Meta's Threads Is Barely Usable and It's Also The Fastest Growing App Ever

In which we choose sides in a battle between billionaires.

Source: Threads.net

Last week was an eventful one in the world of social media.

Over at Twitter, Elon Musk stepped on what can only be described as a truckful of rakes. The trouble started when Twitter prevented anyone from viewing tweets unless you were logged in (it later rolled back this change). Then, a day later, Twitter started restricting the total number of tweets you could view (potentially because it was DDOSing itself?), making the site unusable for many users. Twitter’s recent changes also broke the older version of Tweetdeck, a popular app for power users to interact with the service, and Twitter announced that it would be forcing users to pay for access to the new Tweetdeck, which has widely been regarded as an inferior replacement. Twitter later explained a lot of these moves were made so they could “detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform.” Sure. Let’s go with that.

Whatever the cause of Twitter’s issues, it created a perfect opening for Meta to launch a competing social platform, Threads. Originally intended to launch on July 6, Meta pushed up the launch by one day to take full advantage of growing disenchantment with its rival.

So what is Threads?

Source: Apple

Threads, which is being branded as “an Instagram app,” allows you to post short text updates to your followers. You can make posts of up to 500 characters, attach up to 7 photos, or upload videos up to 5 minutes in length. Conveniently, it uses your Instagram profile to create a new account and with one tap, you can follow everyone on Threads who you followed previously on Instagram (Extremely inconveniently, you can’t delete your account without deleting your Instagram too). In an interview with the Hard Fork podcast, Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained the logic of an app where text has primacy:

There are going to be communities on Instagram for whom Instagram is absolutely sufficient…But there are going to be then other communities that are going to want to engage in public discourse. You’re going to want to debate what’s going on in the playoffs, you want to talk about Pharrell’s debut show as the men’s director of Louis Vuitton. Whatever it is. If you want to be engaging in those types of public conversation, Threads is going to be fundamentally a better place. The post-and-comment model, which is how YouTube works and Facebook works and Instagram works, is great but it really does not support public discourse nearly as well as the tweet-and-reply model. Elevating the reply as essentially the same level as the initial post allows for much more robust discourse.

Shortly after launch, Threads became the most rapidly downloaded app of all time, receiving over 30 million downloads within 16 hours. As of this writing, the app has over 70 million sign-ups. It will likely be the fastest app to reach 100 million downloads ever. Its initial success is a testament to just how desperate people are for a viable Twitter alternative that has a quick sign-up process, is easy to use, and has content from people they like.

That said, the app is a barebones experience and is missing a bunch of basic features at launch. The biggest one is the ability to only see posts from people that you follow. The home feed right now is absolute chaos, with algorithmically selected posts from brands, influencers, and a bunch of people most readers of this newsletter probably wouldn’t care about (manually hiding/muting them helps). I can easily see the user experience driving people away, at least temporarily. Will people be interested enough to come back once the app improves?

In a Thread post (a throst?), I asked people what features they felt were most needed. Here are some of their responses:

• Direct Messages

• Hashtags

• A web/desktop app

• Keyword/topic search (right now you can only search for other users)

• The ability to save drafts

• Trending topics

• The ability to curate lists of followers

I’m sure that many of these features will come with time and I believe that Meta is willing to invest the proper resources to play the long game (Threads will also eventually support ActivityPub, allowing you to port your followers over to competing platforms). Mark Zuckerberg has stated that he wants Threads to be the first conversation-based platform to reach 1 billion users.

Threads’ two biggest obstacles

In my opinion, here are the two biggest obstacles that Threads faces in its quest to become the next Twitter:

1 - Facebook has alienated some of the best posters on the internet - One of the reasons Twitter was a success was that it made it easy to learn about breaking news and get smart commentary about world events in real time. It was able to do this because most major journalists were creating content on the platform, often at a high frequency.

Meta’s relationship with journalists is much more fraught. Many journalists believe Meta is single-handedly responsible for laying waste to their industry. Newspapers used to be hugely profitable selling ads; now Google, Facebook, and Amazon account for the vast majority of online digital ad spending. And the industry’s temporary pivot to video, which many believe was driven by Facebook, is largely viewed as calamitous from both a business and journalistic standpoint. Many journalists have sworn off contributing content to a Meta platform ever again and I don’t know if Threads will change that.

But it goes beyond just journalists. I’ve been having a blast using Bluesky over the past few months. Bluesky, like Mastodon and Nostr, is an attempt to build a decentralized version of Twitter. The app itself is also very barebones (though it’s more fully featured than Threads at this point). But the biggest difference between Bluesky and Threads are the vibes. To put it bluntly: Bluesky has some of the best posters alive. These are elite level posters who create the memes that you’ll see blurry JPGs of on your Insta stories 8 months from now. Many of them are anonymous and most of them also have ill will towards Meta for a wide variety of reasons. (Notably, Meta’s platforms generally don’t support anonymity).

Threads has a massive head start and it is genuinely impressive that it’s been able to scale to 70 million users so quickly. But will it attract the posts that will keep people coming back? We’ll see.

2 - The malaise comes for every social platform - The launch of every social platform is usually a lot of fun. Usage is high. Attitudes are optimistic. The first night of Threads felt downright celebratory as people rejoiced that they had a place to post their words at a place run by a slightly less terrible billionaire. But we all know that on a long enough timeline, every social platform becomes a shittier shell of its former self. Just look at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, all of which are now considerably less fun than when they first launched.

This sentiment is captured well in a new piece in The Atlantic called “Zombie Twitter Has Arrived”:

There’s a weird cognitive dissonance at play these first few hours on a new posting app, here in the twilight of the social-media era. The inveterate posters—the creators who rely on having a renewable resource of fire hoses in which to blast out content, and the ones who are proud of their internet-brain damage—are firing off missives with the giddiness of two kids who just discovered that their walkie-talkies work across the neighborhood. These individuals are simply excited because beginnings are exciting, but there’s also something delusional about it all. The cascade of new followers, the collective rush of establishing new communication norms on the fly with friends and total strangers—all of that is fleeting. And the true sickos know what happens next: the trolls, the spam, the ads, the Conversations About Politics. Even if those things never materialize, the nagging feeling is still there. It’s not exactly like rebuilding your home on the coastline after it was destroyed by a hurricane, but the vibe is similar: rebirth and hope, but also regret and dread. If only it had all just fallen into the sea.

Social networks, in their conventional sense, have basically proven to be unprofitable in the long run which is why everyone is trying to become Tiktok now. Even if Threads is able to become a usable and fun product, I don’t know if it will be able to resist the market forces that have led all of its competition to whither.

Despite literally everything I’ve written above, you can still follow me on Threads! And feel free to let me know what you think of the app in the comments below.

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Other Stuff David Chen Has Made

I don’t usually guest-host on other people’s podcasts because I have difficulty maintaining my own podcast commitments, but occasionally I get an invite from someone who I really admire. It just so happened that that happened twice in the past week!

• First up, on David Farrier’s Flightless Bird podcast, I appeared to discuss Independence Day. Farrier is one of my favorite online journalists and his

  Webworm with David Farrier
  newsletter is one of my favorite subs. Listen here!

• The Next Picture Show is one of my favorite film podcasts and its hosts (including the folks at

  The Reveal
  ) are film critics who have been hugely influential to my own work . This is why I was so excited to appear again on their who to discuss two movies: Once and Past Lives. You can listen to the Once episode here and the Past Lives episode will be out next week.

• On Decoding TV, @joyonapping and I finished our coverage of Silo season 1, a show that started really promisingly and ended up being kind of a drag.

• On my YouTube channel, I discussed the curious case of GQ pulling its piece about David Zaslav.

• On The Filmcast, we reviewed Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny and had a lot of strong opinions about the matter!

• [PAID ONLY] On my personal Patreon page, I host a podcast called Dave on Dave where I get advice and criticism from David Cho. This week, we posted two new episodes: One reflecting on July 4th, and one about the launch of Threads. Become a Patreon member and support my work on Decoding Everything and everywhere else on the internet.