Threads, Twitter ...

Anonymous -

Social media competition & upheaval

There is now apparently for the first time major competition for Twitter, the new 'Threads' from Mark Zuckerberg.

Billionaire media tycoon Mike Solana has an interesting article about the whole social media sphere, and why he suspects Zuckerberg's effort won't work in the end, despite possibly for a time having more users that Twitter:

'Zuckerberg wages war'

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/twitters-final-boss-zuckerberg-wages-war

One point Solana makes, is that, underneath the general 'post anything about my life' Facebook (with 2.85 billion users), social media has naturally divided between sites focused on pictures and videos ... and sites focused on text like Twitter.

Sites focused on entertaining people with images and videos (many of YOUNG people of course) are clearly much more popular

Instagram (part of Mark Zuckerberg's Meta / Facebook) - 1.3 billion users

TikTok from China - 1 billion users

Snapchat has 'faded' somewhat but still has 383 million users

By contrast, Twitter has 'only' around 450 million worldwide users, and it is at the top of the text-focused social media platforms

Solana mentions numerous previous attempted rivals of Twitter ... which all have failed to gain traction, even when Twitter was much more heavily censored than now under Musk.

We have seen:

- Gab from Andrew Torba, most truly free speech of all, yet peaking at somewhere from only 4-11 million users ... so maybe only 1/40th the size of Twitter at most
- Parler, deplatformed, set to relaunch
- Truth Social from Donald Trump, little used except to see what Trump is saying

Since Musk took over Twitter, alternatives promoted include:
- Mastodon
- Hive
- Post (from the CEO of the Waze navigation app)
- Notes from Substack

Solana notes that the Substack longer-essay blogging platform, with an easy tool allowing income for bloggers from subscribers, is the most significant large-scale somewhat 'free speech' platform, along with Elon Musk's Twitter

Yet ironically Musk declared war on Substack when it launched the 'Notes' Twitter-rival, Musk cutting off Substack from being promoted adequately on Twitter ... Solana thinks this is a tragic mistake of Musk, dangerous for the future

Solana notes that Twitter rivals have needed to peel off huge numbers of Twitter users in order to be successful ... and even when Twitter was censoring much more, this has been too difficult for anyone.

However, Mark Zuckerberg is able to do something extremely different to make his 'Threads' rival to Twitter more successful -

Zuckerberg tied 'Threads' to the Instagram platform, which has 1.3 billion users, 2.5x the number of users of Twitter

So there are already more than 100 million Threads users, something no other rival to Twitter has ever achieved, and that just in a few days.

But Solana predicts that, given how Instagram users are oriented to visuals, this will not work in the end:

"At this clip, Threads’ userbase will likely surpass Twitter’s, ushering in a flood of obituaries from a press that lock-step hates Elon Musk. 

But shortly after the Twitter obituaries will come a Threads crash of probably historic nature. 

The problem will be content. Most Instagram users will weigh to visuals, as that is all they’re good at, and most will fail to understand why they’re not just back on Instagram or TikTok."