Threads Turns Out to be a Wet Fart while Twitter Makes Disruptive Progress

When Meta launched its Twitter competitor, Threads, some of mainstream media buzzed about how it could become a disruptive force and bring competition to the social media sphere. Politico, for example, hyped Threads up as it claimed Twitter's hold on political discourse was loosening. Bloomberg claimed that Twitter was under pressure and "at imminent risk of losing its status as the watercooler of the internet".

However, such bravado turned out to be spoken way too soon. The thing with new social media platforms is there will always be that initial burst of users by virtue of being the new shiny thing on the block. But the novelty factor does not last long and if the new platform isn't offering a better experience than its incumbent competitor, apathy will set in and the users will simply move on. This is simple consumer psychology and that is exactly what happened to Threads.

Gizmodo reported that user engagement fell precipitously in terms of both daily active users and time spent on Threads. Sensor Tower Data estimated daily active users dropped 20% while time spent on the platform fell by half from 20 to 10 minutes. Similarweb similarly estimated daily active users dropped 25% its July 7 peak to July 10 with time spent dropping from 20 minutes to 8 minutes.

Additionally, interest in terms of Google searches has waned over time. There's also speculation that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has lost faith on his own platform based on his inactivity.

Meanwhile, Twitter recently began sharing its ad revenue with a diverse pool of verified users. Tim Pool received $6,000; Benny Johnson earned just north of $9,500; and Brian Krassenstein got a whopping $24,000. Twitter does not just pay political commentators as someone like SK, a person who likes to talk about hip-hop, earned over $2,200. And now, the Twitter Blue subscription makes all the more sense. (Actually, Minds has been using a similar business model for a while).

This is quite a big development as competition heats up. No, not between Twitter and Threads, but Twitter and YouTube. Twitter is proving to be place where users can upload long-form content and get lots of engagement. Tucker Carlson is a shining example of this where his episodes have garnered several millions of views, few of which exceeded 100 million. Even his least-viewed episode (9.8M) makes his best night on Fox News (~4M) a joke. James O'Keefe's BlackRock exposé that I covered here garnered an impressive 15.2 million views.

Meanwhile, YouTube has been getting criticism for misleading advertisers on in-stream video ads. Google quite literally violated its own rules by delivering ads in such a way that artificially boosted views such as placing ads on sites in a fully muted player or auto-playing ads without user initiation. Based on the timing, it appears Twitter is taking advantage of this opening to encroach on YouTube's turf.

Of course, it should be reiterated that Twitter is still a centralized social media platform. The state of your account is at the mercy of whoever is in charge of moderation. While Twitter has gotten better after Elon took over, its centralized nature is still a point of weakness. Those who are more interested in decentralization and censorship-proofing should look at protocols like Nostr or HIVE.

This article is also co-published on Odysee, Publish0x, and Steemit.