whatever reason, I think Twitter has this great idea and sort of magic in the service, but they just haven't kind of cracked that piece yet. And I think that that's made it so that you're seeing all these other things,

whether it's Mastodon or Blue Sky, that I think are, you know, maybe just different cuts of the same thing. And Threads really is a 2023 phenomenon. This app happened really, really quickly. It's still very basic. And even the launch timing,

Meta launched Threads sooner than it meant to, in part because Elon Musk made a big change over the July 4th weekend to essentially limit the number of tweets that people can see unless they pay. So Twitter is becoming more and more private, more and more closed off. And Meta saw that as an opportunity to say, we are going to launch right now. We're going to push up the launch date. It's just abundantly obvious that this is about sticking it to Twitter in a very real way. You know, there have been so many Twitter alternatives that have popped up ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter.

BlueSki, the Mastodon one, the one that Adam Davidson is running, Journo Host. None of them seem very good, I say with a laugh. Is Threads actually different from the other nonsense we've been exposed to in the last couple months? Nonsense is a good word for it. I think yes, purely because of where it comes from. To some extent, it's really not a very good app. It's very basic. It's missing lots of features. It crashed a lot when it first launched. There's a lot wrong and missing in Threads. But Threads has two real things going

for it. One is that because it's attached to Instagram, it's incredibly easy to sign up for you download the app, you press sign in with Instagram. And just like that, you have a profile, you have a username. With another couple of clicks, you can bring in your bio, you can bring in your followers. So the speed of getting set up is faster than basically any social network ever, as long as you're an existing Instagram user. And the other thing is just that it's owned by Meta. Meta is very good at this. It's very good at scaling social networks. Facebook has 2 billion plus users. Meta knows how to have social networks with lots of people in them. So it was able to get past a lot of the early screwy, you know, can't keep the service live stuff much, much faster than most.

In a matter of like hours, it started to feel like a stable service, whereas some of these still don't feel stable, you know, months and years after they launched. So I think it was just able to get up to speed and get a lot of people interested so much more quickly than some of these other ones, whether or not it's a better app, almost notwithstanding. Okay, David, it's been about a week since Threads launched. Are people signing up for it? And are they actually staying on it? People are definitely signing up for it. So Threads has more than 100 million users already, which is an astounding number.

It is, by that measure at least, just by number of people who signed up for it. It's the fastest growing app ever. Last fall, that was chat GPT, which got 100 million people in about a month. Threads did it in five days. And it's not quite apples to apples because since it's so based on Instagram, you're not totally starting from scratch. Instagram also has lots of people it can send lots of push notifications to, to say, hey, did you know Threads exists? Would you like to download Threads?

Please download Threads. Come to Threads. Your friends are on Threads, which they have been doing aggressively. But still, there's no question that 100 million is a gigantic number. Everyone at Meta is saying it is way past all of their expectations

for how this app was going to do. Whether people are going to stick around is very much the question. Even Adam Masseri, the head of Instagram at Meta, has been saying, It's not nearly as hard to get a bunch of people to try something as it is to build something that a bunch of people want to keep using over time. And that's a question of a week. It's a question of months. It's a question of years. But anecdotally, the vibes have shifted a little. When you open threads, it's just a gigantic feed of people, many of whom you don't follow. That's turning some people off. Lots of people are posting, lots of people are very excited, but there was that

kind of 72-hour period right at the beginning where there was just so much enthusiasm. And that definitely seems like it has waned a bit, but we'll see. I am not on it because I am now over 40 and I've decided I don't want to be part of the discourse anymore. But I am curious, what does it look like? Well, I'd like to know what's it like to have a healthy approach to social media. Can we talk about you for a while? DM me. That sounds great. It's an interesting place. So it's kind of a mix between Twitter right now, which is mostly based on the people you follow, right? You say, here's the people I want to follow to like. Here's just an endless feed of stuff. And that algorithm is not great so far,

at least has been my experience. Like there's this one account, I don't know anything about it. I had never seen it before, but it's just called Nugget and it just makes dumb jokes. And it's probably one out of six posts in my threads feed is just that. And I have heard that others

are experiencing the same thing. So there's definitely a big push in my threads feed is just that. And I have heard that others are experiencing the same thing. So there's definitely a big push to show you interesting content over show you the stuff that you've professed to Instagram that you care about by virtue of who you follow. And I think that's going to start to annoy some people because it's just, it's just meme city right now. It's a lot of people talking about threads, which is what everybody does in the first week. And then just a lot of stupid memes, which to be fair is what Twitter was for a lot of people too. So maybe in that sense, it's already working.

Are there any downsides to it? I mean, this is an app that was built in less than six months. Is it glitchy at all? Is it making demands of the user? It was glitchy at first. I haven't seen many outages or issues in the last couple of days. It was a pretty big mess the first day or so. But it's missing a ton of stuff. There's no feed to just see the people that you followed. There's no hashtags. There's no trending topics.

That one, I think you could argue, is a good thing, but it doesn't exist. There's no way to sort people into lists. Some of these are very basic things. There's no good search. You can search for accounts, but you can't search for content. It's very much a prototype of a social media network. And if this were any company other than Instagram, and if this were any moment other than the moment everybody is desperate to find something that feels like Twitter, but isn't Twitter. I don't think this would have gotten this kind of excitement. That's also, by the way, the reason it's not available in the EU was just because they launched it so quickly. There's this thing called the Digital Markets Act in the EU that puts a lot of work onto what are called gatekeepers, which are in this case, mostly the social platforms, to make sure that they're doing right by users, both with the data that they collect and how they

use that data. And not only do you have to do the right thing, you have to document it, you have to do all this legal work and paperwork. And it's the kind of thing lots of companies are going to have to do. And ordinarily, you would do it before you launch. But meta was racing to get this thing out the door and basically seems to have decided launching some places quickly was better than launching everywhere well. And I think that is very much like the vibe of all of Threads right now. How is Elon Musk responding to all of this? Oh, he's so mad. He's so, you know, backstory of this is when threads started to leak out, reporting from my colleague Alex Heath and others talked about how this was a thing that was coming,

meta was coming for Twitter in a big way. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are beefing, I suppose you'd say. There was a moment where it looked like they might fight in a cage match. I still don't know if that's real. I hope and pray every single day that it's not real, but there's a chance it might be because this is the world we live in. But Musk's response so far has basically been to kind of stick his fingers in his ears and say, I'm not mad, I'm not mad, I'm not mad, which is always a good signal that you're very mad. He's been tweeting a lot about how much Twitter is being used right now. He's tweeted a couple of what I would say are unsavory things about Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter actually sent a legal notice to Meta threatening to sue because

of the way that Meta supposedly took intellectual property from Twitter to make threads. Most of this is nonsense. None of it is likely to go anywhere. Meta is very good at copying other people's apps without getting into legal trouble. so I don't see that turning into anything. But the CEO fight is still very much going on, whether or not that ends in a cage match or not. It's still happening. But we can hope for the match. I kind of do hope for it.

I both feel like it's the worst timeline and the best timeline, if it comes to be. It's going to be very interesting. David Pierce, editor-at-large, The Verge. Will you stick around with us until we get back from the break to talk about your big idea that social media might be dying?

I would love to. Let's get ready to rumble! Thank you. and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. We're back with David Pierce.

He's editor-at-large of The Verge. David, is Threads indicative of something bigger that is happening on the internet right now? Very much so. I think we're in a weird transitional moment in how we interact with each other on the internet. And I'm about to accidentally do a pun that I just want to apologize for in advance. There are a bunch of threads here to pull on, I think. One is just Twitter specific, right? Twitter was this really important information sharing platform. And in the sense that it feels like it's falling

apart, there are a lot of uses of it that have been looking for another place to go. But the bigger picture thing here is we're just kind of coming out of an era of the internet. I think we, we spent really from about 2006 or seven on in just a handful of places. We were on Facebook, we were on Twitter, we were on Instagram. There were a lot of people on Reddit, but our experience of the internet was mediated by like a small handful of companies. And it kind of feels like all at once that's going away. Some are pivoting to be these entertainment platforms like Instagram with Reels and TikTok is very much an entertainment platform,

but there's no place that it feels like people can just have social networks anymore. That was the phase we were in for so long. And increasingly this question of like, where do I go to be with my friends on the internet feels like an open question. And it hasn't for a long time. And I think that's a really big, weird change that people are going through right now.

It would make sense if this happened on one platform. Twitter is falling apart. Okay, we get it. But what you're saying is interesting. You're saying it's actually happening across all the platforms. Why is this happening everywhere all at once? Yeah, so I think the Reddit story is actually kind of the perfect microcosm of all of this. Reddit has been around for a very long time. It's an 18-year-old company.

And Reddit has kind of been this big, successful company without ever being any kind of good business. It's actually a terrible business. But so Reddit has discovered, okay, we have to make money. We are now in a time after a long period of low interest rates and huge investments where a lot of that has gone away. So if you're a company like Reddit,

you have to figure out how to actually make money. And so Reddit has said, okay, there are two ways we think we can make money. One is to sell the data on our platform, this incredibly valuable community and all the stuff they talk about, to AI companies to use to train their future chatbots and all that stuff.

That's where those AI companies get data is from places like Reddit. And until now, that's been freely available and Reddit would like to make it not freely available. There's aspects of Reddit where it's like, look, we have this massive corpus that gets updated every day of people's opinions about pretty much everything.

And I think there's a lot of value in that. And the other way is to just figure out how to make more money off of the platform. And so Reddit sparked this whole revolt from users and moderators by taking away a lot of the privileges from third-party apps. So if you wanted to build an app that used Reddit in data and information, you had to pay a whole bunch of money and most couldn't, so most closed.

And just basically infuriated everyone who has cared about Reddit. The narwhal is not baconing today, my friends. This is not a wholesome chungus moment. Reddit is offline and there is good reason for it. And Reddit's not the only company going through this. Twitter has historically been a very bad business. Snapchat has historically been a very bad business. These companies just have not figured out how to make a lot of money out of

social. And we're now in a time where you can't just grow, grow, grow and convince your investors that eventually you'll make money. You have to make money now. And that has really turned the whole vibe of the kind of social web on its head. How are users going to feel that? I mean, we're already feeling it in some ways. We're already seeing it in some ways. But how do you imagine this evolving over the next six months to a year? Yeah, I think the thing that's really going to happen is that the trade-off that we as users make with social platforms is going to become really, really obvious.

And so what used to happen is like, I don't know, Facebook's a good example. We all used Facebook for a long time because we got to hang out with our friends. And you sort of understood the trade-off that I'm posting for free, I'm not getting paid to do that, and Facebook is selling ads that appear next to those posts. But I sort of got enough value out of it that it felt like that was worth it. I didn't need to make money. I was happy to post because I got to be where my friends are. I think that trade is becoming much more obvious to people where now instead of just putting ads next to my posts, you're actually going to take my posts and sell them to OpenAI to use to build a chatbot. Or you're going to charge me money. In Twitter's case, it's trying to get everyone to pay $8 a month for Twitter blue, to actually just use your platform. And now we're in

a position where I think a lot of social media users are going to start to feel more like, I don't know, Uber drivers or DoorDash delivery people where instead of participating in a platform, users are going to start to feel like the ones who are kind of being dumped on as this company tries to make money off of you. And I think that's just going to feel bad. Yeah, it also might mean if we look to the future and we think, well, who's going to replace Twitter?

That's where I am in my life, right? I've been on Twitter for, I think, 10 years. I covered the Arab Spring. Twitter was such a big part of it. I have really remained loyal. So I've been thinking, well, who's going to replace Twitter? But I think what you're saying is there might never be another Twitter. Twitter might not go back to what it was that I remember, and nothing ever might get that big again. I'm not doing threads. Yeah, I think the really interesting kind of big philosophical question to ask right now is, was Twitter a good idea? Like fundamentally, morally for us as people existing in the world,

was Twitter a good idea? And I think you can make super, super compelling cases in both directions, which is why this moment is so interesting, right? Because I think if what we want as a society is basically Twitter only better and not run by Elon Musk, that's doable. Like Threads is on its way to becoming that. I think whether we want that company to be owned this problem of trying to figure out if it's a good idea for all of us to be connected to each other. And I don't know, I'm so torn. And I think we're going to spend the next couple of years figuring that out. Like, is the best version of social networks, just the group chats that we're in with our friends and family, maybe that solves the amount of connectedness and sharing and posting that we want to do without this relentless dopamine hit of looking for likes and looking for retweets and trying to get followers and maybe let the entertainment platforms be entertainment platforms and let TikTok compete with Netflix and that's all fine and good. And when we want to spend time with the people that we care about, we do it in relative

private. Maybe that's the answer. And I think the first question a lot of people are going to ask is, is better Twitter actually a thing that I want? I am going to ask you something now, David. Grandios. Ready. Could you eulogize the golden era of social media, 2011, 12, 13, 14? What would you say at social media's funeral? Oh, man. I would say that for a brief, beautiful moment, we thought that putting the whole world in a room would make everything better.

That if we just connected everybody, we'd all come to some kind of mutual understanding. We'd globalize the world. We would see each other's problems. We would see each other's problems. We would see each other's goods and bads and struggles and triumphs. And that that would add up to something beautiful. And for a while, it felt like it might. I think there was a long time on Facebook even where it felt like you could just post

candid kind of nothing pictures of your life and people would care. And it was a way to keep up with the people that you cared about. And it felt like it was genuinely social and genuinely human. And we were wrong and that all fell apart. And I think that was kind of a beautiful lie we told ourselves for a while. But like, wasn't that a nice moment when it felt like we had found a way to be ourselves online and connect to everybody? What a cool world that was for a minute there. I teared up. I'm holding a lighter in the air as I say all of this. It's good stuff. David Pierce, editor-at-large of The Verge. Thank you, David, for taking the time today.

This was really fun. My pleasure. Thank you, David, for taking the time today. This was really fun. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Congratulations to David on his new washing machine. Today's episode was produced by Amanda Llewellyn, who leaves very good notes, and edited by Amina El-Sadi. Laura Bullard is senior fact checker. Michael Rayfield is engineer.

I'm Noelle King. I've been on Twitter for 12 years, not 10. It's Today Explained.