Threads launches, users sadly shuffle aboard

This about sums it up.

It turns out that while ALP was mocking Meta’s lame Gen AI style, the artists formerly known as Facebook were busy plotting to destroy a B-list social media platform.

Well played, Zuck. Maybe? 

It was the product-launch heard round the world, partly because of the genuinely impressive 100M users accrued in just five days, partly because of a slow news cycle and the media industry’s fixation with Twitter-as-public-utility.

So what to make of Threads? The reviews are in, and they’re mixed at best.

For a comprehensive breakdown of all the ways in which Threads underwhelms, Anne Helen Petersen’s take was the best we found.

Her takeaway in a nutshell:

This is pretty much what Threads feels like to me now: a place that’s ostensibly interesting (look, so many people are already here!) but is actually totally boring. … It’s just new and there, like a bowl of sub-par chips and store-bought guac at a party, asking “Aren’t you hungry? Aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

Hands down, the smartest (albeit unintentionally so) take we found on Threads was also the saddest. 

The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel observes: 

"There’s a little bit of me that really resents the fact that not only am I having to build this over again ... You are leasing all the furniture on social-media platforms, and one day, the company is going to come by and say, 'You have to take it back now.' And you’re left sitting on your floor ... Ultimately, we are serving at the pleasure of internet boy-kings. These are not our spaces."

He’s right. What the social platforms giveth they also can taketh. A cuddlier Twitter alternative isn’t going to change that brute fact. But his resignation that this is something that he has to do, that this is just the way it is … we don’t buy that.

There’s an alternative — one that we are bullish on as a long-term path to growth. It isn’t easy, and it takes time, but investing in your brand’s owned and operated channels will deliver you an audience loyal to you — not a platform. And there are a growing number of people out there who want to be in that audience. People who don’t want the anodyne and the sterile, and who don’t want an algorithm limiting the breadth of ideas to which they’re exposed. Look at the boom in podcasts and newsletters — all the multiple sources of distribution available for them — to see that hunger playing out in the marketplace.

Charlie, you don’t have to do this. You never have to be a renter again.  If you see this, drop us a line. We’re here to help.