Threads vs Twitter
A reader asked if I was going to get a Threads account.
Short answer: yes, but only if they come out with a web client since I won’t install the app on my phone or tablet.
Longer answer:
Threads is Meta’s new microblogging site. Basically it’s a clone of Twitter, since Twitter seems to be entering a death spiral. Twitter wasn’t exactly in great financial or technical health when Elon Musk took the company private, and Mr. Musk’s decisions after acquiring the company do not give the appearance of having improved the site’s reliability. I haven’t posted much on Twitter recently simply because the logon page isn’t working half the time, which means it usually isn’t worth wasting the time to try.
To be fair, I didn’t use Twitter all that much anyway, even though I’ve been on there since 2009. To really get effective engagement on Twitter, you need to post like 30 or 40 times a day and reply to lots of people, and I simply don’t have time or the interest for that. To be honest, I suspect most of the people reading this would prefer I write the final DRAGONSKULL book instead of wasting time on Twitter. 🙂 All that said, it is pretty clear that Twitter is not in good shape at the moment. Maybe Mr. Musk will turn things around, or maybe he won’t.
To snark a bit, if Mr. Musk ends up destroying Twitter, I think it will be for the greater civilizational good. Twitter was frequently a malignant place, whipping up angry mobs to attack random people, which has had negative effects in many areas of life. Twitter’s oversized cultural importance and prestige, I think, was a bad thing, and the reduction of its cultural hegemony is only to the good.
This leaves an opportunity for someone to come along and seize Twitter’s market. There have been various attempts to replace Twitter, both before and after Mr. Musk bought the platform, but Threads so far is the only one to gain any traction. This is somewhat unfortunate since Threads is owned by Meta, which is the current nom de plume of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which already dominates pretty heavily in the social media sphere.
Longtime readers and listeners will know that I am not a fan of many of the things Meta has done as a business or many of the business decisions that Mr. Zuckerberg has made. However, even I must concede that Meta probably has the most experience of actually managing and maintaining a functional social network. As many people have found out the hard way, managing a social network is hard, and making it profitable is even harder. One of the regrettable truths of the Internet age is that managing an Internet community of any size requires a heavy hand, or else it quickly degenerates into a cesspool of crackpots, crazies, and people posting images of various perversions ranging from mildly disturbing to outright horrifying, to say nothing of seriously illegal.
There are privacy concerns about Threads, which are the same as all the other privacy concerns for Facebook and Instagram. But Meta’s business model at its core is collecting data to sell to advertisers, and since I advertise on Facebook, Meta already knows a lot about me anyway.
I won’t install the apps on my tablet or phone, though. Half the privacy concerns from social media come from installing the apps on mobile devices – there are still privacy concerns from using the sites on a desktop web browser, but not nearly as many. I’m old enough that whenever I have to do anything online, I prefer to do it on a desktop computer (or a laptop if I’m feeling lax), so I never installed the Facebook or Instagram apps on any of my devices, a habit which has turned out to serve me well.
So, to sum up, if Threads comes out with a web client version, I’ll use it, but I won’t install the mobile app. And if it doesn’t come out with a web client (or if Threads ends up crashing and burning), I won’t lose any sleep over its absence from my life. 🙂
-JM