Threads hit 100 million sign-ups but couldn't keep users because it misunderstood Twitter. Twitter isn't just a text feed, it's topic-based communities like Black Twitter and Anime Twitter. Threads copied Instagram's follower model instead of building discovery tools like hashtags and community filters, so users had nowhere to find conversations that mattered to them.
So was Threads more, uh, entertainment-focused platform? Was it more social platform? What happened there? So yeah, I stuck my neck out a bit on Threads because the day after it launched, when everyone was kind of going crazy for Threads, I was like, hold on a minute, this is like, this is not sustainable. Because, you know, the metrics were incredible. Everybody was using it, got 100 million signups, and then everyone was even retaining even the next day and stuff. But the problem was all the content was about threads on Threads, which was really entertaining for a day and hooked everybody. But then you're like, okay, wait, wait, now this is boring to read about threads. And so what are we actually gonna talk about here? And I think what Threads really, really misunderstood was they misunderstood what, and this relates to your question, they misunderstood what Twitter was. They think, they thought Twitter was a feed of posts, basically a feed of text. that people would follow and about the topics they're interested in. But just a feed, that was not— that's not the core of Twitter. The core of Twitter is a collection of communities that happen to be organized in a feed. So you've got Black Twitter, you've got Anime Twitter, you've got all kinds of weird stuff, Unspeakable Stuff Twitter, you know, all kinds of fashion and everything. But— and the algorithm has done a great job organizing you into one feed, but that's what it is. And what the criminal mistake that Threads made is that they treated it like Twitter was a follower platform, that basically you could just take your Instagram existing follower network, follower graph, and just import that into a text-based platform and that would be entertaining. And the crucial mistake they made is they didn't include any topic search, hashtags, Or any ability for people who are into weird shit to find each other. So I wasn't able to find the people who are into Arsenal or whatever it is, brown shirts, or all the things that I'm into. I wasn't able to find them. So I just had to look at everyone talking about Threads.
