I both thought Meta should try to go after Twitter (yet again). And thought it might actually work this time. But I honestly didn’t expect Threads to be this good, this fast. I chalk that up at least half to Twitter itself, which adds new performances to the shitshow daily at this point. Threads is good, in part, because so many of us want it and need it to be good. Because Twitter is so fucked.
At the same time, putting it all on Twitter’s chaos is a disservice to Meta. As the company has proven time and time again, they’re really good at this social stuff. Namely, taking an idea hatched elsewhere and engineering the shit out of it. I mean, how many times has a company pushed up the launch of a massive new product (on top of launching it faster than they normally would have, as has been reported, thanks to the aforementioned Twitter fiascos)? That’s what Meta did yesterday — launching it several hours ahead of their original countdown clock.
That threw me for a loop as it was the middle of the night in Europe, where I am at the moment, and so by the time I actually signed up for Threads, I was user #9,231,036. For a certain subset of us nerds, that’s just embarrassing. We pride ourselves on early sign-ups. I was user #24 of Instagram, for Chrissake. But that is just how fast Meta was scaling Threads. It went from basically zero to ten million users in seven hours. Sweet Jesus.¹