The Washington Post: “Meta’s Threads is struggling to win over content creators”

Threads, a text-centric service launched by Meta last year in a bid to usurp Twitter after its acquisition by Elon Musk, needs people like Dorsey and his clients if it is to succeed. Adam Mosseri, the executive overseeing Threads, recently told The Washington Post he wants it to be a place for real-time discussions of events happening in the world, from sports to TV. But content creators who spoke with The Post said they are struggling to understand the platform.

Threads still seems like a platform in search of a mission, says Lia Haberman, an independent digital strategist and author of the ICYMI newsletter on marketing and the creator economy. The focus isn’t news. It’s not about visual creativity or video, like Instagram or TikTok. So what is it?

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If Threads was a start-up we wouldn’t be questioning whether it had made its mark. They’d burn through their VC money and then quietly fold or be acquired by another player, said Haberman, the digital strategist. I don’t see how Mark Zuckerberg continues to pump money into a platform where the biggest draw so far is that it’s a less toxic alternative to Twitter.

Taylor Lorenz

Harsh, but mostly fair I think. I doubt the people behind Threads have given much thought to what it is meant to be, beyond providing an easy alternative for those shunning Twitter and inching up Meta’s advertising revenues.

Text-centric social networks don’t have enough stickiness for a wide audience, especially in a landscape where they compete for attention with huge visual and video platforms. The smaller audience makes it less appealing to creators (and advertisers ultimately). On top of that, Threads has to compete with Twitter and its various clones, making its lack of differentiation even more apparent. Had it not been a Meta product, benefiting from constant promotion on Instagram, Threads would have faded away long ago, just as Mastodon.

Also, there’s a lesson in here about focusing on replies as a metric for engagement and influencer bonuses: some creators claimed that it was possible to maximize Meta’s payouts simply by posting generic replies to low quality meme posts going viral on Threads, instead of formulating new, thoughtfully crafted content – what a shocker!