Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we’ll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine’s usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here! If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Have you heard about the hot new social media app, from the makers of Facebook? It’s called Threads, and some pretty big names are already on board: Tom Brady, fresh off a spokesmodel gig for a failed and possibly fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange, is there, alongside a roster that includes aging boy band members, various Kardashians, rise-and-grinders, thirst trappers, crypto bros, brand managers, #brands, and—slotting nicely into this murderer’s row of declining relevance—the co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. To be fair, it’s early. Zuckerberg, who recently emerged from paternity leave posing as a jacked-up cage fighter, has been busy quoting the Backstreet Boys, sucking up to mixed martial artists and bragging about Threads’ every success. His company, now known as Meta Platforms Inc., released Threads in the iPhone and Android app stores the evening of July 5. Two hours later, Zuckerberg said 2 million people had signed up. By the next morning, the figure was 10 million. He posted again around noon with an update: 30 million, which “feels like the beginning of something special.” It was at 100 million by July 9. The figures sound impressive until you understand what Threads actually is: a sterile knockoff of Twitter, designed to make Meta’s commercially dominant brand of social media even more so. Zuckerberg has been doing this sort of copying for a decade, occasionally with success but often producing forgettable and ultimately failed clones. He’s mimicked Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, Siri, Nextdoor, Flipboard and Cameo, among many others. RIP: Facebook Lifestage, Lasso, Hobbi, M, Neighborhoods, Paper and Super, respectively.  Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg Like Twitter, the latest knockoff encourages users to write short messages. Tweets are called “posts,” and retweets are “reposts.” The big difference is that you sign up through Instagram, the photo-sharing app that Zuckerberg’s company also owns and whose 2 billion monthly users are currently being urged, through various digital enticements, to give Threads a try. Once they do, the app suggests they follow all their Instagram friends, even if their friends have never written a post. That leads to lots and lots of push notifications—those intrusive phone pings alerting you that you’ve been followed by someone on Threads—creating the illusion of a vibrant community and tempting more users to sign up, too. You can turn these interruptions off, but Instagram makes it annoyingly difficult. And there’s no way to delete your Threads account permanently unless you also delete your Instagram account. Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, has said the company is “looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately.” Meta declined to comment. Threads would probably be a tougher sell if the app it was ripping off wasn’t such a disaster. Twitter had seen its influence wane even before it descended into the reality-show chaos imposed by a wealthy billionaire with an unflagging commitment to placing rakes in his own path and then, with great flourish, stepping on them. When he isn’t indulging in a little antisemitic humor or grumpily tweeting about college kids these days, Elon Musk has done almost everything possible to destroy the company he paid $44 billion for. Since he took over Twitter Inc. in October, usage has seemed to wane, advertisers have fled, and revenue is down something like 50%. The website keeps breaking—probably in part because Musk canned three-quarters of the company’s engineers and also seems to have refused to pay his cloud computing bills. Twitter responded to a request for comment with a poop emoji. Threads isn’t the only potential Twitter replacement. There’s Mastodon, Post News, Discord, Bluesky, Substack Notes and many others. On the other hand, it’s possible, and maybe for the best, that no app shows up to replace Twitter. Over the past nine months, I’ve watched as friends and colleagues have migrated en masse from one knockoff to the next, getting excited for maybe a day or two and then mostly losing interest. My last “toot,” as Mastodon’s users call tweets, was in December. I’ve never even done a “skeet,” the unfortunate name of the Bluesky version. For all of Max Chafkin’s insights into what will—and won’t—likely be the next big platform, read the whole story here. Correction: Wednesday’s newsletter misidentified the regulator that successfully blocked the merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. It was the Justice Department, not the Federal Trade Commission. |
No comments:
Post a Comment