The Threads Explosion — With Alex Heath

0:28The truth is AI security is identity security. identity security fabric can help you secure the next generation of identities, including your AI agents. Visit Okta.com. That's O-K-T-A dot com. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack.

1:09That's technology at Capital One.

1:18Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. Meta, it's introduced threads, the so-called Twitter killer. In just about two days, the platform has added 70 million users. That's right, 70 million signups. But what does it all mean? Is it actually going to compete against Twitter? Is it going to be an Instagram competitor? That is something that's been underappreciated. We'll get into it. Joining us today is an amazing guest. Alex Heath is here. He is a deputy editor at The Verge.

1:49He's been all over this story, including interviews with Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram. And I am so excited to bring this conversation to you today. Alex, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Alex. Double Alex time. Two Alexes, that's right. Let's start it off with a bang. What is Threads? Because I feel like, you know, people have called it a Twitter killer. I don't necessarily see it as that. Can you just describe what the platform is? Yeah, it's interesting. Actually, right before we started this, Mosseri and I have been threading, I guess is the word, about this. and he specifically just said to me like we don't want to kill Twitter.

2:24This is in the context of the news industry which we can get into later but yeah what is Threads? I mean they can be saying that they don't want to kill Twitter but I certainly think they wouldn't be launching this right now had Twitter not kind of started to self-decay like it has in the last several months. So they kind of rushed this thing out. Meta is notorious. They kind of invented this playbook for A-B testing new products in certain markets around the world and the run up to a public launch being very methodical about stats and usage and all these things and bugs. And they just like push this out the door.

3:03I think Adam Mosseri said it was the most YOLO launch they've done in a very long time. And it seems to be working. They're at like what, over 70 million signups now? I think they're going to be chat GPT is the fastest growing consumer software product of all time. So no, it seems to be working. Yeah. So how does the product work? Because there's a feed that looks like Twitter. It's mostly text right now. Would you describe it as analogous to Twitter? What are the similarities and differences? Yeah, I mean, it's really similar. It's it's a much simpler version of Twitter to start. This is definitely a minimum viable minimum viable product.

3:37Like they're going to add no DMs, which Adam most certainly told me that they don't really want to add that right now, but they may be frog-marched to do it. I think they will be because I think people who are power users of Twitter or have been over the years really get that that loop between tweet to DM is really special. But yeah, it's this very simple version of Twitter hooked off of Instagram. You bring your Instagram profile over with you. Your followers kind of auto-populate from Instagram when they join. So it's got this built-in bootstrap network that I think is why you're seeing this crazy sign-up number.

4:15This is being built off of an app that already has over a billion users, you know, Instagram. So of course you're going to get a ton of early interest. I think the real thing to watch will be retention. Do daily users stick on the platform? Do they build a sticky product? And now they're focused on that. So So adding things like a chronological feed, adding more, you know, list type features, bookmarks, even like you can't see your likes right now. There's a lot that needs to happen and they know that and they've got a long laundry list. But right now it's just like a really simple version of Twitter with everyone from Instagram.

4:51So I'm going to make a bold claim and say that it's quite different from Twitter. And the reason why I'm going to put that out there is because there's no following tab. It's just for you. So it's entirely algorithmically sorted. Actually, the algorithm looks a lot like Instagram's algorithm. So I'm curious what you have to say about that. And it also moves a little bit slower. So actually, it seems like the goal of this app, and I think Meta has said this, is to get you to dive into certain conversations and then participate in the threads as opposed to just scroll through a fast feed of tweets.

5:25What do you think about that? Yeah. Well, I think they shipped what they could for launch. it is a very simple kind of engagement based algorithm if you follow more people you'll start to see more people you follow in the feed if you don't they're going to just be recommending stuff to you and I think that's the right approach I think power users people that are listening to a show like this want to have that control in their feed but most people don't talking as you know too Alex like talking to people who work at these platforms over the years the vast majority of users just opt into the algorithmic feed they prefer it.

6:00It's better for engagement has always been. So I think it was actually smart for them to launch that way because like it auto populates threads with content. Now, whether you find that content interesting or not, they've got to fine tune that, give you more ability to say, I don't want to see this. I want to see more of this, less of this. They have all those surfaces on Instagram and Facebook already. And I think it's going to be relatively straightforward for them to port that stuff over to threads especially since threads is built off of instagram's tech stack it is effectively a different skinned version of instagram from like an internal meta backend perspective so i do think that gives them the ability to move rather quickly on making some of those changes okay and i think you just highlighted some really important points so first of all the question of whether you find this interesting or not now there's a lot of energy on the platform because it's a new platform and people are trying to build up their clout and they're following there and you also mentioned that it's effectively a different version or reskin version of Instagram and you know it's been said by some of the observers looking at this thing is that like people are pretty good at posting a picture on Instagram you know showing a photo of your family doesn't really take a lot of insight or a lot of skill and you have a great camera so you're probably going to look good but posting text right that does take a little bit or to consistently write insightful or interesting things that people want to read is much more difficult than posting a photo.

7:23This leads me to believe that people on threads will end up defaulting to images and videos, which we're already starting to see. Actually, when I open my feed now, I think it's more likely that I end up seeing a photo than I end up seeing a text post. And Mosseri said that basically the way to think about this is if you want to have a conversation about something, you put it on threads. If you want to just drop a post, put it on Instagram. but I think it's just such a meaningless distinction and it just leads me to believe that what Meta has created is not actually a Twitter killer but an Instagram killer or an Instagram competitor that is not quite sure not fully appreciating what do you think?

8:01yeah it's an interesting I was thinking about this yesterday too what if so if Threads continues to take off how does the distinction remain between the two? So it will present Meadow with some interesting challenges because they are always thinking about revenue. Obviously, they're a huge company. They have this thing called monetization efficiency, which is a term they use internally about how the different apps monetize relative to the other apps. They try to keep them in balance. the worst situation would be having an app that is new and not monetized potentially overtake engagement on Instagram where they make a lot of money.

8:50So that will be an interesting dilemma they reach when if for some reason Threads is starting to take off to that degree they have to decide do we put the brakes on this because we're not making money on it? is this actually just the new Instagram? How are we going to make it different? I think all that is like TBD. We're like a day or two into this thing, you know, but like that's, I think that's, you're, you're spot on to point that out early, I think. Yeah. Now let me tell you what my feed looks like right now. So I have a picture of Tony Robbins at the top, which I was algorithmically selected, I guess trying to, you know, promote his business, but it's something he would put on Instagram.

9:28Then I refresh and it's a picture of a pizza on the top, which is great. I love pizza, but I would never use Twitter for that. I would use Instagram for that. And I think this is a risk that I just think is underappreciated. I wonder if Meta really thought this through. I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg's animist with Elon Musk might have, and this rush to try to take advantage of a competitor's weakness, might have pushed them into something that, of course, the product is being celebrated, but I also wonder if it's going to be an own goal. It could be. I think they would not mind having an own goal like that's better than just like not doing anything i know for a fact they saw elon's rate limiting fiasco on twitter last weekend over the fourth holiday where he was saying you can only view 600 tweets etc and they saw that and the reaction to that and went oh shit we need to just rush this out they were gonna they were gonna release it next week not this week and give more time for celebrities to get on boarded uh but they decided let's work through the holiday through the fourth let's get this thing out as quick as possible and just take advantage of this moment which i think was smart because if they would have shipped this thing even two years ago maybe even a year ago even right before elan was taking over i think people would be like why do we need another twitter type app but now there's this sense that people are looking for alternatives and they know that and so this is the other thing right even though i think the biggest threat is to instagram especially instagram's growth and we can get to its fight with TikTok in a minute.

10:56It's not good for Twitter either. And I have this theory about Twitter, where is that you want about 100 % of all the breaking news to show up on Twitter. That's the utility, right? If something is happening in the world, you want to be able to know that you can go to Twitter and you'll find out about it. Now, let's say even 25 % of that energy moved elsewhere. Let's say it moved to a place like Blue Sky. Let's say people who used to post breaking news to Twitter, they're now posting it to threads. For some reason, maybe they're posting some of it to TikTok, Twitter as a place where you get like 75 % of the breaking news is so much less useful than a place that when you get 100%.

11:30In fact, it's a much bigger ding to it than just a 25 % decline in value. So I'm curious what you think this means for Twitter, how Twitter should feel about this, even if, you know, potentially it's not exactly going to kill the app, it could degrade the app in a way that's actually a lot more meaningful than completely destroying it. Yeah, I mean, I mean, we know how Twitter feels because Alex Spiro, most personal lawyer, sent this super cringe letter to Meta yesterday threatening to sue because they think that Twitter employees are working, former Twitter employees that Meta hired are working on threads and stealing Twitter's secret sauce.

12:06And then Meta responded saying, no, Twitter employees are working on threads. That's not a thing, which was, I thought, a great response. I think the interesting framing here is what most Sarah and I were talking about on threads, right, actually, before we started recording, where he literally said to me, my take is from a platform's perspective, any incremental engagement or revenue they, the news industry, might drive is not at all worth the scrutiny, negativity, and let's be honest, integrity risks that come along with them. So that's him being pretty blunt about how Meta feels about promoting news.

12:40And they're not going to take any active role in putting the thumb on the scale for news to flourish on threads. They're not going to they're not going to unpromote it. They're not going to discourage it. But they could keep it at an arm's length and it would still feel better for a lot of people disseminating news than Twitter, which is where the risk really comes from Twitter. Yeah. What do you think this means for like a product perspective for Twitter? Well, I mean, we're so early in this, like we should have this discussion again in a couple of months. Like they can't even really calculate what a DAU is on threads yet because we're not even a week into this.

13:13Four days in. But imagine it continues on its trajectory. Yeah, for the foreseeable future. The energy is certainly there. The news industry is already there in a pretty big way. I was scrolling through and I was like, the economist is on this thing. Yeah, well, think about it. I underestimated how much the news industry had migrated to Instagram, even though Instagram hasn't really been a place you think of for news. But all the brands have accounts there just because it's such a huge platform and those accounts get automatically ported into threads. so that's happening while at the same time Mosseri the head of the app is saying like we're not going to promote this like we're okay with it but we don't love it like we don't want the baggage definitely don't want the threads 2024 election like I'm waiting for RFK Jr.

14:03to get on there and start talking about anti-vax stuff and get labeled and like we're going to be in this like it's like you and I have been covering Facebook for a long time I just like I'm ready for this cycle to like star all over again but like with a new app for Twitter. It's just another problem. I mean, I don't like, is this, is this their main problem? I think their main problem is like, they've got a bunch of vendors that they haven't paid who are threatening to sue them or have sued them for bills that they haven't paid. Like they can barely hire all of their former employees are wanting the company to burn that like Twitter has very few friends right now.

14:43And so I, I, yeah, the news leaving Twitter is a problem for them, but like, I don't, I don't know if it's even like their fifth biggest problem right now. Well, I disagree with that. I think that, you know, the stuff that you're talking about, money can fix problems, right? If your bills aren't paid, you can figure that out. But ultimately, like if you're a tech product, what you are is what you are for users, right? And it does seem like the product is degrading for users. I mean, users are there for up to the minute information and entertainment right so if that is trying to take that entertainment thing and and threads and news news folks are trying to find anywhere they can to go that's not twitter and then what are you going to be on the platform for uh elon you like elon i mean that's kind of like where it's trending these days um you know like he bought it saying he needs though it's essential to have a town square for the world and it's become his town square and i just think it's deeply fascinating that meta this company that you know a year or two ago everyone was going like these guys are evil they should not you know they're a monopoly they shouldn't have more power in social media now we're like please like we need an alternative to twitter run by mark zuckerberg like can this be the actual town square uh the irony of all this is i think meta may actually create a good town square or at least a better one than what Elon has in mind for Twitter.

16:06So I want to talk about their ability to create a better town square. But first of all, let's just kind of key in on what you just said. It's just that it does seem like everybody who's talked about how Mark Zuckerberg is the root of all evil is all of a sudden like praying to Mark Zuckerberg to take the energy away from Twitter. What do you make of this shift, especially for many in the media, to sort of go from Zuckerberg's biggest and Facebook's biggest critics to now their biggest supporters? I mean, it's the end. Is it intellectual dishonesty? I mean, what would you say it is? I think it's the enemy of my enemy.

16:39You know, I think everyone found a tech billionaire mogul that they hate more than Zuckerberg and it's Elon Musk. And it's kind of as simple as that. Like, I mean, how do you if it's if it's about rooting for executives, then how do you have a lot of credibility or any credibility? If it's I mean, I guess like I'm trying to wonder, I'm not I'm trying to wonder how oppressed that could have, how they so totally went after Zuckerberg, can cheerlead threads and still be believed in terms of their ability to evaluate technology issues critically. I don't know. If you took a normal person off the street and said, do you think the news industry can evaluate these tech companies critically and honestly, would they say yes?

17:29I mean, I think we as the collective news industry have been losing our credibility slowly as objective truth sayers for a long time, which is a whole bigger discussion. But I do think Mark Zuckerberg, as your lower third, you know, suggesting his image has shifted quite a bit. And it's also a result of like the jujitsu and the cage match and bragging about how much sleep he gets and his kids. And like he's got this kind of dad vibe going. that is just more endearing than musk's um whatever you want to call it i i don't know like um i i just it's interesting to watch today said that what musk has been doing is just the walrus which is his yeah his so-called uh wrestling move where he just like lays on top of you and just wiggles and they're like most of what he's been doing has just been you know lump maneuvers without much thought or skill.

18:24Yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, Elon has built some amazing companies. Like, he knows how to do hardware. He knows how to do deep tech, scientific breakthroughs. No question. And software. I mean, PayPal is an excellent. And software, although his influence on PayPal, I think, yeah, definitely was influential. But, like, that's kind of a little bit, I think, thornier. but yeah in terms of like he can make amazing cars and spaceships and the satellites like absolutely software and people my boss and eli wrote this great essay when he took over twitter called welcome to hell just saying like basically all these things that you think you're good at like you have no idea how different social media is and because it's people and uh the the weirdness that comes along with that um mark zuckerberg has been doing this his whole life he knows nothing except social networks and so uh mark's not out there trying to make cars but elon's now trying to do social media and mark's now saying as of this week like let me show you like how it's done and and and like oh and we may go fight in a cage as well which like i still hope happens obviously but um for now we're just in software fights the cage match has been such a great promotional tool for threads like if you couldn't matter you couldn't imagine a better uh way to gin up interests in your new social platform than to say you're going to fight the world one of the world's richest men who happens to own the biggest competitor in a steel cage yeah it's great i hope it happens i mean it seems like even less likely now but i do hope it happens especially because i just i played such a small but fun role in it where elon was responding to me about it and And I just wanted, I just, it would be, it's going to be so self-fulfilling if I can just be sitting there ringside and watch the walrus take place.

20:22It would be great to see. I mean, he has to try the walrus at this point if he's in there. And, you know, if it happens at the Coliseum, that's going to be a bummer because, you know, that's going to be super hard to get into. It's very limited seating. It's going to be very expensive. So I hope it's actually in Vegas. I hope Dana White gets that done in Vegas. But, yeah, we'll see. Exactly. All right. I want to take a quick break and then come back and talk a little bit about whether threads can actually make friendlier social media. And then we can also potentially get to some questions. We're streaming live here on LinkedIn.

20:54So if you have questions, please drop them in and we'll get to them. Yeah. So why don't we do that? All right. We're here with Alex Heath. He's a deputy editor at The Verge. Very big into this whole story about threads. We'll be back right after this. Shape the future of enterprise AI with agency. A-G-N-T-C-Y. Now an open source Linux Foundation project, Agency is leading the way in establishing trusted identity and access management for the Internet of Agents, a collaboration layer that ensures AI agents can securely discover, connect, and work across any framework. With agency, your organization gains open, standardized tools and seamless integration, including robust identity management to be able to identify, authenticate and interact across any platform.

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22:29It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition with Alex Eath, deputy editor at The Verge. He's been covering this thread story in great depth. Um, and well, anyway, it's been a week for you, Alex. I won't get to see what it's done. It's a little week, yeah. So let's just talk about the dynamics of, of threads because when Zuckerberg and Mosseri have talked about how they want to make this like a friendlier version of Twitter, I thought, okay, that's a little bit delusional.

23:10Social media isn't friendly at all. However, um, there have been some interesting things in the product that have been, um, pretty intriguing in terms of the way that they're operating it. So first of all, there's no counts on the numbers of retweets or rethreads you get. And people have talked about how Twitter is this anger video game and the points are the retweet numbers. And now they don't display the points. I mean, they're very interested in, you know, showing metrics and hiding metrics. And so like the fact that they've hidden those is pretty telling. It also seems like the algorithm is just prioritizing.

23:43I mean, you can, you know, tweak a social media algorithm to be like if someone calls you like an idiot or a dummy or a loser or nerd, you know, get that out of there. And if someone says awesome, amazing, super, that's so cool, you know, you can promote it. So what do you think about the way that the product is structured? And do you think they have a snowball's chance in hell of actually making it a friendly social media forum? Because that would be quite an accomplishment. I mean, give them the Pulitzer if they do that. I mean. Or the Nobel Peace Prize, actually. I don't know. is it possible to quantify the friendliness of a platform?

24:16I don't know. I'm sure Matt has tried vibes quantification. I mean, this is, this has been done. Like the comments on YouTube, for instance, are like the meanest place on the internet and, you know, places like Reddit can, is a helpful place and places like Twitter is an angry place. I do think the identity portion of this is important. So you can certainly have alts on Instagram and have pseudonymity. there. But in general, you're getting a lot of people who are themselves, like they're real names coming over from Instagram and are following the people they follow on Instagram, which is a good mix of people you actually know.

24:57And of course, brand accounts and celebrities. But it's not this totally anonymous, unpersonal thing like Reddit or even Twitter has been where you're just kind of coming into it blind. So I do think that has a chance. I mean, the vibe I've gotten in the last, you know, whatever, 36 hours is that it is a pretty friendly place in general. I would hope that a new platform wouldn't just start off being super mean, but I guess it could. I don't know how they make it ensure that it's friendly. I mean, what will inevitably happen the bigger it gets is that people who want to sow discord, people who want to rage, dunk, bully, the conspiracy theory stuff.

25:43That's all going to come on there and they're going to have to moderate that. And I think they're prepared to do that. They're pretty aggressive with moderation on Instagram and it's the same tooling. So is Instagram friendly social media? I guess that's the question. If you think Instagram is relatively friendly social media, I think threads will be too. It seems like it, but also Instagram is filled with fakeness. Well, yeah. And I think threads already is too. You've got a lot of like the LinkedIn, high LinkedIn, but like LinkedIn thirst trap influencer content, like recycling memes from that.

26:20I've seen the same thing posted on Twitter and LinkedIn. Like there's a lot of people trying to already game the system. But I don't know. It seems friendlier, at least for now. Yeah. So we have a question from someone watching here from Doug about whether Meta is really ready to moderate threads. And I am curious, like if you think there is going to be this kind of culture war issue where like Twitter will be like, oh, people will say Twitter is the free speech network and Meta is the censorship network. And, you know, so I'm curious what you think the moderation is going to look like. And does it like divide into, you know, two networks where like Twitter is like, you know, potentially like, you know, true social and you have meta as like the, you know, Democrat Twitter.

27:04I definitely don't think they want it to be Democrat Twitter. I have already seen like their warning labels, misinformation labels that they have on Instagram. People have been saying that's been spotted on threads. So, again, it's like the same tooling. So, well, are they ready to moderate it? Again, we're talking about something that is literally built on Instagram's tech stack, using the exact same moderation, content guidelines, et cetera. So, yeah, they're going to moderate it. They certainly have more moderation capabilities than Twitter does, even before Elon. So, yes, I do think it's going to, there's no nudity, for example, which is a huge difference from Twitter.

27:43Likely. Or like Twitter is the porn social network. And then. Yeah. Well, I saw someone say Tumblr for incels, which I think is good. Yeah. Oh, my God.

27:57Yeah, it is. It is interesting. I mean, the porn will keep the appeal of Twitter. I don't know. Ever since Elon's took over, I've definitely seen way more showing up in like really benign searches. I like search for like the Mets game. The next thing I know, I'm like watching, seeing this awful image of Skull. I mean, like the top thing on my feed on Twitter yesterday was a like three hour Lex Friedman video interviewing RFK Jr. Like literally it was like maybe three hours long, like at the top of the feed. And I'm just like, OK, this is what this platform is now. It's just it's changed so much.

28:31Do you find Lex? Do you think Lex is right wing? I think he's seems more down the center. Yeah, no, I'm not saying he's right wing or that. I'm just saying like that's the kind of content it's like. Right. It's Elon's circle of who he spends time with. Twitter has become this reflection of him, not a town square, not something that's objectively more has bigger breadth, more types of content. It's actually narrowed quite a bit into, like, I think the circle that Elon would like to like go to a barbecue with on like a Friday. Yes. So what do you think about pseudonymous account? Is that the right way to say it?