Voices: I tried Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival, Threads – I’m not impressed

I had no idea how many hot singles were in my area until Elon Musk took over Twitter. There are so many of them! I get about three direct messages from them per day, and I see them comment under virtually every viral post I see on the app. It’s amazing!

Also, did you hear about this thing called bitcoin? Apparently, a bunch of different guys with cartoon frogs in their profile pictures know a way for me to get a lot of it, and all I have to do is send them a picture of my passport! Thank you Elon, I’m going to be rich!

Oh, I almost forgot: did you guys hear that the white race is under siege by the looming threat of immigration? Me neither, but there are a bunch of people on Twitter – way more than you would think – who are keen to teach me about it! Their commentary on the subject can be found under completely unrelated tweets, many of them aimed at children!

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, a lot of us said that the site would become unusable in time, as the Tesla CEO’s half-baked libertarian philosophy and far-right sympathies turned it into a breeding ground for grifters and extremists.

What I don’t think any of us expected, however, was just how quickly the change would take hold. Nonsensical, site-altering policies are implemented and retracted with such speed that they become impossible to keep track of, making Twitter about as user-unfriendly as a site can get without the homepage just being an enormous jpeg of a middle finger. Remember “rate limit exceeded”? That was two days ago.

Luckily, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is here to save us with the launch of his new social media service Threads, which gained more than 10 million users in the first hour after it launched. In the half hour that I spent playing around with it this morning, it seemed to perform many of the same functions that Twitter does, with the added bonus of not being plagued by AI bots and unsolicited pornography (yet).

The site is still in its early days, but if Twitter keeps going the way it has been these past few months, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it becomes your one-stop shop for bad film takes and misleading political commentary.

That’s part of the issue with this new site, though. It’s so similar to Twitter that the idea of trying to establish a social media presence there is exhausting. When I migrated from Myspace to Facebook in the early 2010s, the allure of Zuckerberg’s flagship site was that you could do things there that nobody else was offering (although you couldn’t put a Blink 182 song on your homepage, and for that I’ll never forgive him).

With Threads, it’s like when I started my first Twitter account in 2012, except I’m now burdened with the tragic foresight of what is eventually to come. I have to manually track down accounts that I want to follow, and there’s no way to guarantee that the people who followed me on Twitter will follow me again on Threads. I didn’t have a huge following on Twitter, but what followers I did have were integral to my freelance work. That network is going to be difficult to piece back together on a brand new site that people are already going to be a little suspicious of (if you type “Threads” into the iPhone app store, this site isn’t even in the top five results).

The other main drawback is the fact that you can only sign up to Threads if you already have an Instagram account. Considering how different the audiences are for Twitter and Instagram – with the former being a text-based microblogging platform and the latter being almost entirely image-based – this seems like a huge oversight, especially considering how badly Instagram has been underperforming for the past few years. I’ve already seen a number of accounts say that they refuse to try Threads if it means having to sign up to Instagram too, and I don’t really blame them, not least because once you have signed up, you can’t delete your Threads account without also deleting Instagram.

When you sign up to Threads, it lets you automatically follow all of the people you have on Instagram, which does a lot to help you to get started on the site. However, I don’t know about you, but I follow very different people depending on the platform I’m using. I don’t know what half of the people I follow on Twitter look like, and I have no real interest in hearing the inner monologue of the artists, models and photographers I follow on Instagram. I want to keep those worlds separate.

It would be great if you could just import your contacts from Twitter – I’m sure somebody will jerry-rig an app to do that automatically in the next few weeks – but I suppose that would be a step too far for a website that already feels like a knock-off to begin with. If Zuckerberg goes too far, Musk might challenge him to another cage match (and his mum might not break it up this time).

If Threads is going to succeed, it’s going to be out of sheer necessity. Twitter is a sinking ship. It isn’t just broken, but its reluctance to self-moderate means that it’s actively hostile – even dangerous – to its users. Musk has made it his mission to strip it of all the things that made it fun and useful, and we’re rapidly approaching a point where being there is more of a chore than a means of escapism.

Threads goes a long way to removing those more hostile elements, but it still has a lot to do if it wants to capture the things that made Twitter work in the first place. A more sophisticated verification system would be a good start – for now, it’s attached to your Instagram account’s verification status, which isn’t as reliable as Twitter’s was pre-Musk – and uncoupling your account from Instagram is a must. Apart from that it’s just going to be a case of a user base growing organically over time.

Until those things happen, I think most people are going to stick with Twitter, even if it is broken. Now if you’ll excuse me, @Paul_McCartney_8008135 just DM’d me asking if I could send him some iTunes gift cards. Anything for you, Macca.