Threads – Zuckerberg’s Weapon To Counter Musk’s Recent Purchase, Twitter

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta officially launched Threads on Wednesday. Rumours have been making rounds in the past three months about the competitor of Twitter. 

Threads have had a great opening, with upwards of 30 million users signing up till Thursday morning, as per Facebook-parent Meta. Many influencers, celebrities, brands, businesses and many other eminent accounts have registered their presence on the platform.

The brand new Threads is a companion to Instagram, a photo-sharing social media platform also owned by Zuckerberg’s Meta. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion more than a decade ago in 2012.

Threads is being considered as the appropriate competitor to its rival Twitter, with people naming it the “Twitter Killer.”
The launch of this app has heated the clash of titans between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who became the latest owner of Twitter after buying it the previous year. Musk has been experimenting with a bunch of alterations to improve the user experience, like tweaking the algorithms, allowing longer single tweets and the latest being a temporary restriction on the number of tweets a user can view while using the app.

A number of tech companies tried to monetise Twitter‘s instability in the past couple of months. Threads seem to have emerged as a winner amongst them due to its enormous financial backing and adjoined Instagram’s user base, which caters to upwards of two billion monthly active users across the globe. 

Let’s have a better understanding of Threads

Threads, manufactured by Instagram, is a social media platform delivering the service of a real-time public conversation based on text-based posts with the option available to post images and videos. 

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said that their idea was to build an open and friendly space for the public. Instagram is the poster boy for Meta. They wish to take the best from Instagram and build something with that around text to discuss thoughts and ideas.

Instagram and Threads are closely interlinked. A user requires an Instagram account to sign up for the new platform. The already existing username of their Instagram handle is the default username for their Threads account.

Threads will have a 500-character limit per tweet. Users can reply, repost and quote other people’s posts, just like Twitter. They have smartly brought in Instagram’s design element and in-app exploration features. They have offered the choice to share Threads posts directly onto users’ Instagram stories.

As per the Meta, Threads is available for download on both IOS and Android devices in more than 30 languages. They have a default setting for verifying accounts that are verified on Instagram.

There is a slight difference between the competitors, Threads and Twitter. Threads do not have the option of direct messaging, unlike Twitter. But, Instagram has said that they may add features as per public request. 

Instagram, the maker of Threads, had tried consistently to make their app simpler and easy to use. Amidst that process, they detached Threads to be a separate app. These would aid in Instagram being less occupied with public conversations, just letting public comments flourish under posts. It was difficult to reject the idea of building a new app in this raging era of social media, Mosseri said.

The Twitter Killer

Twitter, being the dominant player in the field of real-time public conversations, now has an opponent that might pose a serious threat to its hegemony. 

Since Musk acquired Twitter in a leveraged buyout deal worth $44 billion late last year, the platform has been subject to a number of changes here and there. These changes were not welcomed by all the users. Instead, some have raised questions about the policy issues and technical glitches with a cry for an alternative platform so that they could look for an exit. 

Meta, the parent maker of Threads has an upper hand in terms of user base. As compared to Twitter’s 250 million active user base, Meta has got multifold with more than a staggering 2 billion active user base. 

Zuckerberg had said in a Thread post that in some time, there would be an app for public conversations with over a billion people using it. Twitter had this opportunity but wasn’t able to provide for it. 

Meta still has a long way to go to align the platform with the user’s consent and likes. They have to deal with spam, harassment and false claims on Threads. In the recent layoff season, Meta laid off 20,000 of its workforce, which included workers from arenas of user experience, policy-making, risk analysis, etc.

They have said that they will implement the same Community Guidelines on Threads, similar to their other apps.