augment: “The Threads Creator Paradox”

Their money flow also speaks the same language. They’ve started various influencer programs that push Instagram creators (read: “celebrity” creators) to post on Threads with a promise of $5K if they get 10,000 views. They’re going for big celebrities like Taylor Swift, who, quite frankly, doesn’t care about the platform whatsoever.

With that, I have two simple questions for Meta:

1. Why are native creators who bet your platform on day one not getting financially incentivized for the labor they put in to make your platform worth visiting?
2. Why do you think that photo and video creators who, as Deirdre Assenza would say, spam and scram, will do well on a microblogging platform?

And herein lies the Threads creator paradox: Meta believes that the grass is greener if they inject creators from one site to another while ignoring that the creators who succeed on Threads are nothing like the ones on their sister site and are certainly not traditional celebrities. In fact, if they want to inject the kind of creators who succeed on Threads from platforms they own, they’re likely to find more ideal users who run Facebook Groups—community builders who engage and give space to their group members.

Anuj Ahooja

Interesting critique of Meta’s approach to Threads from someone who seems to be a lot more engaged with the platform than me. Although the parallel to Facebook Groups, if accurate, makes me even less inclined to give Threads a chance.

Image Credits: Berke Bayur/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

I suspect that Meta chasing big names for Threads reflects their expectations of massive scale, comparable to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and a desire to continue the narrative of the fastest growing social network, emerged after the initial launch. This thinking unfortunately neglects the different nature of Threads, which sooner or later will bump into the same growth constraints that plagued Twitter for years, and the incentives of people participating, who were driven at first by their discontent with Twitter and other available alternatives – not a sustainable motive for organic growth.