Why Threads is a bigger deal than you think.

10 million users in the first seven hours meta the company behind Facebook and Instagram has just declared war on Twitter with their new app threads and this is the most fascinating exciting terrifying thing happening on social media right now so first of all do I even think threads has got a chance of becoming mainstream well let's put it this way right now my 60k follower account on threads is getting more engagement than my 1.7 million follower account on Twitter I mean look at this this is not normal for a 60k follower account on any platform but yet the excitement levels for this new app they're not just high they are unlike anything I've ever seen before but why because it's in the right place at the right time all I've seen on Twitter these past few months is oh I hate this app now or Elon Musk has ruined this app or why is Twitter the place where everything has to be and there are reasons for that I mean Twitter has dialed up the ads you'll see one like every five posts you've got so many bot accounts and just inappropriate accounts parading around without getting flagged I mean Twitter charges people to be verified now so you literally end up in situations where you've got a fake Elon Musk account which is paid to be verified at which point what does it mean to be verified they've just limited the number of tweets that you can view in a day again unless you pay to increase that limit to me it has felt like no longer a homely platform like I just don't feel like I belong there and so threads is basically designed to be the opposite of that and to capitalize on this downward spiral sentiment that lots of people have towards Twitter meta has made sure that they've launched with zero ads that they're not even thinking about monetization until the app reaches a billion users this is what Zuckerberg is saying which is kind of crazy because if it does get to a billion users that's already two times what Twitter is they've made sure that everyone needs to have an Instagram account before they can register which has done a lot to reduce the level of Bot activity and I mean they're spoiling us I mean you can see as many posts as you want per day plus because it's linked to your Instagram account you don't pay for verification it carries over from your Instagram to your threads account for free instant and the best part of it is that so do your followers you know how threads has managed to get this unexpected Buzz about it it's because it's managed to do the one thing that's really really hard for a new platform to do and that's to make it feel like everyone is already there so anytime one of your Instagram followers signs up for Threads they're following you already by default which is giving creators this massive surge in excitement and therefore an instant incentive to start posting unique content for those people all of this is making threads feel like this New Haven like a fresh start the Twitter but where everything is right in the world and I can't believe I'm saying this but a world in which Mark Zuckerberg is the new People's Choice hero it's just really good timing combined with some very big brain marketing and then the other side to this coin is that they've also figured out how to give people on the outside a major fear of missing out you actually get numbered based on how quickly you register for a threads account literally like getting ranked in a race so I'm around number 12 million probably won't make it to my resume but the point is whatever you get given that's your number permanently so there was a rush to be in the first million then there's a rush to be in the first 10 million now I guess there's a rush to be in the first hundred million and then when you sign up it lets you preemptively add people for when they join as if to say they are going to join of course it's just you being ahead of the game by being there before them but also you know how I was saying that your Instagram followers automatically get added to your threads account yeah well that only actually happens if you've already registered so your incentive is basically to hurry up to register your account as fast as you possibly can to make sure that you're getting as many of those automatic follows as possible like for me I was kicking myself when I woke up this morning to the chaos that was happening and realized if I just set up my threads account eight hours before before I'd gone to sleep I would have woken up to 50 000 more followers already there now don't be wrong threads is not God's gift to mankind it's missing features it's missing a lot of key features that you really need for an app like this like trending topics for example the thing that actually makes Twitter different to other platform forms is that it's news first you go on there as well as to argue with people over the internet to learn about what's happening with the world and what people think about it it's got to be grounded in real world events as opposed to Instagram which is more what are my friends up to or at least that's what it used to be right now it's more of a tick tock V 0.5 and there is also a data problem you might have noticed you definitely would have noticed if you live here this app is not available in the European Union because the EU has very strict data sharing policies that this does not yet comply with and it's just going to be really hard in general for people to have to start again you know some people have spent 10 plus years on Twitter just grinding away to build up that follower number to the point where even if all the users that do still matter to you and do still care about what you're currently doing do move over to threads and your engagement stays just as high you are going to feel some kind of loss from just not having that big follow account that you've spent so much time to accumulate but I guess the key message here is that if anyone can do it it probably is meta you could say that Twitter has met her their match and they've been very open about the fact that this is still a V1 they probably wanted to launch the app in a state where it was simple yes but stable to then one by one add in the extras and add in those final countries that haven't quite made it in yet besides I gotta give it to them the app itself is kind of nice it's exactly what you would expect it to be it's like Twitter like let's be very clear there is zero doubt that the designers studied Twitter and consciously made this like it but with some design elements of Instagram it's named well I mean a thread is already what people call a string of messages so it's fitting and it also doesn't sound like a joke like Mastodon which I mean all I can think of is just dinosaurs foreign and it's simple you've got your news feed which is a combination of both people you follow and those you don't you can search for new people to follow here you can write a thread this is all your notifications which are very neatly categorized although not fully working in my experience like I have definitely been mentioned but not according to this tab and then there's you on the far right this is your profile now as you can probably tell it's not very customizable it's not very fun to look at right now and I wish you could double tap post to like them and that the interaction buttons were on the other side of the screen there's plenty of ways I would change this but it's got the fundamentals right it's easy on the eyes it seems to run well be smooth and pretty bug free it's inoffensive which is actually more than you can say for Twitter right now and that's the benefit of starting out and not trying to do everything at once so honestly could threads kill Twitter very possibly yes it sounds like a Monumental feat I mean Twitter's approaching 500 million users but remember Instagram has 2.35 billion and even though threads is very blatantly a direct copy that doesn't mean that it doesn't have a higher ceiling I mean Facebook killed Myspace Instagram killed Snapchat just basically after copying their features and doing it better it's not a new thing for this meta company to do a similar thing to what's already being done and to just brute force them out the picture if you're finding this video useful by the way then a sub to the channel would be incredible just like threads is trying to overtake Twitter and subscribers we're trying to overtake Apple so every subscriber helps but okay here's what concerns me about the whole thing look at Instagram Instagram today is not at all what it originally set out to be it started out as this genuinely unique way to keep in touch with your friends via photos but in the process of continually following where the money is it's now just yet another glorified vertical video app most of what I see on my feed is no longer my friends or anyone I actually care about it's just an algorithm that's designed to serve you purposeless videos in such a way that you can't look away and eventually lose track of time and then you go to Facebook meta's other main social media app and it's far far worse I mean you can't scroll past two posts without seeing an ad then you get a suggested for you post which is actually nothing related to you there's a permanent sponsor tab on the side which is filled with targeted ads tons of inappropriate content and a really bad system for actually reporting it where nothing ever seems to get acted on it's alarming because this is essentially what meta's vision of a successful product is and don't get me started on the way they handle data I mean meta's entire business model is making money from profiling their users tracking their activity to then sell their eyeballs to advertisers I think it's pretty fair to say no company on the planet has a worse track record of using people's data in dodgy ways and yet they're asking for all of it here when you sign up to threads look at all the stuff you have to agree to there's a reason why Fred's is not up and running in the EU yet this app even wants access to your sensitive Health Data which the governments there are rightly asking why do you need this exactly and if you sign up to threads there's no way of not agreeing to every bit of this data sharing and there's also a really weird Clause that says you can't close your thread account after opening it unless you also close your Instagram account which I mean who's going to do that it's hard to even comprehend like if this app does beat Twitter how powerful meta becomes as a company I mean for example I leave Three Links in the description to all my key social media apps for every video and this would mean that all three of those links would lead to platforms owned by meta that's a monopoly that's the most powerful Monopoly that exists on the planet and is that not too much power for a company who's shown that they're willing to go to Great Lengths to extract money from their users so what I'm saying is that I do think the threads app as it is right now is doing a lot of things better than the competition in a way that's made me make more posts on this in a day than I've done in a month of using Twitter but also that there's very little to say that it's going to stay that way I mean even just reading between the lines of what the CEO himself is saying let's get the users first then start implementing the money making and like you know how people hated the idea of the metaverse and how this meta company would just own people if threads actually kills Twitter and meta ends up as this captain of social medias it's very much step one of that but at the same time I do believe that people deserve Second Chances so while past actions are generally a pretty good indicator of intent I'm willing to be proven otherwise it is possible that meta sees this not as a way to repeat the same mistakes but a way to correct for them and in the end is the users that make these platforms what they are so if we decide that we want to use this as a positive force then that will automatically make it a better place to be and to help me do that this is my threads account Freddy and waiting should probably cut the video before that

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 2,548,455

Keywords: threads, meta, twitter, instagram, threads vs twitter

Id: QdE-_Tj47f8

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 07 2023