It’s been a whole year since Meta unveiled its ‘competitor’ to Twitter/X, Threads.
I put competitor in quotation marks for a good reason. With Meta leveraging its Instagram to get billions of users to easily sign up to the microblogging site and Elon Musk buying Twitter turning it into his own personal hobby, I thought we had a battle royale on our hands.
Clearly not.
After a flurry of signups and people trying to be the first-ever Threadfluencer, the noise died down. A bit too quickly. Things were looking good there for a while, it had 100 million users sign up in the space of five days, making it one of the fastest-growing apps in history.
But only a month after the Threadomonium, the site lost 80 per cent of its daily active users.
Post by @kindabadgalathView on Threads
I was one of those 100 million users keen to try out this new platform and see what all the ruckus was about (see above). I tried to like it, I really did. I spent months shit posting, hoping it would be the next Twitter but after a few months, I became disillusioned and missed Twitter.
The site couldn’t even ‘thread’ properly.
Threads wasn’t hitting the same way Twitter did. It was fun to see my Instagram-fluent friends try their hand at being funny via words and try and relive the glory days of Facebook statuses. But it felt like I was trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
But nothing hits like an inside joke on Twitter that references three other Twitter-centric jokes.
While writing this, I logged onto Threads for the first time in months and what I saw was a cacophony of absolute garbage, religious conspiracy theories and of course, ads. I immediately cleansed myself with a quick scroll on Twitter and I went outside and touched grass.
The only time I’m tempted to get back on is through the Threads previews on Instagram where they show relevant content and sometimes curiosity gets the best of me and I get dragged onto the Threads app to see what all the hubbub is about.
I decided to also reach out to colleagues to see if I was the odd one out. But most of them were like me, they tried Threads, didn’t like it and only lurked from time to time.
Only one of them uses it daily but for very niche hobbies and he said to me, “It kinda works for me because I found enough people worth following and I just constantly switch back to the ‘following only’ tab, but I still only use it once a day.”
While I’m not a fan of Threads, it is still going strong with Zuckerberg posting that Threads now has 175m monthly active users, a surprising amount but sure, why not?
A report in February, showed 250 million people jump on Twitter/X each day, but that number has dropped since Musk bought it in 2022. I mean Threads did give us Elon Musk calling Mark Zuckerberg a cuck, which is inherently funny. So I’ll give them that
So happy birthday Threads, I hope you lead a long healthy life and may your dreams of overthrowing Twitter/X/Elon’s side hustle come true.
BRB doom scrolling on Twitter.
Image: Gizmodo Australia