Instagram Threads is here to crush Twitter

25:10That's at least the pitch, whether they follow through with that and that all works as planned remains to be seen. And there's obviously, you know, you should have plenty of skepticism with the largest centralized social media platform in the world saying it's going to embrace a decentralized protocol. I do think the fact that they're doing it with threads, with a new app and not Instagram, signals that they're serious about this. And in most areas retelling to me, they really can't retroactively embrace ActivityPub on an existing app that's at that kind of scale they needed to have something fresh.

25:40And it's pretty clear that he drove this. I was re-watching a TED Talk he gave last year about this and about how creators will inevitably embrace these open protocols for a lot of these reasons. This is something he's been saying even before Threads was a twinkle in Meta's Eye. I do think they're going to be met with extreme, fierce backlash in the Fetaverse. They know this. They're already getting this. I've been hearing from people in the Fetaverse that you're supposed to just say Fetaverse, not the Fetaverse. I'm going to get a bunch of angry tweets about that. People from Fetaverse? No, I'm out on that.

26:12It's like Brooklyn. It's like a neighborhood. I'm all for it. I think ActivityPub's a great idea. I will say the early pro-powerful community on Thetaverse, y 'all are a little too anal on your terms. Let's just loosen up a little bit. But yeah, there's no trust of meta here. I tend to side with John Gruber on if you're going to really say that this is an open protocol, you need to treat it as one and you need to let anyone come on and not just be already talking about blocking them. At least see what they're going to do. But I mean, that's like the beauty of Fediverse. I'm trying to embrace it.

26:48I hate that already. No. There's an article that should go there. That was awful. I didn't. It's like when Tim Cook says, this is iPhone. Like, no. It's an iPhone. It is the Fediverse. Yeah. But this is like the point of the Fediverse is that if you don't like, if you go and you build a big audience on threads and it finally goes live and you don't like that you can't post boobies, you can go to a server where you can post boobies. Except the boobies will not be on threads. So what server has the biggest audience? It's going to be threads by a factor of many X. So do you care about censorship?

27:26Do you care about distribution? You're going to have to make a choice. Threads or boobies. It's very clear. And of course, Meta knows this better than any other company is that distribution trumps all. And I will say the earliest bull case for threads is that the notifications are just popping off. Like I know Neelai and others were talking about this when they first got on. I thought my phone was ringing last night. I had to mute it instantly because it's got that Instagram graph built in. The day one distribution that you have on threads is just it's so much more than Mastodon. it's honestly more than Twitter these days.

28:01Like there are eyeballs there. And as a creator on one of these platforms, when you're not getting paid by the platform, guess what? You're going to want to use the platform with the biggest reach. And so meta knows this. And I think even when they hook into activity pub, they know they're going to be the server with the biggest reach. And so they're going to buy that very fact, be able to extend their policies, their way of doing things throughout the, the fediverse. And that's, I think, what's really getting a lot of the other server admins worried is that all of a sudden this giant open protocol may be just governed by the Instagram content guidelines.

28:36Are they going to actually monetize threads? Like Twitter was notoriously difficult to monetize. Yes. For many reasons. I would say incompetence was up there. Is that really the play here? Or is it just like this is our goodwill project. Now you all like us. Go use Instagram and Facebook where we make our money. We're no longer in a zero interest rate environment, Alex Kranz. No, they're absolutely going to put ads in this thing, I would say, sooner than they had even expected, given the scale. This is Meta's playbook. They wait for something to have the kind of velocity that it could hit a billion users, and then they do ads.

29:15I think Mosseri wants you to think that they're not interested in monetizing. He has said a couple of times, like, he keeps calling it a champagne problem. and it's like, well, no, this is either going to work and you're going to make money off of it or you're going to shut it down. Like there's no middle option where this thing continues to live without being monetized. Yeah, they want to make sure the product's sticky, has good retention. They worry about retention. They kind of set the industry benchmark for retention and social networks. They have the playbook that they invented that the rest of the industry follows for this.

29:45So they will use that playbook. They will add ads when it's at this nice kind of like self-circulating, self-building place. And yeah, it's going to look like Instagram in terms of that. I guess I just wonder how valuable that is because Twitter, in addition to being terrible at monetizing, also was much smaller than a lot of these other ones, right? Like it was way smaller than Facebook. It was way smaller than Instagram. And Threads, even if it gets to Twitter size, is going to still be way smaller than the cash cows. Yeah, but you have to approach this as a marketer. if it's another toggle.

30:19I can never do that. So walk me through it, please. Okay. I talk, I regrettably have to talk to these people for my job. Sorry. No, I'm just kidding. I love marketers. Keep, keep talking to me about the platforms, please. If it's another toggle in your dashboard, when you're running an ad on Instagram to run it in threads and you can reach, you know, a hundred to 300 million people on there, you're going to do it. It's zero cost to you. It's all upside. This is where the benefits of scale and graphs kind of coalescing. at the plus billion mark, is going to just keep giving Meta kind of tremendous incumbent advantages with new products like this.

30:55And they know that. This is why we're not seeing it in Europe yet, right? Because when you first hear about it and you hear about Threads, you're like, well, this should go in Europe. Because I know they're afraid of the DMA. That's the first thing you think of when you think of Threads, is this should go to Europe? Always think of it. Threads seems very European to you. No, no, no. We've been talking a lot. There's been a lot of noise today about how it's not in Europe yet. And that seems to be because of the DMA, right? Like, that's the fear is that they can't do it because of the DMA. And what the DMA says is that, like, you have to be kind of open and honest.

31:31You have to, like, be good stewards. And you need to let people take their followers where they want to go and all of this. And that's like, okay, that sounds like everything that Thread does. And then I guess the other side of that is that also it's part of meta. and meta is huge and will inevitably swallow everything whole because when you're that big, that's just how you process everything. I just have one more thing to say on the monetization before we go, which is this is another place that it is very useful to be part of Instagram, which has a number of very good monetization tools for creators that would lend themselves very well to a product like threads, things like gifts and subscriptions and the tip stuff they can do and shopping like all that stuff is built and at scale and making huge amounts of money for lots of people and you can just stick it into threads without all that much work i think the interface designers would have some work to do i think the interface designers already have some work to do which we can talk about if you guys would like to but let's let's get into i both want to talk about the the europe stuff and then i want to get to some of the questions that you got about threads on threads yeah but first let's take a break we'll be right back

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35:09We're back. Let's talk about this Europe thing. I don't want to dwell on this for too long because it's boring policy, but it is worth explaining. And Heath, you talked to Moser specifically about this. What is your sense of why this thing didn't launch in Europe? Yeah, so Threads is not available in the EU. I'm sorry to everyone in the French countryside on vacation right now. And according to Kranz, it's a very European app, so it's a real shame. It's very European. Everybody wants it. You'll have to cry into your cheese and your wine. But that does leave out a market of hundreds of millions of people.

35:41It's a huge missed market opportunity for Threads initially, and they know this. This is a really interesting example of what the EU is doing regulation-wise with big tech. They have the Digital Markets Act, which is going into effect next year, and it labels Meta and other big companies like Apple and Google as gatekeepers. And with that distinction comes a whole new host of compliance requirements that, if are not met, result in insane fines, like not just like your one-off fines that these companies happily pay, but debilitating fines. Which is the way fines should actually function. Sure. Sure.

36:19They should discourage whatever the things you're not supposed to do from doing. Yes. No, I agree. Fines should be proportional to the company size. Yeah, they've been parking tickets so far. This is not, you know, Meta's not alone here. I've heard people at Apple, Google are also freaking out about how to comply with the DMA. There's a lot of unknowns. There's a bunch of interoperability standards. There's self-preferencing standards that have to be met. But I think with Threads in particular, they're worried about being compliant with the data sharing and the data leakage between Threads and the rest of Meta.

36:51Since Threads is this quasi separate thing, but it still is connected to Instagram. It has its own terms of service, but it also has Meta influence, Meta content guidelines. They're definitely going to be sharing that data. and basically whatever meta tests to how they operate this uh they are very much liable to that at a station being accurate uh under the new dma and if not they're going to get fined and not only that they have to be able to prove it like like aggressively and constantly and that was one of the things most areas said that i thought was really interesting is that like the tooling just to be able to document this stuff is a huge amount of work yeah it's a huge amount of work this is one of the companies with perhaps the strongest global if not one of the strongest global lobbying policy presences in the world.

37:36They've had more headroom on this than anyone. And they, I think it's very interesting that they don't feel confident to launch what they think could be the fastest growing software product since Chad GPT in Europe, even though the DMA does not go into effect until maybe spring of next year, because they're that worried about potentially being liable. I think this means that other big product launches like this will also not go into the EU region initially as well. I don't think this will be the only one. They do really want to get into the EU. I just think it's going to take several months at minimum before they can make sure that they can hold up to their, you know, attestations of how they're using the data.

38:13So kind of like video games going to Australia, where they always have to wait forever because there's all the Australian regulation and they're like, okay, now I get to kill everybody. Or China, as in, you know, China's an even more stringent example. Well, and again, in this particular case, Instagram was in such a rush to get this out that it so clearly sensed a moment to do this that it made what seems like sort of a calculated decision to say, this is a problem we could not solve by July 5th. So our option was either don't launch on July 5th or don't launch in the EU. And I think they just picked that.

38:46Yeah, Mosseri was very clear to me and others that they felt they had a very narrow window to launch this thing to really capitalize on the Twitter turmoil. And they didn't want to miss that window. And their instinct was probably right there, as hard as it is to not have a massive market that can use the app. What do you guys think about that? I mean, I think there's a lot of people. We've had people in our Slack that are a little more sympathetic to the EU here versus Meta. Obviously, Meta doesn't have a great track record with privacy. People think that what the EU is doing is generally good.

39:21I don't really know. I haven't formed a full opinion on that. I think GDPR has been widely considered a disaster and did not actually make the internet more private. And if anything, just kind of solidified incumbents who could pay for the internal tooling and all of that. You get to click a little button. Yeah, sure. Every time you go to a new website, you click that button. Do you feel like your data is more protected because of that button? No, I feel like I'm annoyed I have to click the button. Yeah. The last big sweeping regulation was that pop-up that the EU gave us. And I haven't seen any independent analysis that what the DMA is proposing will result in anything substantially better.

40:00I hope it will. I think these gatekeepers need to have more incentives to allow for competition. It's just very tough to craft this kind of regulation. Very tough. They're trying to cover a lot of different companies with one law. And every one of these companies is very different. They all have different goals. They all have different size of customer bases, the different stuff that they do really, really poorly that destroys our privacy. There's not a lot of consistency there. And I think it makes sense that Meta said, no, we're not going to go in there. We're not going to challenge this right now.

40:38We are going to acknowledge it. I think that feels like it's working exactly how it's intended. And hopefully European users don't get mad and be like, well, we just should get rid of this law so I can give Meta my data. And I'm sure Meta would love it if all the users rose up and were like, give us threats. But I'm like, I think this is working exactly how it's intended. And I wish other countries would be thinking more about legislating this stuff, not necessarily in the DMA way, because I don't know enough about it to have a really strong opinion on it beyond it sounds nice at first glance.

41:12And I would love more legislation that sounds nice and actually works and actually provides fines that are meaningful and do things like – I think that's working great. The fact that Meta looked at it and was like, I don't want to risk the fines. I want to figure out and make sure that we're complying with this law. Like, that's wonderful. That's working exactly how it's intended. And that's great. Yeah, I tend to agree. I think if I'm the European Commission and the folks who wrote the DMA, they're probably thrilled that this is how it went down. Because a big part of the goal is to make these companies sit down and think about the consequences of their actions.

41:48And I think the challenge for a lot of these regulators is that they've always been somewhere between like one and 65 steps behind the tech industry. they're regulating and litigating old problems while all these other companies are out talking about like crypto and ai and then they skip right past privacy and try to regulate ai and they will have moved on to something else and the dma basically swung such a big hammer that it was like okay we're gonna stop everybody for a minute and i think this seems like from what i've heard from folks the kind of policy that is gonna play out really slowly over time and is only going to be sort of answered as it gets litigated and questions about like, who is a gatekeeper and what does that mean?

42:27And how do we decide who has that power and who doesn't like that stuff is going to take a while to really shake out. But I think just the fact that it made meta take its time on this, I think they're going to see as a big victory. And again, this is kind of an unusual situation in that they didn't have time to iron out some of the policy issues for a global launch. The question for me will be whether that becomes the thing like you're talking about. If the move becomes these companies take longer to launch their global products as a result of trying to get the regulation right versus everybody launches everything and then launches it a year later in the EU when they can figure out how to do the paperwork correctly.

43:07I have no idea which one of those is going to play out, but one of those is going to be politically significantly less popular among European people than the other. People really want their tech and their services and especially things like networks that have a global kind of utility to them. And I'm very curious to see if the EU gets blowback in that regard. I just keep thinking about all the Instagram users. Like there's a thing on your Instagram badge now that shows what number user you were on threads. And I bet you there is a not insubstantial number of people in the EU who are pissed at how high their number is going to be.

43:44Maybe they'll give them like a special one. Like they have their official thread number and then their EU thread number. Oh, that's fun. I like that. So that way they can still have a little bragging rights, but not as much as Keith. I want to get into threads reader questions, but I also quickly I want to address. I've just seen a lot of commentary on this and have been asked this directly. Why didn't ask Mosari about this? People have been pointing to the App Store privacy labels for threads and all of the data they collect. and we could talk we should actually do like a what has been the impact of apple's privacy labels in the app store segment at some point there's a lot to unpack here newsflash they have not really worked and they don't actually mean anything i was just gonna say i actually think there's nothing to unpack here i think the answer is it's basically security theater i think the simplest thing we can say now is that if you already use instagram if you are instagram user you have absolutely no reason to be complaining or saying you're not signing up for threads because of these privacy labels.

44:44You're already using Instagram, which is governed under the exact same data policy as threads. So that's my short answer. We should absolutely talk more about privacy labels and maybe talk to some developers who have gone through it later. But I just wanted to get that out of the way. That's exactly right. And I think the argument of is this company collecting way too much data on you is the answer is yes, right? Like Neil, I posted in Slack, he got a thing from Threads asking to connect to other devices on his local network, which is like insane, right? Like this app wants everything you will give it, including like your health and fitness information.

45:19But if you've ever used a Meta app, you're already giving it that information. This is not a new problem. If you're mad, it's still about Meta's data collection. Like save like 10 percent of that anger for the data brokers who literally actually sell your data to companies without your knowledge that are completely unregulated still in the U.S. because they so effectively lobby the government. They're terrifying. Direct a little bit of anger towards that versus Meta and we may actually solve a lot of these problems. Weren't those the brokers that like the NSA and CIA revealed a couple of weeks ago that they were buying data from?

45:54They're like, oh, yeah, we buy it from them already. We're veering dangerously close to me giving a long rant about how Cambridge Analytica was a fake made up scandal that actually had nothing to do with anything. So I'm here for it. Let's just let's save that for another day. Heath, you asked on threads for people to ask you threads questions for us to answer on the Vergecast. Let's do a bunch of them. Let's what do you got? Yeah. So this is a great one. I'm really curious what you guys think about this. Do you think the discourse can be different here on threads than on Twitter? Or will the format eventually produce the same results, aka hate speech, bullying, dunking, all that stuff?

46:31I think the format will definitely produce a lot of similar results. But the fact that we're getting the Instagram aggressive moderation might mitigate some of that. I think that's right. I mean, I think the thing that we've seen is that these platforms develop different norms really fast, right? Like Mastodon is different from Twitter, which is different from Blue Sky. which is different from, I don't know, Telegram. Like these things where people send texts to one another do develop different cultures. I think threads absolutely risks basically turning into Twitter and in a lot of ways and for a lot of people will.

47:06I also think a lot of people's Twitter experiences were sort of self-inflicted. I think who you decided to follow and engage with and what you decided to share. Like if you just went on and talked about NBA, you had a very different version of Twitter than people who yelled about politics all day, right? And I think to some extent, just having a sort of forced experience of starting over goes a really long way. And I think just that alone is going to change versions of the discourse. But like, are there going to be similarly horrible political fights? And are there going to be main characters on threads who just get ruthlessly harassed until something horrible happens?

47:44Like, yeah, it's going to happen. Are you guys changing how you use threads versus Twitter? Like, consciously? Because for me, I definitely have a different approach. I'm like, okay, I learned Twitter was where I could kind of stumble along. Say more. What are you doing differently with threads? I'm being more thoughtful about it. I'm being more thoughtful about what I post. And I have the urge to post all sorts of horrible shit posting. And I usually do on Twitter. And I'm like, maybe I don't on threads. Maybe a bunch of people don't want to hear these thoughts about tow hairs. And I think they all should.

48:17But people on Twitter super did. They didn't. They didn't. That sounds like a Tumblr thing. That was really a Tumblr thing. I mistook the audience. But I think that the audience feels clearer, at least in these early days, a thread of what you could do and kind of how mean you can get, how weird you can get. You always want to scale it back just a little bit. Don't get too mean. Don't get too weird. And David, I think your point about the opportunity to start over is a big one is totally spot on. And I think the early culture these networks create matters, as we've seen with Blue Sky already, for example, and Mastodon in a different way.

48:54I do want to just check our like white man privilege of like using these platforms. I do think because of the public nature of Twitter and threads, if you are a minority or someone who is easily targetable, unfortunately, on the Internet, you have a wildly different experience with these public platforms. And you don't it doesn't matter who you follow. Like it comes to you. Like I've seen enough examples. The mansplaining still appears in my in my my threads. And that's coming to threads. It really is. It's already there. It's already there. It started last night, like is almost immediately. Somebody was like, let me tell you what you're saying.

49:30And I'm like, no, I said it. And Kranz, be honest, like the mansplaining is probably the best of the worst. You know, like there's actually there's far worse. Yeah. Like this was this was like fairly mild mansplaining. I've definitely had it way worse. And I'm sure it's just going to come. And I think that's just like I think most people who go online and simply exist and people get mad at them, which is a lot of us, unfortunately, we're kind of accustomed to it by now. It sucks and it shouldn't happen and there should be tools and stuff. But I think that's a hard problem to figure out how you do those tools, how you balance them and don't turn into whatever happened to Facebook in 2016.

50:06You just kind of have to. I mean, this is me saying it as an old haggard witch of a woman who's been on the Internet a very long time. you kind of get used to it. You kind of learn to like what stuff to ignore and what stuff to report. You shouldn't get used to it. Like these platforms should do better. Yeah, you shouldn't. But yes, I know what you mean. That's a hard, like something like mansplaining. Like how are you going to report somebody for being like, they think they know more than me. Moderator, fix it. Yeah, totally. Well, that's not going to work. It's just going to be like, well, yeah, I'm just not going to engage with you.

50:37And at Twitter, I probably would have engaged a few times, right? Like I probably would have been like, let me explain things to you. Let me be optimistic or eat shit, asshole. And here I'm like, I've done this before. I see you. And I'm just not going to feed the troll. I will say it was comforting to see that Threads had basic moderation, things like blocking and muting built in on day one. Oh, I've already blocked somebody. It was great. I was like, beautiful. I will. You can DM me and I'll tell you who I blocked. But I'm not going to say it here. So optimistic, but cautious. And we should definitely check back in on this.

51:07I thought it was a good question. Next one. Should we expect a high velocity of new feature additions? And would that even be possible under the regulatory scrutiny that Facebook is correctly subject to? We kind of already touched on the regulatory scrutiny. I do think there's going to be a high velocity of feature tweaks and changes to this product, especially now that it has garnered so much attention that exceeded Meta's wildest dreams. And what happens in these big companies is that these projects start as like small resource constrained things. Threads has like a few dozen people working on it.

51:38And when they see that it's working, a bunch more people want to work on it. A bunch of resources get thrown on it. Zuckerberg himself is very excited about it now. So I expect that the team building it will swell and they'll ship a lot faster. I already know, for example, like the internal employee build lets you do things like tap on a profile and it expands to see it in full. Like they're already making a bunch of like small tweaks on the edges that will ship soon. And then, yeah, Moseri's already confirmed a following only list is in the works. He has told me and others that they don't plan to do DMs.

52:10I have a feeling they'll go back on that after they see how much of a loop, a powerful loop that is. At the very least, they need to make it easier to share threads to like Instagram DMs, for example, or just other DM apps. That could be a lot smoother. And they know that. Let me shit talk in peace. Yeah. Any features you guys want to see like quickly? Better search is, I think, the biggest one and something that the company is relatively good at. So I suspect that's coming. But what I think is going to be really interesting is to see how much they want to do here, because I think one of the things that is true is that it is simple and that's part of what is good about it.

52:47Also, he said this to you, Heath, that Instagram, the app is bloated and messy and too much. And they're actually in the and this is like this whole company goes through this constantly. Right. They add a million things to the app and then they go, oh, my God, this app is a mess. And then they get rid of some stuff and simplify and then they add a bunch more stuff. And this is just like this is the meta pendulum swing at all times. And they're in a sort of simplification phase right now. And I think also part of what has appealed to people about threads already is that it's very straightforward and it works.

53:18And so I think the idea that they're going to be like, now you can make a podcast inside of threads is like, they'd be stupid to think that that is the answer. Right. And so I think what we're going to see is them try to figure out what is smart to take from Twitter and what is like actually not what makes the platform work. And I suspect we'll get a lot of stuff really fast. I think you're right because this team is actually just in a position to ship really fast. Like building stuff just inside the org structure of something like Instagram and Facebook is hard and takes a long time and a lot of people.

53:54And this is a team that just can make things and now has like a big win under its hat and is going to be able to make things faster. They have Jane Wong. Yeah, they got Jane Wong. Legendary app scooper Jane Wong, which means she probably won't be posting her app dumps anymore, which is a huge bummer. Or they just hired her to be Threads exclusive, which would be a super cool move. She's literally working on Threads. She's a Meta employee now. It's pretty wild. Okay, this is a good one too. How will journalists and other people who provide real-time important info be able to be verified so users know the info being posted is legitimate?

54:27We've obviously seen how this has played out on Twitter since Elon changed the check marks. I am verified on Instagram because a media brand I worked at in 2015 had a social media manager who knew someone at Facebook, got everyone verified in the newsroom. That's how I got verified on Twitter. Anyone who's worked in a newsroom long enough knows that that's how it worked up until like a couple of years ago. Meta has a paid verified program now. So I think they're phasing out the, you have to know somebody to get a checkmark. They're going to let people who got that checkmark keep it. So thanks Meta.

55:01But yes, I think going forward, Meta will tell me if I'm wrong, but you need to pay to be verified on Instagram, they actually, I believe, ID check you. So I think there's a level of... Actual verification. Yeah. So I cannot make a Neelai Birder account. Well, you can try. I mean... I will try. We should try. I'm going to wait until he's back on the show to do it. Yeah. But there is a level of actual scrutiny of someone's identity when you become verified on Instagram that far exceeds what Twitter is doing currently. So if you see a checkmark on threads, it's the real deal. Don't hold me to that, though.

55:37I don't want to be sued. But yeah, how do we feel about this, the checkmark thing with threads? I didn't know you could pay. That seems... Yeah. It's basically like Twitter in that they're trying to get away from the checkmark means... You're special. Yeah, special. Yeah. Which is honestly the only reason I ever liked the checkmark. I love very visual ways to validate myself. Thank you. But Meta is at least trying to make sure that not everyone demands a blue check. But yeah, Meta is actually checking, whereas Twitter's thing was like, oh, you have a credit card? You're in. And so that's good.

56:14I think that's actually how it should work. Not necessarily that you should have to pay, but that they are actually checking and making sure that the person is the person. That's great. Go for it. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think part of me wonders if the whole idea of the blue check is just being sort of beaten out of usefulness. Twitter kind of bastardized what it means. Tumblr would just like sell you one as a joke, which I thought was very funny and still love very much. By 20 if you want. Yeah. And so I kind of wonder if we're at a point where we're going to need some other connotation of this person is who they say they are.

56:51And to some extent, being connected to Instagram is useful in that way, because there are just more tools to verify people on Instagram than there are on threads or Twitter at this moment. And so I think having those connections might be useful. But I don't know, I continue to wonder if any kind of check is going to mean much to people for very long. At some point, I feel like it's just going to be a little thing you kind of look over and you're like, oh, that person's really who they say they are. Oh, that's a parody account. Oh, that's just somebody who's too lazy or a brand or something. I hope so.

57:25I think at some point we'll get that, and that'd be great, but different way of working on the internet. This is also, I would point out, a potential upside of the Fediverse is this becomes a thing that not every platform has to do for itself, that we can have bigger, broader, cross-system tools for verifying people that actually make a lot more sense. Oh my god. That's going to be the first big fight between Meta and the Fediverse. I think one of my great conspiracy theories about Threads and ActivityPub in general is that Meta actually has no interest in doing things like that and only does it out of basically obligation because it runs the platform.

57:59Meta doesn't care all that much about your content. Your content is just annoying for Meta, generally speaking. It wants your activity. It wants you to be paying attention. It wants you to be on its platform. But it didn't really give a shit what your posts are. It just wants you to hang out. So giving you a feeling that your posts are yours and someone else can deal with all the hard work of doing something like verifying that you are who you say you are. But you can just use threads because it's a better app. They can just focus on making a good app. And all the stuff you do around it doesn't have to be their problem anymore.

58:28I actually think that's an enormous win for Meta down the road. I think you're right. Okay, one last question, and then maybe we can call Neelai, TBD. Will there be third-party API platform integration for other developers on threads? I highly, highly doubt it because Meta as a company, their last time they tried to do a developer platform, it resulted in Cambridge Analytica. So they have decided as a company. Jesus, when you say it like that. They could do it again. They didn't do a very good job that time. You see, Mark Zuckerberg's still running the company. I think he remembers those Senate hearings and the lawsuits and the fines, the record fines.

59:10But he took the wrong thing from that. Instead of being like, oh, I shouldn't collect as much data, he was like, hmm, I guess that means no third-party apps. Is this really – David's teased this. Are we really going to have to explain Cambridge Analytica? No, I'm not doing this. Cambridge Analytica was not about your data. it was because Facebook let third-party developers use your data in ways they shouldn't have. Okay, end of story. Go watch the documentary, The Great Hack. It gets almost everything wrong. No, quickly, just to summarize, no, I do not think they will do a third-party platform because of that.

59:40It's probably a good idea. I would say it's at the very, very end of their to-do list and probably something that their senior leadership does actually just not want to do at all. So, sorry. But it's a good idea, but no. I think that's right. My question would be, Heath, on that respect, I think because I can't stop talking about ActivityPub. One of the things Maseri has said a couple of times is that part of the upside of ActivityPub is you can support the standard and kind of be part of the ecosystem, but you can also build threads-only stuff just inside of the app. So what I wonder is less like, do they want to support developers and more, do you think they'll go the road of like, I would call it like the iMessage thing, right?

1:00:18Where it's like, you can send SMSs through iMessage, but if you're iMessage to iMessage, you get this whole like universe of other stuff you can do. So is that where Threads ends? That's totally where it's going. And it's so ironic given that Meta spends all its time shitting on iMessage whenever it gets a chance in ads and in interviews. But yeah, Threads will be the blue bubble of the Fediverse. And we're all going to have to look at that. That's good. Yeah, I like that. You just made all the Fediverse green bubbles so mad. Get at me with your toots, guys. Okay, those are reader questions. What's next?

1:00:51Can we talk about the Twitter response just for a couple of minutes before we throw to another break? Yeah. It got more aggressive over the 24 hours. But basically, the first response from Twitter, well, let me just read you the tweets, both from Elon Musk and from Linda Yaccarina, the CEO. So Elon Musk said, it is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter than indulge in the false happiness of hide the pain Instagram. That's what Elon Musk said. And like, what does that mean? That's a sentence. What? Sure. And then the CEO, Lindy Acarino, said, we're often imitated, but the Twitter community can never be duplicated.

1:01:24That is a much better line and a much better selling point, I would argue, and I think is going to be the thing, right? And like even Maseri said this to you a couple of times, Alex, he's like going way out of his way to give Twitter credit for like pioneering the format, which I think you could make a strong case it didn't really do that. Like there are things that look like Twitter before Twitter, but also that it is it is a big community full of engaged people. And that's actually a hard thing to unseat. And even if threads works, it probably won't kill Twitter. Both of those read a lot like I'm not scared.

1:01:56I'm not scared. I'm not scared. Don't tell everybody I was scared. Responses. Right. Right. Is that what you guys take from this? Okay. Pretty much. Okay. Yes. Cool. And then just to prove it's not scared, Twitter also threatened to sue Instagram over threads. Heath, you were looking at this just before we started recording. Do you want to explain what we know? Oh, my God. I was just reading it while you were saying that. So this is Alex Spiro, my personal lawyer, who has also been taking point on them not paying rents, etc. This whole letter is hilarious, but it's to Zuckerberg. The part that I think is super relevant is that over the past year, Meta has hired dozens of former employees.

1:02:35Twitter knows that these employees previously worked at Twitter, that these employees had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information, that these employees owe ongoing obligations to Twitter, and that many of these employees have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices. That sounds like your problem, Alex Spiro. With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop in a matter of months Meta's copycat app with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets, et cetera, in violation of law, et cetera.

1:03:05So this is, I guess, some vague threat of like a IP, software IP, property rights lawsuit, which hate to break it to you, Musk and Alex Spiro, but if there's any company that has researched the actual legal grounds for successfully winning a case on copying software, it is meta considering they have copied more software than any social media company to date in a cumulative. Yeah, I think if Snap couldn't win a lawsuit, Twitter's probably not going to win a lawsuit. Yeah. This is the part of the show where if we had Neelai, he would be going on a rant about the state of copyright law in America.

1:03:40Thank God he's not here. Thank God he's not. But it's not really a copyright thing. It's very much like a trade secrets from employees thing, which is... I guess. And again, the irony of that is like, remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter and promptly fired more than half the company? You're going to have a hard time proving it. If you fired everybody, you didn't do any due diligence to recover everything from them because you fired them so quickly. And like you have to prove what trade secrets that they're using, which is pretty in this particular case, probably going to be pretty hard to do unless they're like in Slack saying LMMO.

1:04:14I'm using this. I'm just going to copy paste the stuff we used on Twitter, which hopefully they didn't do, but they might have. Oh, and here we go. Andy Stone, a meta spokesperson has already. This is so great. We're already seeing now. So when meta people, they finally have a place to respond to tweets that isn't Twitter. He threaded it. I just got sent a thread from Andy Stone responding to this letter saying, to be clear, no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee. That's just not a thing. Oh, that's great. So, yeah, I honestly like I should have said this earlier, but a huge part of Threads and why Meta is so excited about this is that Mark Zuckerberg and all their execs finally have a place to post Twitter like content that isn't Twitter.

1:04:57I loved that like his first tweet in 11 years was Zuckerberg posting the Spider-Man pointing meme. Unbelievable tweet. Unbelievable. So good. The best possible thing he could have tweeted. I was so impressed by that. We're going to enter this hole as a reporter. It's just like I'm going to have to be checking Twitter for the Twitter response to the story and then threads for the meta response. Whatever. This is the new world we live in. Which one is getting more engagement? That's a good question. I'll have to report back on that. To that point, my one request, Adam Masseri, if you're listening, and I know that you are, build a web app.

1:05:29I'm sure you're going to do it first. Just I don't want to have to spend all day at work looking at my phone. I'm using my phone as my webcam right now. I can't be on threads. Come on. Help it out. Help me out. Well, David, to be fair, you can open threads on web. If there's a lot of replies, it cuts off and tells you to get into the app, but you can at least see them on the web. I'm just going to go guess threads URLs and see if there are any sick posts at whatever URL I type. It's going to be amazing. All right, we need to take one more break. But before we do, Neelai is pinging me in Slack and apparently just landed and has some deep thoughts about threads he would like to share.

1:06:06So we're going to call him up. I think he's at baggage claim. and hear what he has to say.

1:06:14Where in the world are you, Nilay Patel? I'm at the airport with Mags. Can you say hi, Mags? Hi. We're waiting for our bags, but I need to react to Instagram threads in a very deep, meaningful way, like a spiritual way, which is why I'm calling you from there to force my way onto the ship. That's correct. So we've spent a long time on this podcast talking about threads already, but you i want to know because you are the guy who has been on this show specifically saying things like i don't want feed-based social media in my life and then you just showed up guns blazing on threads what's going on here yeah it's like six posts in a day already i'm off the wagon yeah i'm drinking straight from the hose you're smoking again it's two things one you know i missed it it's fun to post on a new social network in that five you know i post some blue sky a little bit i i tooted on mastodon but here i think the activity pub integration that meta is promising is actually really interesting in a way that i don't know if the at protocol from blue sky will be successful maybe it will be but i can just see a world in which having a presence on a large decentralized social platform can connect directly to our work and what we do and i think that's really exciting And I'd rather be invested in that sort of opportunity than just building on someone else's close platform yet again.

1:07:39What do you make of like the app itself? Heath and Kranz and I didn't talk that much about like the actual mechanics of using the app. I kind of think it's like it works, but I kind of think it's like hideously ugly. What's your sense? It's a little bit ugly. Right? Yeah, it's a little bit ugly. Why are the share buttons so big? I don't understand. The button for reply and the button for whatever the paper airplane. I'm just confused. I don't know what's going on at the bottom of every post. I think they know some of it isn't there and needs to be improved. It's just it's hard to know how much this version you have to take seriously right at this second.

1:08:13It's a very minimum viable product, and it shows. Yes. They clearly rushed this out because of Twitter's rate limits. But I will say this. I posted that the embeds were a little bit broken because we wanted to put thread embeds in our stories and QuickBost and the feed and all this stuff. And like three different meta engineers, including the person who wrote the embed product, replied to me and then they fixed it. And that's just like the most fun you can have. It's everyone's building things together and talking about the products in earnest. And that's the fun part of making the Internet. I keep saying the Internet feels like 2011 again.

1:08:49And that's the part I really like and the part that I want back. Totally. And it feels I mean, in a funny way, it feels like if you go back to that era, that's like the early Instagram era. where all of this stuff was being built the first time before it was a giant monolith that was hard to ship new stuff into and before everything that changed got rolled out in tiny little doses. This, they're just back to like building it live right in front of us, which I agree is fun and different and feels really different from Meta. I wasn't sure Meta like had the muscle to be this kind of company anymore.

1:09:20Yeah, I think the same thing. I think they're excited. The energy is like palpable. They have skyrocketing user growth again. I also just keep looking at how bad it must be in the reality labs and Horizon Worlds division, where they're just trying to brute force the next version of the metaverse internet into existence. And they're just alone in their headsets while Zuck is a conquering hero, posting Spider-Man memes. Maybe the answer was much simpler than they thought. Yes. I do think it's going to be interesting to see how the vibes shift in week two of this. right because right now it's very exciting it's kind of amazing that it works as well as it does but i think the question of like where are we going to be seven days from now when opening this thing is less exciting is going to be really interesting and we've seen this a few times where it feels really cool and everybody like is this is this thing going to be be real or is this going to be something more meaningful i think it just comes down to does it send anybody any traffic like they did the growth hackiest growth hacky thing which is just always buzzing at you if you have notifications on.

1:10:23So the platform just feels alive because it's constantly sending you notifications. I actually turn them off like too much. This is everything I did not want about feed-based social media. But then even when you have them off, when you have the app open, still buzzes at you whenever you get a reply or a notification. And that's like pretty good. Like they built a good feedback loop in there. And I think that's going to carry them, especially if the pace of signups continues to just accelerate like we've seen. totally um all right well before you go i know you have more bags to pick up and traveling to do uh the the one of the last things we talked about before we got on with you was uh i don't know if you saw this while you're on the plane but twitter is threatening to sue instagram for essentially ripping off the app they're saying they you know hired a bunch of people with devices and trade secrets and they came and built a copycat app um i would just like to hear lawyer neil's initial impression of whether this is anything and the extent to which this is nothing.

1:11:19Yeah, it's the saddest shit I've ever read, man. Like, what are they even complaining about? Twitter's trade secrets? What are Twitter's trade secrets? Twitter's IP stack is basically nothing. And then on top of that, Twitter promised ages ago to never use its patents offensively. I actually wrote a big story in 2013 about this thing called the Innovators Patent Agreement, the IPA. It was a big Twitter initiative where they agreed to never use their patents against anyone except defensively. and they try to get everyone else to agree to it as well. So, like, they got nothing except quote-unquote trade secrets and, like, good luck.

1:11:50If I'm Quinn Emanuel, like Elon's law firm, I would be totally embarrassed by this desperate letter. They should have definitely told him not to do this. There you go. All right, go get your bags. Thank you for coming on. I suspect we will have more chances to talk about threats very, very, very, very soon. All right, Max, can you say goodbye? Bye, Max. Goodbye. All right, we're out of here. All right. And with that, we need to actually take a break. And then we're going to come back and do a lightning round. We'll be right back.

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1:14:51All right, we're back. Let's stop with threads for a minute and let's do a little bit of a lightning round because it is July. So like news is slow and news is going to be slow for a little while because everybody's on vacation for the next several weeks. Have you guys already started getting like the increase in out of office responses from people? Mine has definitely spiked the last few days. No, I aggressively work hard to not email people ever. It's not going well, but it's going well enough that I haven't gotten any yet. I respect that. Just carrier pigeons are nothing. Let's do a little bit of lightning round.

1:15:24The only rule for this lightning round is you can pick anything you want to talk about this week except threads. Threads is off limits. Kranz, you get to go first. What do you got? Okay. So we're going to talk about Daddy Zaslav, one of my favorite people on the planet. Who has had quite a week that man. He has had quite a week. Should we go into all of it? There's a few. Just give us the quick rundown because there's a bunch of stuff happening simultaneously here. Okay. Here's the quick rundown. About two weeks ago, Turner Classic Movies lost a lot of employees. People were very upset, particularly a lot of big fans of old Hollywood movies like Steven Spielberg and Scorsese and Wes Anderson.

1:16:04And they all complained. And Zaslav was eventually like, okay, but you guys can come and help us and be a part of this. And we won't fire everyone at Turner Classic Movies. And you guys can help us choose movies. And so that happened and everybody seemed to settle. There was much joy in the kingdom. as much joy as can happen in the kingdom of Zaslav. Yeah. Picking a fight with Turner Classic Movies, by the way, weird move. Weird. Well, and also, he allegedly loves classic films. Like, he's a big fan of them. He's a huge fan of Turner Classic Movie. Yeah, but you know what he likes more, Alex? It's tax breaks.

1:16:38Yeah, exactly. He was like, I love them, but I love tax breaks more. And they came and were like, yeah, but do you ever want to work with any of us again? And he's like, I do. So never mind. Tax breaks. Backseat. So then over the weekend, GQ published a story that talked a lot about this, but also talked about the fact that Sazlov isn't exactly known for his film taste. He's a guy who did the 27 Kids and Counting or whatever it's called. He did a lot of reality show, a lot of reality TV that a lot of people consider trashy. They don't like it. And this GQ article really took him to task for that.

1:17:19And the fact that he was that guy, and now he's out here running one of the largest movie studios in the world. And then the story disappeared. Well, first it got aggressively edited. It came back aggressively edited, but with no byline on it. And then it totally disappeared. And it turns out that someone on Zaslav's camp reached out to GQ and were like, this is really mean. And to be fair, it was a very mean article. But it, as far as we know, didn't say anything that lots of people were not already saying publicly. Yeah, there was nothing inaccurate in it. It was a lot of opinion. And that opinion was, you suck.

1:17:54It was not that bad. Like, this is what you're going to have your PR person try to spike? Yeah. So it sounds like what happened was that they reached out with a whole list of things. And PR does this a lot where they really dislike a story, but there's nothing actually inaccurate. So they just have a bunch of things to be like, well, but you could have also said that he loves babies. Why didn't you talk about how he loves babies? And people at GQ, they pulled the story. There's a lot of upset folks. It turns out that the EIC of GQ is also producing a film that's being made at Warner Brothers. Everybody looks terrifically stupid in this situation.

1:18:32Zaslav just looks really, really thin-skinned. And he is still in negotiations with both SAG and the WGA with all the other producers in Hollywood right now. So probably not a great time to look really thin-skinned and like you hate the movies and people. And also, like, truly excellent Streisand Effect example of taking a GQ story that I had not heard about or seen and no one really paid that much attention to, and turning it into like front page news all over the internet. I didn't read it until it had already been pulled. And then I was like, oh, this is what you went after? Thank you to the Google Cash for providing that.

1:19:10I gotta be meaner in my own stories about Warner Brothers now. So we'll see what can happen. Yeah, big week for David Saslam. Heath, have you picked one yet or do you want me to go while you look? Yeah, I have one. We wrote about this. Wes Davis wrote about this on the site. The TSA is going to be expanding its use of facial recognition to over 400 airports. They claim a 97 % effectiveness rate on the 25 airport pilot program they've been using so far. This is just a bad idea. Can we just say beyond a shadow of a doubt that we should not be giving the TSA our faces? TSA shouldn't have anything.

1:19:45They shouldn't have funding. Also, 97 % success rate on this is not impressive. No, it's not. Our security system misses three out of 100 people. It's like, yeah, good. Like I've seen these things and I'm sure other people have going through TSA. Like I see it at LAX and I've seen it in New York. Obviously, like avoid it at all costs. I really hope this stays opt in. They should not mandate this. There is no federal privacy law about facial recognition data. There is no law that stipulates how the U.S. government uses this data. TSA claims they delete it. I do not believe them. I think we can be skeptical of the data practices of private for-profit corporations that we choose to use all the time.

1:20:27I'm not saying that that's bad. We should absolutely be way more skeptical and concerned about government agencies using our personal and face data. And so this is a giant thumbs down for me. The TSA sucks, and they should not use our face data. Well, someone's going to get a really good look in his bag next time he flies. Yeah, you just made a list somewhere for sure. I'm definitely on the list now. Whatever, I've got global entries. Stop me, bitches. Clear, bitches. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. All right, mine is Google. You may have heard of it. Changed its privacy policy to say that it uses publicly scraped web data to train things like BARD and Cloud AI.

1:21:11I believe those are the two things it added to the privacy policy. This is one of those things that like everybody already knew and Google is sort of retroactively being like no trust us. It's super cool that we do this. It's no problem. Don't worry about it at all. And this sparked like a minor uproar because it had a lot of people asking questions about like, okay, is Google using my Google Docs to train AI models? I believe the answer is no because that doesn't actually count as a thing on the public web but I'm sure that's complicated if you like make it a public link like who knows all this stuff is a mess and the response to it like updating your privacy policy is one of those things you do when you hope no one will notice because who reads privacy policies mercifully there are people on the internet who have it set up so that when google changes its privacy policy you get an email about it love those tools congratulations everybody but I think this is the kind of thing there are just going to be a lot of moments like this in the immediate future.

1:22:07And there are a lot of questions about what it means that all of this is happening, and what it means for you as a person, that none of these companies are doing a good job of communicating. Obviously, none of this is regulated in any kind of meaningful way yet. And it's going to keep sparking all of these fights about all of these companies. Like, we went through this with the social networks. Do you guys remember, I think it was Instagram actually changed its privacy policy a bunch of years ago that it was like, Like we can use your images in marketing materials or everything. And everybody's like, wait, what?

1:22:37You're going to use my photos in an Instagram ad? And Instagram was like, why would we do that? That's ridiculous. We need it to be able to like propagate your image across our services. And this stuff, people just don't understand how this stuff works and they shouldn't have to. And we are reaching a point with all the AI stuff again, where it's going to get real scary. There's going to be a lot of like FUD out there as people panic about it. And it's just going to get real messy. And I'm not looking forward to it. Well, it was really weird for people to be upset about the scraping in this case, because like that's literally Google's business.

1:23:10Google's business has always been to scrape the Internet and monetize what it does. Like, oh, no, they're doing like have a debate. Yeah, but this is a new product. This is a new product that further abstracts the core content, the source content. That's fair. That's fair. I think that's the key thing here. we're witnessing like potentially one of the greatest like copyright scams in history with these models. I mean, if they're allowed to maintain copyrights with those models, which they might not be able to. Again, if I was here. Thank God we already hung up on Eli. Yeah. Thank God. He's calling back right now.

1:23:44Liam, don't let him in. Don't let him in. All right. We should go. This is enough Vergecast. We've gone long as we are want to do. Should we tell people how to find us on threads? Is that what we do now? We like stopped telling people our Twitter handles. Should we tell them our threads? Yes, we should because I want you to say Neelize because it's funny. The thing is, I don't want to say the phrase threads me because that sucks. So maybe this is why, maybe tweets is the answer. Tweet me on threads. See? I'm David Pierce because I'm going to kill whoever has David Pierce and then I'll be David Pierce.

1:24:18But until then, there's an I'm at the beginning of it. That other David Pierce dies in the next week. He's like a lawyer in phoenix and we are in a permanent war for david pierce username is there an apostrophe there with the i'm or no no just just all just letters all the way down alex your alex heath you know whatever mr low number joined alex kranz your alex h kranz right yeah it's that's what i used on twitter it seems fine the h stands for hustle yes it does go to kranz for all your hustle bro content decoder is a podcast nila's not here so don't listen to it decoder's awful I hate it forever.

1:24:52But where can you follow him? You didn't say where we can follow Neelai. Oh yeah, Reckless 1280 on threads. Because that's the year he was born, 1280. Next Wednesday on the Vergecast, we're going to talk about AI. We're also going to talk about video games with Ash Parrish and Chris Plant from Polygon. We talked about all our favorite games. It was very fun. And we're also going to talk about a whole bunch of new Apple software, we think. It's all coming very soon. So we're going to talk about it. Until then, we'll see you on threads. That's it. That's Vergecast. rock and roll. See you guys.

1:25:27And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecastattheverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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