I don’t want to be remembered for my many fights — Obaseki

By Paul Tassi, Senior Contributor at Forbe

Since around the time Meta launched Threads last week, I decided to try an experiment where I wouldn’t tweet for a week, and only post on Threads instead. Well, that week has not finished yet, but I’m calling it. I’m back on Twitter and unsure of what my future with Threads will be.

Of course, Threads numbers are impressive, as it’s racked up 100 million users since launch, the fastest-downloaded app in history. This is possible due to both Meta’s scale, and its courting of 2.35 billion Instagram users, who can all easily migrate over with their same accounts. There’s no user-side technical complexity like with Mastadon, no extremely limited invites like Bluesky. You get the app, you re-follow all your current Instagram follows, and start posting.

The problem is that an Instagram-based Twitter service sure does not feel like Twitter at all outside of its UI. While that may be a good thing for some people, for those of us who have spent 13 years using Twitter and cultivating our accounts there, Threads can feel like a dystopian utopia. What I mean by that is Meta attempting to cultivate a “positive Twitter” by spamming your feed with inane celebrity and influencer content and stolen Twitter memes, twisting your feed with its algorithm so you don’t see anything that could possibly be construed as unpleasant. But what’s lurking underneath is another megacorp trying to directly control what you see and don’t, all in the ultimate service of building something that’s advertiser friendly.

Without question, the worst thing about Threads is the nonsensical main feed that never stopped being awful this entire past week. While on Twitter I mute trolls and harassers, here I was constantly, constantly muting over-posting influencers I’d never heard of or horrifically unfunny meme accounts and essentially every brand I saw. I followed my old Twitter people to try to get some coherence into my feed. I even screamed into the void with one thread saying “I LIKE VIDEO GAMES AND TV AND CORGIS” to try and get the algorithm to listen to me to no avail.

The problem with Threads is that porting a bunch of influencers and celebrities over from Instagram creates just utter banality in text form. It makes sense for Instagram to be the primary medium of social media communication for these people, between thirst trap photos and glamorous red carpet events. It makes less sense in text form when Kourtney Kardashian is asking people if they have any recipes that involve Fig Newtons.

While it does lend some sense of legitimacy that almost every celebrity you’ve ever heard of has a Threads account, I’m not sure what it gives them that Instagram doesn’t. Their lives are better rendered in photos, and its not like the “conversations” they can have on Threads are any more coherent than anywhere else, given that many already instantly have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, making meaningful conversation almost impossible.

But for Twitter refugees, this place is just bizarre. I am having to manually search to re-find most of the people I follow, since that’s a very different group than the random celebrities and real-life friends I follow on Instagram. And even with this porting ability, and me racking up 7,500 followers in a few days, compared to my 160,000 audience on Twitter, it still absolutely feels like starting over, and of course I cannot just “give up” on all those people on Twitter lest it actively hurt my job and relationships with a much wider audience.

It was also a mistake to let brands on here at all. Threads kept jamming Wendy’s and Starbucks and McDonald’s in my feed periodically, but just…organically, not even through an ad campaign since those don’t exist on Threads yet. At one point I found myself starring at McDonald’s making a Grimace Shake joke on Threads with an extremely similar tweet popping up on Twitter. Except there it was in a “promoted” ad slot. Threads was just giving it to me as normal content, which really kind of shows you where it’s priorities lie, despite not taking in advertising revenue yet.

Threads is also missing dozens of features Twitter users take for granted. Even if they are on a “list” of additions, because Zuckerberg pulled the trigger on this so early, it’s unclear when any of these will get here. DMs, trending topics, post search, and one of the most important ones to me, a desktop interface, are all missing, making usability extremely poor.

One of these promised features is also a following-only feed, the #1 requested thing from everyone who came over from Twitter, where a chronological feed of the people you actually follow is main reason Twitter got popular in the first place. But while Threads head Adam Mosseri says it’s “on the list,” I am wary of his reassurance that because Instagram and Facebook have a following-only, in-order option, Threads will too.” Though that is a setting hiding in those interfaces, and everyone knows the “main” feed of those sites are mostly out-of-order, algorithm-sculpted posts. Periodically, Threads would randomly go into following-only mode for me, but only rarely, and if you kept scrolling even a little bit, it was back into algorithm nonsense like what happens on Insta and Facebook.

Meta has consistently shown they want to influence what you see directly, and that led to some worrying comments from Mosseri about how Threads wouldn’t “encourage” news or politics. One of the most useful things about Twitter is instant, live coverage of breaking news or something like following along with sports games, both of which is only possible if a chronological feed is front and center.

It is possible that Threads cleans things up in time, but it’s hard to trust that Meta’s vision of this positive “good vibes only” place won’t have to result in heavy algorithmic curation, because with 100 million users and then some, you simply cannot weed out negativity without some serious heavy-handedness. I do not care about Elon’s warped vision of “free speech” but there’s a difference between that, which removes hate-speech guardrails, and being forced-fed ad-friendly content like Slim Jim memes and influencers I’ve never heard of asking me what nicknames I call my dog.

If Threads actually clones Twitter down to its slew of basic features and mainline, following-only, chronological main feed, it may have a chance. But even then, as a Twitter addict, porting my Instagram followers over does not save me from losing 95% of the audience I’ve built for a decade. It’s true that Twitter is crumbling under Musk, but I’d almost put more money on him getting bored and selling it at a loss so it ultimately survives than I would Threads being some brilliant alternative that saves the concept of online discourse. From what I’ve seen, this is not a place that most people will want to spend a lot of time, once the initial hype dies down. Right now, it just feels like Meta doing what Meta always does.

Paul Tassi writes for Forbes. You gave view original post HERE.