Meta takes aim at Twitter with new app Threads

Is Threads the Twitter killer? And if so, I just have one question: why?

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is lesson number 594, so if you’re looking for the transcript, just go to PlainEnglish.com/594 and you’ll see it there. That’s thanks to JR, the producer.

Every Plain English lesson has five parts. Two of those parts are in the audio, we have a main story and we talk about an English expression. The story today is Threads, the new app from Meta, the maker of Instagram and Facebook. And the expression I’ll teach you today is “get off to a good start.”

I told you there are five parts. There’s a step-by-step video lesson, and that lesson will show you how to explain the biggest reason for something, even if there might be more than one reason. This is a complicated topic, not for beginners. It’s a way to express a complex idea and we show you exactly how to do it in today’s video at PlainEnglish.com/594.

We have a section on informal speech, too; it’s called “Learn the Lingo.” And today’s is about the term “trash talk.” And then there are our interactive exercises, too, which will help you with pronunciation, listening, grammar, prepositions, and more. So all of that is at PlainEnglish.com/594.

With that out of the way, let’s dive into today’s story.

Meta takes aim at Twitter with new app Threads

Elon Musk is an accomplished man. He’s the pioneer CEO of an electric car company, Tesla, the first to mass produce luxury electric cars that people actually want to buy. He co-founded PayPal. He’s an investor and entrepreneur in many different industries. He made himself the richest man in the world. And now, he has done something that might surpass even his greatest accomplishments to date: He made Meta cool again.

Meta is the company formerly known as Facebook. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, which makes virtual reality headsets.

Meta has struggled in recent years. Growth on its main platform, Facebook, has slowed, if only because so many people in the world already have it. Instagram has come under fire for promoting harmful content and negatively affecting its users’ mental health .

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, placed a huge bet on the “metaverse,” and changed the company’s name to “Meta.” But the clunky headsets and lonely virtual “worlds” of the metaverse have not caught on with consumers—most people can’t even tell you what the metaverse is, much less where you can find it. Meta’s stock price had fallen 75 percent from its peak.

The stock price has recovered, but Meta still needed a win. And it got one this month with Threads.

In technology, you often say you can build it or buy it. Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook: it was a new idea that started from scratch . But it bought WhatsApp—someone else had built WhatsApp, Facebook bought it and improved it. But there’s another option that sits between building a tool and buying a tool, and that is copying a tool.

Meta is great at copying ideas from competitors. Do you like Instagram Stories? Facebook copied that from Snapchat. Do you like Reels on Instagram? That’s kind of like TikTok. And now it introduced a text and link-based social network called Threads, which looks a lot like Twitter.

Threads was designed to compete directly with Twitter. When you open it, you’ll notice a lot of similarities. It’s text-based. You can share links and photos. You can follow other accounts and see those accounts’ posts in your feed. You can reply to posts of others and tag users. Messages are short, no more than 500 characters.

It’s hard to build a social network from scratch for many reasons. First, you need a good idea. But you also need users to sign up and you need users to come back and keep using it. Meta learned, in the early days of Facebook, that people will come back to a platform if they’re connected to other people, if they have a reason to come back, and if it doesn’t feel lonely.

So instead of starting an app completely from scratch, Meta decided to loosely tie Threads to Instagram. When you download the Threads app, you use your Instagram login. Some people were confused by that: why should I use my login from one app to access another? But that’s a feature, not a bug . That means that you already have a login, you already have a username, and you can easily be connected to the accounts you already follow, and which follow you, on Instagram.

Threads got over 150 million downloads in its first two weeks. Meta believes it can reach a billion users on Threads. That sounds ambitious, but there are over 2.3 billion active monthly users on Instagram, so it would only need to capture a fraction of Instagram’s popularity to reach its goal.

But why? What market need is Threads serving? Primarily, it’s an alternative to Twitter, which seems to be self-destructing before our very eyes. Since taking control of Twitter, Elon Musk has implemented a bizarre set of policies that have infuriated users. He removed the blue check mark for verified accounts, expanded a subscription service that nobody really wanted to pay for, he reduced benefits of free accounts, scared off advertisers, and, most recently, limited the number of Tweets a user could view—not post, view.

Add to that Musk’s polarizing style and controversial public statements, and a lot of people were ready for a change. And Meta was there to pounce.

But that still doesn’t answer the question of why. Why would Meta do this? Twitter is not very profitable. Twitter has never been able to monetize its users like other social networks have. It’s not like there’s a big pile of money in this type of platform. Even if Meta grabs a lot of user attention with a text-based app, even if Meta crushes Twitter and everyone moves to Threads, that still doesn’t mean Meta will make any money off this project. Will Meta have the secret to monetizing a Twitter clone? Will Meta do a better job at monetizing a text-based app than Twitter did in its seventeen years of trying? Maybe, but that remains to be seen.

From the perspective of user adoption, though, Threads got off to a great start . The product is incomplete, but users didn’t seem to mind at first. There’s no way to access Threads from a browser. You can’t DM users. There aren’t clickable hashtags yet. It’s not as easy to find relevant people to follow, and the timeline is not refined—you see a lot of random accounts. I was seeing a lot of posts from Ritz crackers, for example. Meta promises continued improvement in the future.

For now, Meta is relishing its success. Despite some predictable trash talk from Musk, Meta, in its public statements, is promoting Threads as a positive, friendly place. It promised that the Threads algorithm would not promote controversial or divisive content.

Still, they need to show that there’s a reason to join, sign up, and keep coming back. The tie-in with Instagram shows they can get a user to sign up. But traffic data in weeks after its launch showed that a lot of users were not yet ready to come back.

There’s probably a grace period of a few weeks or a month or two, but Threads is going to have to incorporate hashtags, DMs, and other features that users expect. And it’s going to have do that quickly. But it is looking good so far.

It’s crazy how fast things change. Instagram got to 100 million users after two years, WeChat a little over a year. TikTok got to 100 million users after several months, ChatGPT in 2 months, and now Threads in 5 days.

Quote of the Week

Speaking of social media, speaking of Twitter, here’s a quote from the 1700s. It’s by an English poet, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She said, “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.”

So we’ll see about Threads. They promise not to promote divisive content. Is this a bit of a mea culpa? Does the market want this? Sometimes we say stuff like “Civility costs nothing and buys everything” but our behavior values the controversy, the trash talk . We’ll see.

Anyway, that’s today’s quote, dating back a few hundred years, but still relevant today, from Mary Wortley Montagu, “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.”

Now, I’ll show you what it means to get off to a good (or great or bad!) start.