The Great Social Media Wars of 2023
all will enter, none will survive
Well damn. Thank you for the incredibly kind and supportive response to the rather vulnerable newsletter I sent out Sunday. I got some great comments and replies too. It seems like a lot of people are feeling similarly as of late, even if not everyone is up for announcing that to an audience.
I had something else I wanted to tell you, but now I can’t remember what it was because I’ve gotten distracted, but I’m sure it’ll come to me if I just keep writing.
Anyway! As you probably already know, this week Instagram launched a new app. Rather, it’s a new app with an old name, or at least the name of an app IG previously launched and then sunsetted (for you non-tech people, sunsetting an app is retiring it completely so people can’t use it anymore, even if it’s installed on their phones – RIP forever Rdio and also Sunrise, my favorite calendar app). The app is called Threads. You’ve already read one million takes about it.
The thing about hot takes is a lot like the thing about social media in general. Everyone has a take, and everyone wants to talk about their own take, announce that take to the world, get as many people as possible to read and share it so it becomes the hottest hot take. Social media is the provenance of the loudest person, the one who barrels through the crowd and withstands the continual onslaught in order to keep being the loudest person no matter. Social media is both social and media in the loosest sense of those terms. But actually socializing – finding people who actually want to share with each other, to discuss or debate, in an online space where that’s possible and doesn’t feel weird or like you’re on stage or otherwise terrible – that’s much trickier to find and to build for.
Here I should pause and cover my ass by saying the following:
I am sincerely happy for my old teammates who I know worked super hard on this thing and launched it in a very short timeframe with a very small team. Like I said in a previous newsletter, I worked with some smart, wonderful people, and I wish them all the best. The app has already been downloaded more than 30 million times, which is an astonishing number and a huge accomplishment. I hope my friends all get a lot of recognition and money for their hard work.
Because I respect and care about my friends and ex-coworkers (well, most of them), I will not dunk on Threads, even if making a joke would make this more fun to read. I will only punch up!
I will not spill company secrets because I really do not need that flavor of trouble at this moment.
Ok let’s get to it.
So to recap what I told you in an earlier installment: I’d been at IG for about six months or so and was on a brand new team that was tasked with “incubating big bets” to help “reimagine the future of Instagram Stories.” At least two of the people who were on that original Team also helped create Threads. We had a brainstorm, and I had an idea called Prompts, and someone else had a not too dissimilar idea, so we voted for Prompts as one of our potential ideas to build for the half. This is what eventually became our mega-hit feature, Add Yours.
My rationale for Prompts was as follows:
People do better with constraints. I certainly do better with them. It’s hard to create an IG Story or a Post because you’ve got a blank canvas that basically just says “share.” It’s like handing someone a piece of paper and saying “draw something.” I bet you they’d find it much easier if you handed them a piece of paper and said “draw a house.” Not everyone is an artist or good at creating stuff. There’s a reason you’d rather hang a print in your house than your friend’s “artwork.”
People are more comfortable doing something when there are clear social norms. They want to know it’s ok to share the thing they’re about to share. They want to know if their friends are doing it, because that makes it okay for them to do too. Not everyone is a big loud creative voice who is willing to share even when no one else is.
Conversely, when there are not clear social norms, people do bad things and those become the highly visible because everyone else is too unsure or nervous to do the good things.
Or as I like to say: Culture takes root whether or not you’re intentional about it, so it’s better to be intentional about it.
And finally, people want to feel invited to do things. As I said in a meeting once, “people want an invitation, not an imposition.” We want to feel welcome to join in. It’s more fun to do something and not feel you’re doing it alone or because you have to. And no one wants to feel left out.
What was really interesting about Add Yours was that after it launched people told me “This is the first time I’ve felt anything like community on Instagram.” One thing IG excels at is your social graph – the big map of all the connections you have, and the connections those connections have, and so on – but even with that social graph it didn’t always feel very… social.
As we were building Add Yours, I wrote a note about why this was. The note was about our need to shift away from a “sharing to” model toward a “sharing with” model. Essentially, I said that “sharing to” is unidirectional, broadcast-type sharing better suited to big time content creation, while “sharing with” is a better representation of how human beings actually share with one another, even (or especially) when they’re not producing original content.
Human beings like to connect over a lot of things. We like to share the stuff that’s meaningful to us, which might be personal updates or information but might also be a recap of our favorite TV show or a song that encapsulates how we’re feeling or, as teens might say, a relatable meme. We like to talk about stuff that seems trivial but is really meaningful, and we like to talk about stuff that seems meaningful but often ends up being trivial. We like to engage with one another, to make and develop new friendships, to keep up with existing friendships. We sometimes need to send out a flare to let others know we need help. Sometimes we just need to say an important thing or make a dumb joke and simply have it be acknowledged. We need to share with each other, and we do not always need that sharing to be Cool Original Content Production.
Great, but what does this have to do with Threads?
I’ve been reading some of the many takes and thoughts on Threads, and depending on who you read and where you read it, there’s a stark divide. Either people are in raptures over it, or they think it’s the worst app they’ve ever seen. Let’s set aside for a moment all the issues people have with the fact that it’s a Meta app, as well any (justified) feelings people have re: Mark Zuckerberg and/or Adam Mosseri. Let’s focus instead on how and why things get built the way they do.
Important caveat: I was not at all involved in building Threads. I did not work on it, and I don’t know what decisions were or weren’t made. But I can make an educated guess as to why some people might react badly to it.
If you think back to the earlier days of social media, what made them fun were a few things: novelty, seeing what your friends would share, emerging culture, finding new people or creators or interests to immerse yourself in, and so on. Social media was fun, at least at first, because many of us grew alongside it. It’s like people who hate Los Angeles, because they try to approach the city as a whole. You have to get to know individual neighborhoods, see how it all comes together, find the spots that work for you. You can’t just dive in and try and consume it all in one gulp; you’ll end up stuck in traffic, yelling with thousands of other assholes.
Over time, as social media not only became impossibly huge, but also – as I mentioned here – basically our worldwide social infrastructure, a lot of people started to feel lost. Not everyone is built to share in the ways social media demands. Some people have strong voices and so are comfortable posting frequently on Facebook or in IG Stories or on Twitter. Some of those people are wonderful; many of them are not. If you work at some of these companies, you will learn over time that a very small number of creators (whether tweeters, podcasters, IG posters, whatever) are responsible for the vast majority of the content being consumed. I recently read, although I can’t remember where, that 90% of Twitter users don’t post. This means that a very small number of power users are producing content for the rest of the users to consume, share, whatever. These power users are literally powering the app. The proportions may vary, but this is true for many (probably most) apps, even if they aren’t social media. I bet it’s even becoming true for TikTok.
Many, many users do not share or create content. Many who do get very little interaction or engagement, which does not encourage them. So over time, you are likely to see whatever original content production metric you have start to trend down. You can game this metric, or you can try to brute force it back up. But it’s really hard to resist that gravitational pull forever, especially when you are building for scale and growth rather than human behavior and human need. I do not like to bet money but even I would be willing to bet that, while TikTok managed to capture lightning in a bottle with its combination of massive virality alongside incredibly niche content, it’s seen a big drop in regular user content creation.
One way to brute force things is to take what’s already worked elsewhere and recreate it. See also: IG Stories (Snapchat) and Reels (TikTok). Threads is obviously an IG version of Twitter, launched at a very smart moment, when Twitter is falling apart more with each passing day.
Another way is to pre-populate the app with lots of big names, big accounts, big and known content creators. It’s hard to build inventory (content or posts) organically. Like I said above, people are hesitant to just share into a void or share without knowing what to do. Large, well-known content creators encourage mimicry and interaction. This is the difference between trying to start a fire with two small sticks vs. having a truck full of propane and a flamethrower.
Threads is, at its core, a broadcast surface. A broadcast surface is built for that sort of high velocity – of sharing, of hoping to go viral, of massive reach. A broadcast surface relies on constant content creation, and on non-creating users being served enough variety and new stuff to keep them interested. This is where the numbers will certainly help, but the question is: How many of those creators will be Constantly Online enough to help maintain the type of content Threads will need to continue succeeding? How many of those users are going to be silent? The timeline is already algorithmic, just like IG’s feed – over time, will Threads users also start to see recommended posts and more?
Obviously, Threads is already massively successful, at least in this moment. It’s a huge win for it to have been downloaded so many times in such a short period, for so many people to have already signed up. A very small team built it and launched it, and I know how hard they worked to get it here. I have no idea how Threads will evolve, what will happen, how well it will fare. If I could predict that, I don’t think I’d be sitting here writing this in my pajamas. I’d be very rich, somewhere in the Greek isles.
But I suppose part of what this is about is a running theme of this newsletter: How do we define success? What does it mean to “win”? What does it mean to you, as a human being and ostensible user of apps, vs. to a megacorp? I’ve seen a lot of “oh, Bluesky lost its chance to be the next Twitter, now Threads will succeed there.” But maybe that’s okay? Maybe that’s what winning looks like for Threads. Maybe for another offering, winning isn’t about constant scale or growth, but about smaller, more sustainable longer term communities. Maybe winning isn’t always about who becomes the richest and the biggest. Nothing lasts forever anyway, not the big ones and not the smaller ones. So why not allow for different kinds of winning? Some will win at unfathomable scale, and others will win on a more human level. Some will build for sharing to, and others will build for sharing with. Some will go after all, and others will be content with most, for as long as it lasts.
Finally made time to come back to this and I'm glad I did. A worthwhile (and hugely interesting) read.