Threads: The problem with the “everything for everyone” approach
Successful social networks have focused on solving specific user motivations through a specific format, unlike Threads’ generic approach
In recent times, Twitter has been through a roller coaster of events. What started with Elon Musk’s turbulent acquisition has now been followed up by a series of controversial product decisions. To list a few:
- Twitter limited the number of daily tweets a user can view
- They stopped allowing users to see tweets without logging in (this used to be status quo, it changed under Elon and now is reverted)
- They rolled out a paid Verification product which is now a prerequisite for your content to show up in the “For You” feed
- Twitter censored content at the request of the Turkish government a day before elections, in start contrast to their pro-free speech stance
This, coupled with a major perception shift towards Brand Elon (it’s undeniable that his brand is more polarizing today than a year back, irrespective of whether you agree with his opinions or not) have the set the stage for new contenders to seize this opportunity and build the next Twitter. There is increasing momentum towards new products like Mastadon, Bluesky and Post.News — users are flocking towards them every time there is a controversial Twitter decision but none of these products have managed to break through at scale yet.
Amid this frenzy, Meta, the company with the world’s largest social network (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Whatsapp) and a history of replicating successful products, has thrown its hat in the ring with the launch of Threads.
In this article, we’ll dive into:
- Success so far — Instagram Threads Now at 100M Signups
- What Makes A Successful Social Network
- Why Meta’s “Everything For Everyone” Approach Is Unlikely To Succeed
- How Can Threads Pivot
Instagram Threads Now at 100M Signups
On Wednesday, Instagram launched Twitter-competitor Threads. In five days, Threads saw 100M signups — an impressive milestone. The only other product to have a similar growth trajectory in recent history is ChatGPT which took two months to reach that milestone.
Let’s talk about what the product is. Threads essentially copies the contour of Twitter and is primarily built for “for sharing text updates and joining public conversations”. Although similar, Meta shared a vision for what makes (or could make) the product unique:
- Meta wants Threads to be a “positive and creative space to express your ideas” unlike Twitter which often tends to be negative and argumentative; Threads wants to enable this through features like blocking comments containing specific keywords, blocking users and enforcing the existing Instagram content policy
- Given Meta owns Instagram, when you sign up, Threads lets you instantly follow all your Instagram connections and jumpstart your network quickly. I tried this and can confirm that’s true — it’s a seamless one-click to get you started.
- Threads says they will eventually be compatible with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) — they want to allow interoperability with other networks like Mastadon but have shared limited detail so far
100M signups in five days is impressive at first glance. There has been a lot of optimism around Threads — one Medium author writes about the fall of Twitter and rise of Threads, NYMag talks about how the sentiment against Elon Musk has been instrumental to Threads’ success..
However, if you do some quick math, you will see that 100M signups (defined by installing the app + click a button that says signup with your Instagram account) out of 3.8 billion monthly active Meta users is 3% of their users, i.e. 3 out of 100 Meta users did a low effort action (one-click signup) in the midst of a huge product news cycle.
That’s definitely non-trivial and if nothing, it shows how much pent up consumer demand there is for a new Twitter-like product, but this by no means is a slam dunk. Before analyzing Threads’ long-term opportunity, let’s start by looking at the history of successful social networks to see what makes or breaks a product.
What Makes A Successful Social Network
Not all social networks are equal. There’s a broad spectrum of products (we’ll loosely refer to all of them as social networks) that have scaled in very different ways, resulting in the ecosystem as we know it today.
If you look at the history of products that have been successful, one big pattern emerges: they have all taken a specific user motivation (social or curiosity / interest) and catered to that need through a specific format (text, photos or video) by building a unique product.
- User motivations are reasons why users adopt these products, which are usually either social (eg. sharing / discussing with friends, family) or curiosity / interest-based (eg. you are interested in civic / political issues, you love art)
- Formats refer to the type of content on the platform, which originally began with text, evolved to include photos, and is now dominated by video; you can further break these down by short or long form
Based on this framework, different networks fall in different segments (see image below) — eg. Reddit / Twitter use the short-text format to cater to users’ curiosity / interests, Substack / Medium use long-text format to cater to users’ curiosity / interests, Snap uses photos or short videos to cater to users’ social needs.
The pattern here — every successful network focused on solving a specific user motivation through an innovative product around a specific format, and not by having an “everything for everyone” product.
For example, YouTube broke through by catering to users’ curiosity through videos — their product innovation was democratizing who could create content and then matching users with the right content. TikTok took a similar approach of solving users’ curiosity through a unique short-video format, and then building an incredibly effective recommendation algorithm that minimizes user involvement in content selection. Same story with Snap (and then replicated by Reels) except they focused on social cases and pioneered the disappearing video format that resonated heavily with younger users sharing their lives with friends.
The pattern also holds in the world of text. Reddit gained traction by catering to user curiosity and letting them discover very specific interest-based “subreddits”. Twitter grew because of their focus on a different interest-based user motivation — users wanted real-time updates on what’s happening in the world and hot takes on more serious topics (business, politics, tech, etc.) which they would not get from a news outlet. Even Facebook in its early days broke through by building a text-based social network that let students connect with their social connection online.
All this goes to show that there is very little precedent for a social network that started with a generic / broad focus and ended up being successful, which brings us to Threads.
Why Meta’s “Everything For Everyone” Approach Is Unlikely To Succeed
Meta mimic-ed several Twitter features to build Threads — the product visually looks identical to Twitter. In addition, Meta added extra features from their standard playbook — the most popular one being automatically following all your Instagram connections.
When I excitedly downloaded Threads, one-click signed in, and was shown a prompt to auto-follow all my connections, I was psyched about it — I don’t have to build my network ground up, that’s incredible.
Then came my news feed. My next feeling — Regret. I came in looking for a Twitter alternative and what I saw on my feed was a completely random set of posts from my connections. Yes, the people I excitedly chose to follow (screenshots below — personal connections blurred).
This is not a critique on the people I follow — I absolutely love following them on Instagram, both friends as well as creators and other prominent people. I love the content that several of of these creators make, especially on Reels.
The problem here is — Threads is a text-based everything for everyone. There are friends posting personal updates or funny memes. There are creators posting relevant content related to their topics. There are also creators and prominent people posting fun posts / updates to connect with their followers. Throw in some reels and links to videos in the mix, and this is a complete hotch-potch of content.
Users use specific apps for specific things. For example, I use Instagram to see updates from friends + when I’m looking for “dumb” doom-scroll content. I use Tiktok for a combination of “dumb” doom-scroll content and interesting content on topics I care about (like food, San Francisco, travel, personal finance, bunch of other things). I use Twitter primarily for tech, business and San Francisco politics / civic related things. But what do I use Threads for?!
Threads did get 100M signups in five days and it’s too early to measure user retention but I would be surprised if a meaningful subset of these users retained — personally, after I downloaded the app, I have used it maybe 2–3 times for less than a couple of minutes and it’s because I don’t know what the product is meant for.
How Can Threads Pivot To Succeed
Meta has a wide slew of factors in its favor. Of all the emerging Twitter alternatives, Meta probably has the highest chance of success.
They have the distribution to get adoption overnight as proven last week — the ability to port followers over from Instagram is a huge asset and there is clearly pent up user demand for a Twitter alternative. Meta has an unlimited amount of data on its users to know what they like and don’t like. They also have a large number of younger users on the platform (Twitter’s base skews older), and these users do not have a good text-based Twitter-alternative short of iMessage or Whatsapp. Meta (along with Google) arguably has the best performing advertising product in the industry. The polarization of Brand Elon is also a huge catalyst.
All these will come in handy once there is a product that at least a subset of users love and use repeatedly, a state commonly referred to as “product-market fit”. But right now, Threads needs to find product-market fit to be able to succeed and that requires some form of focus / pivot. There are several possible paths, here are a couple non-prescriptive concepts.
Better Twitter — keep the feed, focus on topics, democratize discussions
There are a few key product tenets Twitter has gotten right with their product:
- They have a feed-based product and a “For You” tab focused on algorithmic discovery of new content — this approach surfaces a ton of relevant content from what we will call “prominent” people (typically ones with high follower count)
- The feed focuses on a handful of topics that Twitter has inferred you are interested in — it’s not 20 topics, it’s probably closer to 5
However, Twitter also has some limitations:
- It’s primarily a broadcast product — if you are a prominent person, it’s a powerful tool to have your voice heard and debate with other prominent people; However, if you are a regular user, it’s ineffective if you want to engage in a discussion — you need to build a large following, success depends on ability to provide hot / controversial takes, and Twitter’s recent changes only amplify content from paying (“verified”) users
An updated Threads app could essentially takes the best parts of Twitter and one-up them by addressing their limitations.
First and foremost, this concept entails pivoting to a topics-based approach. Threads could do this explicitly by letting users select topics they are interested in, plus inferring a few more topics based on what they about the user. The key here would be limiting to less than say five topics where this is high confidence in a particular user’s interest.
Second, Threads could go on the offense and democratize users’ ability to engage in discussions, both with their own connections (but only limited to connections with shared interest in the topics identified above) as well as other users interested in the same topics. Threads would have a large and unique advantage here on being able to port the user’s Instagram connections instantly but they would also need to filter this list to only show content from connections around shared topics of interest.
While you could argue that limiting to five or fewer topics will limit the addressable market for Threads (eg. # of threads on the platform), it’s more likely that:
- users will have deeper engagement in the specific topics they are interested in (case in point: Twitter), and
- democratizing discussions to regular users (i.e. going beyond prominent people) would create significantly more engagement
Modified Reddit — focus on topics, introduce communities, enforce identity
Let’s look at Reddit, arguably the only the other huge success in text-based social networks. They have got several things spot on:
- They are a communities-based product. Users join “subreddits” for very specific topics they are interested, start discussions and have real conversations with people who are interested in the same topic
- They have a mind-boggling number of active subreddits. I am part of several completely unrelated ones — Product Management, San Francisco, Substack, Coffee, Letterkenny — and I’m constantly impressed by Reddit’s ability to bring strangers together
Reddit also has its own challenges:
- Most accounts are pseudo anonymous (i.e. have arbitrary user handles and you don’t know who they are). While this anonymity is definitely helpful in several situations and has enabled users to speak freely, it also has the downside of resulting in not-so-civil conversations.
- A community comprised fully of strangers also makes it difficult to create a sense of trust and community over the long run
Meta in theory has some Reddit-like features in the form of Facebook Groups but it’s lost in the mess of features within the legacy Facebook app.
A refreshed Threads app can turn into a topics-based social network built on the concept of communities (similar to subreddits). The communities format is more aligned with helping connect people based on granular topics of interest, and enabling ongoing conversations.
In addition, having real identity as a feature could enable building more trustworthy communities that could go beyond online discussions — like enabling creators have communities where their fans can interact (eg. fans of a podcast), letting IRL groups connect online (eg. run club), and more.
The underlying idea behind both of these concepts — narrowing down what specific user motivations Threads would like to solve for and then creating a compelling product experience to help users achieve that outcome.
Conclusion
Threads’ initial growth is impressive, but the real test lies in being able to retain these users. Meta is well-positioned to build a text-based social network that could be the first real competitor to Twitter in a long time, as long as they can pivot to an approach that’s not an “everything for everyone”. Though I vehemently disagree with several of Meta’s past product decisions (and the lack of accountability towards those decisions), I think competition is great for consumers and irrespective of whether Threads succeeds or not, its launch will likely the accelerate the race towards building the next delightful text-based social network that will spark more conversations across the globe.
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