The Endless Cycle of Social Media
A conversation with Charlie Warzel about the rise of Meta's Threads—and what it could take for the platform to succeed
This week, Meta launched its Twitter competitor: Instagram’s Threads. I chatted with my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, about why Threads is appealing to users, and what it would take for the platform to succeed.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Header: A Hunger for Posting
Two days ago, Mark Zuckerberg posted a front-facing video on Instagram with some news: Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, had launched. With a few taps, users could download the new app, port over some of their Instagram network, and start posting. By this morning, according to Mark Zuckerberg, Threads had 70 million users (in July 2022, Twitter reportedly had about 238 million). My colleague Charlie Warzel wrote a story with Ian Bogost this week for The Atlantic arguing that Threads proves social media cannot die. I called Charlie this morning to get his thoughts on the new text-based social-media platform, where it’s headed, and what it means that Meta is the company behind it.
Lora Kelley: Why are people interested in getting on Threads?
Charlie Warzel: I’m a little bit baffled by the enthusiasm. I know that I’m an incredibly jaded tech journalist who thinks too much about these places. But on Threads, I’m scrolling around there, and I’m like, Do people not understand that this is a Meta production?
It blows my mind, because I think about all the hostility toward Meta since 2016—privacy, Cambridge Analytica, politics, Myanmar, the bungling of the metaverse. Then there’s this notion that Mark Zuckerberg is uncool, and Facebook is uncool and bad. And then they dropped this product, and people are like, Oh, thank God, finally I have a place to go to post my thoughts!
I think it speaks to the fact that as long as there’s an internet, there’s always going to be a hunger for short-form text posting. And it probably also speaks to the extent that Elon Musk has bungled Twitter.
Lora: Is this pure opportunism on Meta’s part? Do all roads lead to social media consolidation?
Charlie: I don’t think Facebook ever had ambitions for this. I think they looked at Twitter as this niche service that had a lot of cultural value. Mark Zuckerberg is a scale monster. He’s tried to take things that exist elsewhere and apply unbelievable scale to them.
Zuckerberg understands that if you want a social network to feel good and vibrant, it needs to be populated immediately. And that’s essentially what’s happening with Threads. I think it’s why there’s some juice to it right now. What the launch of Threads showed is that there’s a huge advantage to being able to say, “I have this audience here. I can just move them onto this.” That portability is what a lot of people have been excited about.
Lora: Do you think that Facebook’s checkered history with user privacy is going to deter some potential users?
Charlie: I think that there will be people concerned about the privacy stuff, and there’s good reason to be. But that’s always going to be a really small contingent of people, in general. People want to try new things. They want to be with their friends; they want to be entertained. They want those spaces to be populated by familiar faces, whether that’s their friends or celebrities or just people they know.
People are never going to be as concerned with privacy stuff as they are with I want to be where my friends are. I want to try something new and interesting and see if it works. And if that initial experience is easy, fun, and intriguing, the potential to hook a new user and turn them into a quality repeat customer is very high.
Lora: Do you envision that a year from now, people will continue to have accounts on multiple platforms, such as Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads? Will one—perhaps even Threads—emerge as the new “digital town square”?
Charlie: We are still so, so early on Threads. Right now Threads is full of big-time Instagram celebrities who have been recruited to the platform, who are making a lot of content but might leave because it feels inorganic and strange.
In terms of having multiple social networks, I don’t think it’s super sustainable. People want a fairly contained, fairly universal platform experience. I think that, to some degree, consolidation makes a lot of sense to the average person.
Personally, all of this helped make very clear the extent to which I don’t control what I have built across social media. This impetuous, snarky billionaire buys a service and essentially tanks it. There’s a little bit of me that really resents the fact that not only am I having to build this over again, but it’s with an audience that I never used for these purposes.
You are leasing all the furniture on social-media platforms, and one day, the company is going to come by and say, “You have to take it back now.” And you’re left sitting on your floor, wondering what you’re going to do. Ultimately, we are serving at the pleasure of internet boy-kings. These are not our spaces.
Lora: Threads has gotten a ton of users very quickly. What do you think it will take to make this a lasting platform?
Charlie: The first few weeks on a social network are different from the rest of the experience. The experience has to continue to be good. People need to feel compelled to create content for it, and then a culture will evolve out of that.
Something like this has to happen organically. There is a future for Threads as a Notes app for celebrities, where highly curated pop-culture news and information travels. I think that’s fine. But that’s a very different experience than a place where activist movements start or a place where the messy nature of politics unfolds.
Something I’m really curious about: Is Threads a place where people who have never used Twitter now have Twitter in front of them? Commentators have long said that Twitter is a niche product—people are afraid of it, and there are problems with discovery. Has Meta solved that? Now that your cousin and middle-school teacher are essentially on Twitter for the first time, are they feeling that pull I felt on Twitter in 2009? It’s an interesting thought.
Related:
Today’s News
- The white gunman who targeted Hispanic shoppers at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 received 90 consecutive life sentences.
- After months of debate within his administration, President Joe Biden approved sending long-sought cluster munitions to Ukraine. They are banned in many countries because of their potential for civilian casualties.
- Twitter has threatened to sue Threads, the competitor app created by Meta.
Dispatches
- The Books Briefing: The lonely young male narrator is a common figure in literature, Emma Sarappo writes. But the tension between what he says he wants and what he actually desires feels deeply contemporary.
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Evening Read
The Greatest Museum You’ve Never Heard Of
By Cullen Murphy
In the basement of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, in Milan, a conservator named Vito Milo had just applied a small gel strip to the edge of a 500-year-old drawing in order to dissolve the glue that joined it to a larger paper frame. Now, with a scalpel, he worked loose a few millimeters of the drawing. I asked Milo what was in the gel, and after he rattled off a list of ingredients in Italian, I offered a layman’s rough translation: “special sauce.” He smiled and nodded. “Si, special sauce.”
The drawing was a page from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, and I had been invited to witness the painstaking process of its conservation. One morning last winter, I descended to the conservators’ laboratory, which occupies a room just outside the steel-and-glass doorway to the Ambrosiana’s gleaming vault. At the bottom of the stairs, I was stopped by an attendant, who took a coffee cup from my hands and placed it out of harm’s way.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Instead of answering emails or scrolling on TikTok, pick up a book for your pockets of idle time. Here are five essay and short-story collections that’ll fit right into your busy schedule.
Watch. One of these 11 undersung TV shows.
P.S.
Charlie is wondering how Atlantic readers are approaching Threads, and I’m curious too! Are you indeed feeling the pull toward text-based posting? Are you being inundated with brand messaging or weird jokes from random people? Are you afraid to add another app to your regimen, or simply not interested? Let us know—reply to this email with your thoughts on the new platform and how it may (or may not!) fit into your life. We’ll read everything you send, and your response may be included in a future edition of the Daily.
— Lora
By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.
Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.