It was a “risky bet,” said Instagram boss Adam Mosseri last week at the start of the Twitter competitor thread. Apparently it’s paying off. The app broke the 100 million user mark in record time. And still has a lot of room for improvement. The curious thing is that you really don’t want Twitter’s most important topics there.
When exactly the 100 million users were cracked is not exactly clear. According to the industry service Quiver Quantitative, the mark is said to have been skipped on Monday morning. Other websites based on app downloads had even reported the brand over the weekend. In any case, it is a record: The chatbot ChatGPT needed two months for the 100 million users, with Tiktok it was nine months. Twitter itself had needed more than five years for this number of users.
This is bad news for Elon Musk. Ever since he took over Twitter in the fall, perception of the short message service has suffered from his sometimes erratic decisions. With mass layoffs, the slashing of content moderation and the unblocking of some extremist users, he has clearly changed the mood among users. The revision of the verification model for a subscription also cost trust.
Threads now benefits from this. It designed them as “a sanely run alternative,” according to previously leaked meta-documents. In plain language this means: More moderation, less offensive or otherwise problematic posts.
But, interestingly, also less of what made Twitter great. Mosseri explained in a Threads post that the platform was deliberately not aimed at politics and news topics. “The small benefits that come from this in terms of engagement and revenue aren’t worth the hassle, negativity (let’s be honest) and integrity risk in my view.” You would rather focus on other topics such as sports, music, fashion and entertainment.
This development fits with the general direction of Meta in recent years. After years of Facebook becoming the number one news source for many people and benefiting from the heated debates there, allegations of fake news and contributing to the increasing division of society brought the company a lot of trouble. At the beginning of 2021, the emergency brake was pulled accordingly: since then, political news has deliberately been given less weight in the user feed. So it would be surprising if Threads would do it differently now.
Threads definitely has the potential for more growth. Every Instagram user automatically has an account with the network, which means two billion monthly active users who only have to log in. And: Threads is not yet available in the EU (here you can find out how you can try it anyway). So one of the most important markets for Western services is still missing. The expectations are correspondingly high: According to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, the service wants to reach one billion people in the near future.
This is significantly more than Twitter has ever achieved. Although Musk has repeatedly emphasized that Twitter user numbers are reaching record highs, Cloudflare reported over the weekend that the numbers were consistently falling. Twitter has not released any official figures since the takeover. In November, Twitter had almost 260 million active users.
The Twitter owner reacted over the weekend as one would expect from him. Musk has repeatedly attacked Instagram’s parent company Meta in the past few days, accusing him of paid censorship. It got even more personal against company boss Mark Zuckerberg, with whom he has already arranged to fight a cage fight. “Zuck is a cuck,” Musk tweeted in reference to a sexual fetish where men humiliate themselves by letting other men have sex with their partners in front of them. Then Musk immediately followed up himself. Posting an emoji of a ruler, he wrote, “I suggest a literal cock comparison.”
Sources: Quiver Quantitative, The Verge, Adam Mosseri, Elon Musk
