![]() ![]() ![]() I’ve heard so much talk about the latest hot Twitter competitor without one ever actually happening that I want to keep my powder dry with this one. One of them is practical: I use Twitter mostly for work, and am finding that it still just about performs the functions I need it for-mostly, seeing what other people on the media beat, who mostly still seem to be there, are saying-even if Musk has visibly broken it in many ways. So I have a confession to make, which is that I haven’t signed up yet. So I’m still on the fence about it, to be honest. In terms of utility, it seems to be part Twitter and part Instagram-and those things are in conflict with each other in some pretty fundamental ways. And now it has over a hundred million users, which is a staggeringly large number for a thing that has only been around for a week. It’s still so new that it’s kind of hard to get a sense of it and what it represents, or even how it works, because it’s changing all the time. MI: Have my early impressions of Threads changed? Yes and no. Have those changed at all? How are you finding the app so far? ![]() JA: Hey, Mathew! You wrote a bit for us last week about your very early impressions of Threads. Our conversation, which took place over Google Docs, has been lightly edited for clarity. But on Threads, I’m scrolling around there, and I’m like, Do people not understand that this is a Meta production? ”Īhead of Threads marking its one-week birthday today, I spoke with Ingram about his experience as a journalist on the app so far, why I’m so far refusing to follow him there, and what the shifting balance of power between Threads and Twitter-and other would-be Twitter competitors, including Mastodon and BlueSky-might mean for the media. “I know that I’m an incredibly jaded tech journalist who thinks too much about these places. “I’m a little bit baffled by the enthusiasm” for Threads, The Atlantic ’s Charlie Warzel said last week. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has said publicly that Threads isn’t intended to be a hub for politics or “hard news”-a declaration in line with Meta’s other recent moves away from news-sharing-and Zuckerberg and his company have some, erm, questionable history when it comes to curating healthy online environments for the exchange of information. While myriad journalists (Ingram included) have set up a Threads account, many of them have also remained on Twitter, reports of whose demise-at least as a tool for journalists to gather and share news-might yet prove exaggerated. While Threads is enjoying something of a media honeymoon, however, not everyone seems convinced by it just yet. Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, responded by calling Zuckerberg a “cuck” and proposing a “literal dick measuring contest.” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, described the early adoption rates as “way beyond our expectations.” Meanwhile, traffic to Twitter appears to be way down. Since then, it has continued to quickly gather momentum, hitting thirty million sign-ups within twenty-four hours of launch, then fifty million, then a hundred, making it one of the fastest-growing new apps ever. When Ingram wrote, Threads-which is separate from, but linked to, Instagram, allowing users to import their contacts from the latter platform-had already attracted several million users. Last Thursday, in his weekly newsletter for CJR, my colleague Mathew Ingram dissected the latest round of chaos at Twitter and his first impressions of Threads, a competitor app that Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, had launched a day prior. ![]()
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