The party’s over

Created
Mon, 10/07/2023 - 04:00
Updated
Mon, 10/07/2023 - 04:00
Dan Pfeiffer with the bad news: Why Threads Won’t Solve the News Crisis Like more than 70 million other refugees from Twitter, I downloaded Threads — Meta’s new Twitter clone — and immediately started “threading.” This wasn’t an easy decision. I generally believe that through a toxic combination of avarice and incompetence, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook have done tremendous damage to the world. My most recent book was subtitled “How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media are Destroying America.” So, it’s safe to say that I am not exactly a Zuck stan. But despite my trepidation, I started using Threads. Compared to other erstwhile Twitter replacements — Mastodon, Bluesky, Post, etc. — Threads was a huge success. It was easy to set up and even though I joined only a few hours after it launched, many people and media outlets were already posting on the app. The utility of a Twitter-like product is dependent on two interconnected questions — one, will enough interesting people share interesting content; and two, is the audience large and engaging enough to make sharing feel worth it? Because Threads leverages Instagram’s user base of two billion people, it was able to bring both influential and interesting people and an audience to the table from the outset. I went to Threads because I wanted Twitter circa 2010-2020. I wanted to follow the news, hear politicians, pundits, and experts respond to the news, and offer my own opinions on both. Don’t get me wrong; Twitter was far from…