Threads and the digital land rush
On April 22, 1889, two million acres of formerly native-owned land were opened up to Americans—not by auction nor lottery, but by footrace. Tens of thousands of people lined up behind a starting line, and at exactly noon, they stampeded all over the territory. Most of the land was claimed by the end of the day, which became known as the Oklahoma Land Rush.1
I now know exactly how those settlers felt—because the Digital Land Rush of 2023 took place on Wednesday, when Meta (aka Facebook) launched a Twitter competitor called Threads. As a new social network, it was wide-open terrain: nobody started the day with any followers or posts. But unlike most new social networks, which are unknown and likely to fail, this one was immediately fertile ground: 30 million users joined within 24 hours. So everyone raced to sign up, figure out which of their friends or good Twitter follows were already there, and most importantly fire off all their best memes and takes at once. It was a weird and fascinating experience.
This was the first Twitter competitor I've joined, because it's the first one I think has even a remote chance of succeeding. Social networks are really hard to replace because they're better when there are more users: if there are millions of people on Twitter, and thousands on MastaSky, there will be more good people to follow (and more people will follow you) on the former, so you'll stay there. New networks can overtake older ones by being different—see Facebook vs MySpace—but rarely by just by doing the same thing better.
But Twitter is unusually vulnerable. Until recently I thought the "Twitter's product is failing" narrative was overblown—all that actually happened were a few short outages and marginally worse content recommendations—but the recent limits on reading Tweets were the first real shock that made me open to alternatives.
And because it's run by the company that owns all the other social networks, Threads has unusual advantages.
Some are social: if there are many alternative networks, it's hard for a critical mass of people to agree on one—but Meta's reputation makes Threads a Schelling point.
And some are technical: Meta has the infrastructure and expertise to host millions of users on day one, while new companies have to scale more slowly (BlueSky still has a wait list for new users despite being active for six months). It's certainly possible to launch a new product that way, but it's harder to compete with an existing one—why stay on BlueSky talking to a handful of people when you can just go back to Twitter (or now Threads)?
A history of succeeding at similar products is also a curse, though, because you can over-learn lessons that don't apply. For example, Meta decided to launch Threads with only an "algorithmic" feed that shows recommended posts from people you don't follow as well as ones you do, not necessarily in chronological order. For a normal social network, that's totally rational: a) new users who aren't following anyone get to see content right away; and b) Meta knows better than anyone that most users engage more with algorithmic feeds. But Twitter has always been a weird product. On most social networks, the content comes from lots of people: your friends on Facebook, random posters on Instagram Reels. On Twitter, however, most good content comes from a relatively small number of posters that lots of others follow—mainly media members who are there for near-real-time information. In order to succeed as the new Twitter, Threads needs a curated, chronological feed to keep the power users who will post the content that will keep everyone else around.
The real question is, does Meta actually want Threads to be the new Twitter? You might think so, given the timing and the very similar feature set (the chronological timeline is indeed coming). On the other hand, the head of Instagram2 Thread-ed that the company wants to attract a larger audience than the media and media-consuming niches that have dominated Twitter:
"Twitter, but for normal people" would be much more profitable than the current Twitter. But it's also much riskier—Twitter itself has been trying and failing to do that for years. We know how Mark Zuckerberg feels about Twitter's management dating to long before Elon Musk took over (the famous quote: "it's as if a clown car crashed into a gold mine"), and Meta has a great track record of delivering products for normal people, but I'm still skeptical they'll succeed.
They'll have to for the Digital Land Rush of 2023 to go down in history as a transformative day. In a classic essay on social media, Eugene Wei shows how new social networks create new social codes, and whoever cracks them first can get ahead. But this only works if the network is genuinely new; if it just copies how an existing product works, the same winners will prevail (or, more likely, the new competitor will fail). The land rush has subsided, but after only four days, we still don't know what the new towns and cities will look like.
Some people cheated and claimed territory early; they were called “Sooners” and became the namesake of the University of Oklahoma’s sports teams.
I guess Threads is technically part of Instagram, which is part of Meta?