Meta’s Threads launched at a blistering, record-setting pace, racking up 100 million downloads faster than any app in history, lightyears ahead of even ChatGPT. But as desperate as the public may be for a serious Twitter alternative, the rush to get Threads out and the Meta-fication of the concept may have injured it badly. Maybe fatally.
Interest is already dropping, quickly. Daily active users were down 20% in just a few days. Time spent on the app almost instant cut in half from 20 minutes down to just 10.
The very obvious issue was the way the app launched its main feed. While it was a smart move to be able to port over your Instagram follows so you had at least some people you had previously expressed an interest in on your timeline, they were usually…not on your timeline at all. The feed was a jumbled mess of celebrities and brands and influencers spouting truly the most banal things on the internet as they attempted to navigate the Twitter clone, coming from a generally visual medium.
This lasted about the entire first week of the app. It was enough to get people to post on Threads that it was untenable, or go back to Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon to make fun of the inane experience.
Things have, however, finally gotten better. The last few days, my feed is either made up of the people I actually follow, or the app has figured out my interest in mainly video games, and has been showing me relevant topics and posters, including some I genuinely wanted to start following. However, even if the algorithm is working better it is…still an algorithm, blending a Following feed and a For You feed into one central thing. And it’s still not a chronological timeline. Nor does the app have a desktop client yet, which is the one thing that would probably quintuple my time spent on the site. It’s absurd it did not launch with that.
The problem is that even if Threads is improving quickly, by launching in an ill-advised state, you only get one chance to make a first impression. After a week of a truly terrible feed to contend with, I would not be surprised if millions of potential users logged off an will likely never return. The Meta-like desire to try to fill voids with a (bad) algorithm of content was reminiscent of how bad Instagram and Facebook have gotten, when all they had to do was present a chronological, following-only feed alongside its “For You” style one, and that would have been enough to keep people there.
With 100 million instant users, that’s certainly a massively strong base. But they really squandered the massive launch by presenting an inferior product to its quickly crumbling alternative, even if it looks pretty and people there are being nicer (for now). The launch in that state as a mistake. We’ll see if fixing it can breed long term health for the app.
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