Threads Hits Different

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Read time: pretty short I would say

• Meme theme: Nathan for You

See you out there.

“Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.”

– Isaac Asimov

Why does it feel like something is different this time with the debut of the new social platform from Meta, Threads?

Structurally, it seems not really any different to me than Twitter. There are fewer features than Twitter even, but you post text, you post images, you post videos. You can post gifs, but not from within the platform yet. And there are a bunch of other things it’s not currently doing that you might expect, like a chronological feed or a following-only feed.

Also, just briefly here before I continue: It just struck me that the word “bunch” just means things clumped together, not a lot of them necessarily. Maybe you already knew that though.

So back to Threads. If it’s missing these obvious features that Twitter already has, and Twitter already exists, why did 80 million people download it in the first 48 hours? Cha(d)t-GPT, the previously fastest-downloaded app ever, took a month to get to 100 million downloads (slow much?). Twitter has just over 350 million monthly active users - or MAUs as they say in the biz - and it’s been around for over 15 years.