Meta threads don’t work because Elon Musk’s Twitter is just worse, not dead

There are a number of stories about how, despite an initial increase in sign-ups for Instagram-based threads, there was a sharp decline in user retention. The Wall Street Journal Daily active user reports on threads dropped by 70%, with the time users spent on the app dropping to 4 minutes, it was down 20% from the 21 minutes users spent on the app near launch.

You can blame a bunch of things. An algorithm-based timeline that was initially filled with influencers, celebrities, and brands on Instagram is cited as the main culprit. But over time, even as the feed has become less bad, it’s still not in chronological order, and the app is missing key features like a proper search function and even a working desktop version.

However, the biggest reason why threads don’t work is because Twitter, while it’s been steadily ahead of the Elon Musk era with almost zero good changes made to the site in his tenure, is still…not dead.

While “Twitter is dying” has been the refrain since Musk took over, Twitter isn’t actually dead (even if Musk changes his name to “X” soon). Twitter is definitely worse, but as long as the site is still online, it’s hard to imagine the high thread rate becoming a truly meaningful alternative.

Elon Musk’s bad decisions on Twitter are grains of sand at beach level abound. The site breaks a lot, has weird bugs constantly (responses appear as tweets without context for about a week) and it pushes users relentlessly toward Twitter Blue, the most annoying subscription service in the entire tech landscape.

But Twitter works. On a daily basis, despite a few days of rate limiting or foolish chess moves like limiting daily DMs, the site still works. I use it to post my articles, have conversations with my audience, see what’s popular, and follow live events.

None of this is really possible on threads. Add my articles? If Twitter traffic is bad, thread traffic is non-existent. Conversations with a Republican? Sure, but my audience is less than 7% of what’s on Twitter and it looks like 70% of them have left. See what’s popular? Impossible on topics. Live events? There is no time feed. And you can make fun of Elon limiting DMs, but guess what has no DMs at all? threads.

There is also the issue of what exactly anyone is supposed to post on threads. There are some vague notions of it being a “less toxic” version of Twitter, but Meta can’t really enforce that in any way that will work in the long term with over 100 million users. There are already jerks in the comments. Spam is close to as bad as Twitter (which even requires threads to rate themselves, at one point). The actual posting on threads mainly has to do with either the threads themselves, or the vast majority of people I follow there simply copy and paste their tweets there. I’m having trouble trying to figure out what I should post there instead of something I just posted on Twitter, a question I haven’t been able to answer.

This is not a defense of Twitter Musk. If anything my Twitter audience is sick of me opposing Musk’s decisions almost every day. The rise of hate speech on Twitter is outrageous and directly encouraged by Musk. New Creators Payments is a borderline hierarchical scheme. Raising senseless and humorless blue checks to be top comments on every tweet is easily the worst substantial site change of them all.

But Twitter still works. Twitter is still online. Until that changes, there is no coherent reason to use threads, and it is inferior in every way except for a catcher who runs it.

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