I decided not to follow anyone. And so, for the last couple days, I have only been seeing the raw machinery of Threads. Its algorithm is just blasting me with random posts and, every so often, it tries to show me more of a particular user I click on or spend too long reading in the feed.
My verdict: Threads sucks shit. It has no purpose. It is for no one. It launched as a content graveyard and will assuredly only become more of one over time. It’s iFunny for people who miss The Ellen Show. It has a distinct celebrities-making-videos-during-COVID-lockdown vibe. It feels like a 90s-themed office party organized by a human resources department. And my theory, after staring into its dark heart for several days, is that it was never meant to “beat” Twitter — regardless of what Zuckerberg has been tweeting. Threads’ true purpose was to act as a fresh coat of paint for Instagram’s code in the hopes it might make the network relevant again. And Threads is also proof that Meta, even after all these years, still has no other ambition aside from scale.
But let’s start at the beginning. Myspace launches in 2003 and it quickly makes the idea of a social network mainstream. Facebook goes live exclusively for users with college email addresses a year later. Facebook’s News Feed, which turns the platform into something beyond just a Myspace for rich kids, turns on in 2006. Myspace use peaks in 2008. Facebook overtakes it in 2009. The chronological News Feed is phased out in 2011. The algorithmic era begins.
Twitter, on the other hand, comes from an entirely different evolutionary branch. It launches in 2006 as a place for nerds to eventually complain about Google Glass discrimination and for much of its early years it largely exists as a complimentary service to Google Reader. Its earliest users were bloggers and journalists using it to syndicate stories. The earliest concept of “Black Twitter,” which The Awl described as “Late Night Black People Twitter,” appears in 2009. “Weird Twitter,” a collection of Something Awful goons and semi-leftist shitposters, is recognized as a subculture in 2012. In 2013, Justine Sacco posts the AIDS tweet. And, finally, the #Gamergate hashtag starts in 2014.
And for the last decade, we have basically had these two digital spheres — Facebook’s relatively safe algorithmic walled garden or the sociopolitical Hunger Games of Twitter. Except, Twitter would be the one to go on to gain such jaw-dropping levels of cultural importance that an entire presidency was run on it. Meanwhile, Facebook grew both in users and affiliated apps, but retreated up the asshole of its own algorithm. Case in point: Last spring, Elon Musk and the weird freaks in his group chat became so obsessed with Twitter that Musk agreed to acquire it for $44 billion. And the biggest Facebook page in the US at the time was livestreaming bingo.
In retrospect, it seems like Jack Dorsey and his, what I like to call, “Burning Man libertarianism” approach to content moderation, was the real secret sauce to Twitter’s cultural cachet from 2015-2021. He was able to balance enough plates with a deft enough hand to keep all the disparate parts of the app in place. You could watch porn. Its hashtags could topple governments. Minorities could put pressure on society’s power structures. Rich people could feel like celebrities and celebrities could feel like artists. And, most importantly, it created a lot of really good memes. Even if everyone was completely miserable. Facebook, over the same stretch of time, became a place for old people to share Ring camera footage and haggle over used furniture. I discovered while putting together this month’s Garbage Intelligence trend report that the fourth-most interacted with Facebook post in June was a picture of a potato shared by an Amazon dropshipping page that users were writing “Amen” underneath.
(This potato had 3.1 million interactions on Facebook in June.)
And now we have Threads. Meta clearly dusted off their “kill Snapchat” playbook to launch it because, just as they did with ephemeral stories in 2016, Meta has taken the surface-level components of a competitor’s platform and ported them over to their network and retrofitted them to run on their algorithm. Comparing Meta to the Borg from Star Trek implies a level of sophistication I don’t think they deserve. Comedy writer Jason O. Gilbert came closer to nailing it, writing this week that, “Threads feels like when a local restaurant you enjoy opens a location in an airport.”
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that Threads’ algorithm is primarily about discovery. “We do rank posts lightly and show recommendations (posts from accounts you don't follow) in feed, which is particularly important for a new app before people follow enough accounts,” he posted this week. (And a chronological feed is reportedly coming.) Though, I’d put all of this another way: Meta’s algorithms are automated digital gentrification. And the only good thing about Threads is that its largely text-based interface gives us the clearest look yet at how all of Meta’s apps work. (...)
My guiding theory has been that neither Bluesky or Threads will end up killing Twitter. That this whole race to build a new Twitter will just result in a bunch of increasingly-smaller versions of the same app, used by different groups. Nothing I’ve seen from Threads this week has convinced otherwise. But I do think it’s worth pointing out the scale already at play here.
by Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day | Read more:
Images: Facebook
