Pulling on Threads
Tippets #182: Threads, Twitter, Deep Work, and more. Enjoy!
A warm welcome to new readers getting this for the first time. Thank you for letting me be a small part of your week. As a reminder, Tippets is where I share what's on my mind and a curated assortment of tidbits and snippets (aka. tippets!) from around the web.
And to all of you readers who have not seen a new issue of Tippets in over three months, thank you for your patience. I have been heads down working on one of the most challenging and rewarding projects of my career to date. Now that it has been successfully completed (I promise to share more when the timing is right), I am excited to dust off this once-weekly newsletter and re-engage with its amazing audience.
A little over a year ago, Elon Musk decided he wanted a bigger challenge than simply working with atoms at Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company. So he spent $44B to begin tinkering with bits at Twitter. It has certainly been an…eventful journey. When the deal was announced, I wrote about how Meta’s man Mark Zuckerberg was the real winner should the deal close.
Over the last few years Facebook has been a subject of massive scrutiny from all sides of the aisle, particularly when it comes to topics of misinformation, freedom of speech, and negative influence on mental health. As Founder and CEO, and one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet, Zuckerberg has been the primary focus of this spotlight. Now, Elon Musk has chosen to step into the social media business. The result? There is a bigger light burning much hotter atop Twitter attracting all the attention.
Once the deal officially closed, I posited that Musk, officially at the helm of Twitter, would take some of the heat off of Mark and team Meta during what had proven to be some troubled times.
The timing of Musk’s buy couldn’t have been better scripted for the man at the head of the world’s largest social network - twice. The company formerly known as Facebook announced earnings this week, and all is not well in the house that Zuck built. The company missed its earnings target, showed slower user growth than usual, and has not done enough to convince the market that the all-out bet on the metaverse makes sense. Ad revenue came in down as well, which, while not unexpected given the current market conditions, still only served to pile on. And the market piled on. Shares dropped by over 20% overnight. With shares down almost 70% from last year’s peak, a Twitter distraction is still a good thing.
Fast forward to today, and I believe I am justified in my assertion that Mark Zuckerberg was the big winner from Musk's Twitter buy. But just how big a winner? That story seems to just be beginning.
This week Meta introduced Threads. They are calling it “A New Way to Share With Text”, intended “for sharing text updates and joining public conversations.” Said differently, a direct Twitter competitor.
Now, there have certainly been plenty of Twitter alternatives built, particularly following Elon’s buy, each with the same atomic unit of text-based updates. And mostly they look the same.
But unlike the rest of them, Threads has shown signs of meaningful early traction. As of this writing, Threads has 70M sign-ups and is likely to blow past 100M in the next few days 🤯
Having played with it for a few days, it is clear that this is not simply an experiment for the social network.
First off, it is impossible to overstate how important it is that Meta onboards users through their Instagram accounts.
did great write-up on Threads, and articulated some of the benefit:Threads launched last night on top of Instagram’s social graph. This meant you needed an IG account to sign-up, and it pre-populated the Threads feed with every account you followed on IG…We know Elon has been pushing celebrities who left Twitter to get back on. The problem has always been that most of them already have large followings on Instagram, and Twitter was too much work, and not to mention a completely different content format and meta game…What I think is most interesting is Threads automatically brings over their Instagram follower graph. For the average IG power user, this makes Threads a much better option than starting from scratch on Twitter so as long as they have followers using it. And for the average consumer, a pre-populated follower graph also makes it easier to get started.
With a low barrier to entry and access to content as soon as you log in, the new user experience delivers immediately, no pre-existing follows or interest selection needed.
Then comes the content. The most striking thing about the early vibe is the positive mood. At least for now Threads is a ‘happy’ space, with of dad jokes, random uplifting quotes, and celebrities tuning in to see what’s new. It sort of reminds me of Clubhouse when that first launched during COVID, or Twitter back when I joined in 2009.
Admittedly, one of the things that I have struggled with as I use Threads early on is what kind of content to post. As I mentioned, one’s early followers are from Instagram. I have historically used IG and Facebook for a more personal audience with more personal content - family pictures, vacation itineraries, birthday wishes, and so on. Having that group now following me got text-based content has me wondering what kind of content is right? Family stuff? Work and venture things?
According to Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram (the team Threads falls under), it’s best not to overthink. The attitude seems to be post about whatever you want to engage people on. Nothing is 'wrong,' which is a great starting point and is contributing to the good mood on the platform.
Facebook definitely has a lot of things going for it contributing to the overall early success of the app: an algorithm that works, porting over pre-existing social network from IG, most users having a general understanding of how Twitter works, 3.2bn users on Facebook to help with customer acquisition…
Add to that the current negative sentiment towards Elon Musk and Twitter is strong enough that people are now actually rooting for Mark Zuckerberg!
Now, Threads is definitely an incomplete app relative to what I'd expect from the Instagram team. But given that the launch was apparently rushed to take advantage of the Elon’s latest foot-fault, rate limiting Tweets, so be it.
There are a number of seemingly obvious features left to build. These include:
Let me change my user name!
A feed only for folks I am following (right now it is only the algorithmic feed)
Chronological sort, not just algorithmically
See who others are following
Recommended follows
Save drafts, edit Threads, and actually threading
Desktop app
Polls
DMs
That said, it is definitely a clean experience. And, perhaps most importantly, it is a breath of fresh air. My friend
summarized it well:
Will Threads take over from Twitter? Who knows. Is that even the right question? Probably not. Is it likely that both Twitter and Threads co-exist, and now social media managers will need to maintain multiple screens just to post content across all the relevant networks? Probably. Is Threads off to a great start? Absolutely.
The social media wars rage on, and the fight between Musk and Zuck is bound to get more exciting from here. And if the cage match between them ever happens, it might actually break the internet!
For all of you already on Threads give me a follow here, and please leave a comment with your thoughts on your experience with the app. And for those of you who haven’t already tried the app, I encourage you to do so! It’s not often you get to try out a product that simultaneously has such major scale but is in its infancy, still an experiment, before the business model and algorithm have kicked in and before the natural stratification and hierarchy within the community takes place. Download the app, mute accounts liberally, and play around!
Tippets from Around the Web:
How to Blow Up a Timeline
An wonderful essay by the always amazing
on the change at Twitter. Part reflection, part eulogy, he digs in to what led to Twitter no longer being Twitter as only he can. It’s long, so here are my highlights in case they are of interest.“It’s not clear there will ever be a Twitter replacement. If there is one, it won’t be the same. It may look the same, but it will be something else. The internet is different now, and the conditions that allowed Twitter to emerge in the first place no longer exist…None of the contenders to replace Twitter has come close to replicating its vibe of professional and amateur intellectuals and jesters engaged in verbal jousting in a public global tavern, even as most have lifted its interface almost verbatim…Social networks aren’t just the interface, or the algorithm, they’re also about the people in them. When I wrote “The Network’s the Thing” I meant it; the graph is inextricable from the identity of a social media service. Change the inputs of such a system and you change the system itself.”
Small Banks Don’t Like High Interest Rates
Bloomberg’s Matt Levine is one of my favorite writers. He has an uncanny ability to make complex topics understandable and relatable. Like say, regional banks and their business model.
The bank is a magic trick that allows risk-averse savers to fund risky projects. Like any magic trick, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief: You can’t just tell people “the way it works is that we take risks with your money, but we tell you it’s safe.” There are some genuine tools (capital, diversification, deposit insurance) to transform the risky loans into safe deposits, but there is also some residue of pure belief, and if people lose that belief then it stops working.
How to Do Great Work
A thought-provoking, at times wandering, essay by Paul Graham on deep work. Worth a read and reflection. Again, very long, so sharing my highlights here.
It will probably be harder to start working than to keep working. You'll often have to trick yourself to get over that initial threshold. Don't worry about this; it's the nature of work, not a flaw in your character. Work has a sort of activation energy, both per day and per project…Lots of great things began with someone saying "How hard could it be?"
Quote I'm thinking about: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” - E.B. White
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Nice breakdown! It could be interesting to know what % of Threads users don't have a Twitter account to understand if Threads is creating a new category (new social graph, new experience...) or it's just a copycat of Twitter with the exact same people. Any thoughts about that?