will threads make social media more equitable?

I’m always eager to reflect on current events in the brand space with friends. The launch of Threads was a great excuse to run a little experiment this week. I asked BTC community members and Linkedin friends to leave me a voice message with their thoughts.

I asked:

1. What did you think when you heard the news about Threads?
2. Will Threads make the internet more safe and equitable, or less?

We got awesome insights from Abhilash Krishnan, growth marketer by day, privacy freak by night, David Arnoux, co-founder of Growth Tribe, Carlos Saba, co-founder of the Happy Startup School, Wanjiru Gathanga, brand researcher at Brand The Change, Patrick Olszowski, activist and insight research trainer, and Gabriel Abagalana, digital marketer.

I stitched it all together into an 8 minute micro-podcast. Here is what they said.

[00:00:00] Anne: Unless you live under a rock. I'm sure you heard that Meta launched a competitor to Twitter this week called Threads. There is a massive battle for world domination going on, and we all have first row seats. 

At Brand The Change we talk a lot about the dilemmas of using social media to build an audience for ethical reasons like mental health issues, data, privacy, monopolies, undermining democracy, hate speech, you know, the usual stuff. But also because we question the practice, does it really work or is it just busy work? 

And here comes yet another channel? Is it a good thing that Twitter is getting some competition on its own turf?

What if that competitor is the biggest social media company out there and it already has so much power? I asked the Brand The Change community and my LinkedIn friends what they're thinking. 

Here is Gabriel Abagalana, digital marketer. 

[00:00:50] Gabu: Yes, I've tried threads. I honestly jumped on the trend due to hype. Guys were on threads and they were saying, Twitter is dead now everyone is on thread.

[00:00:59] Gabu: So I was like, hey, let check this out. To be honest, my first impression is the UI/UXis very basic. Nothing really exciting there. it's actually quite a replica of what you get on Twitter, 

[00:01:13] Anne: Gabuwas not the only one who was unimpressed. Here is Patrick Olszowski, activist and insight research trainer.

[00:01:19] Patrick: Technologically, I can't really tell them that much apart. The one thing that I really have valued though since I've gone on threads is that it feels a lot friendlier, a lot newer. A lot less sort of polarized and that may just be a novelty factor. 

[00:01:36] Anne: Ooh, a positive note at the end there. Let's hear from my colleague, Wanjiru Gathanga, brand researcher at Brand of Change.

[00:01:43] Wanjiru: The record breaking growth has certainly been an eyebrow raiser and the ease of which people with existing Instagram accounts have been able to switch I think has largely contributed to this. 

It's obviously meant to be a replacement to Twitter. It's not inspiring. It comes with a lot of risk of inheriting the sins of those who have come before us in an age where a lot of us already questioning the ethics and role of social media in our lives and, the influence social media has across the globe. 

And do we all really need another app? Who needs another app? Who has time to be on another app? 

[00:02:25] Anne: certainly not Abhilash Krishnan, growth marketer by day and privacy freak by night.

[00:02:30] Abhilash: When I heard of Thread, I didn't even feel curious to try it out because , it felt like another big tech trying to merge their distributed user data. So you have user data of somebody who's there on Facebook, was there on Instagram, and now you've started another product, and for someone who like me, who is a privacy freak and who tries to keep all his different, social media or other profiles, In silos and tries to put data dust in that this is like not at all interesting.

[00:03:00] Anne: Okay, so Abhilash is out.

[00:03:02] Anne: I was excited to hear from Carla Saba. He's the co-founder of the Happy Start of school and the co-host of the Happy Pricing Podcast. 

I asked him, will Threads make this internet more safe and equitable or less so? Carlos brings it all back to his area of expertise, which is business models and pricing.

[00:03:21] Carlos: Will threads make this internet more safe and equitable or less?

It's hard to know really. I think on one hand where I see Twitter at is it's desperately trying to see how to monetize. And where Meta is at, its revenue streams are more solid it feels than Twitter and with its multiple platforms and sources of revenue, then it can sustain places which don't need to force that commercial aspect.

So whether it will be equitable, depend on how much money threads needs to make, and if it's a case of it becoming, a subscription model, then it won't be so equitable. If it becomes an advertising model, then we are gonna get spammed a lot. 

So I think it's the perennial question around social medias.

How does the platform stay financially sustainable while, safeguarding the users which require resources for moderation , stopping harmful messages, uh, while at the same time, being a place for open communication and exchange and developing of ideas.

[00:04:29] Anne: I love how Carlos always brings such a thoughtful perspective, and even his voice just puts me in this like zen state. But here's Patrick to pull us right out of that.

[00:04:39] Patrick: Feels a bit like a sort of, , white frat boys pissing contest between Musk and, uh, Zuckerberg. 

[00:04:46] anne: I wonder if there's a brand out there right now that is at once so influential and so unloved as meta. Here are Gabu and Wanjiru again.

[00:04:55] Gabu: Will it change the world? No. It's being owned by meta. I feel meta is very intrusive when it comes to data privacy so I don't think it'll really change the landscape, but I do like the healthy competition. 

[00:05:08] Wanjiru: Meta already has a bad track record of copy pasting or simply buying out competitors or stealing features from competitors. And they're unfortunately big enough to get away with it. And this is just another similar case. That doesn't inspire a lot of trust in the brand for me. We saw how the metaverse went I think that it was a good sign, the metaverse has kind of just died down because it's kind of proof that people are questioning how social media works in their lives and whether they want to opt into new spaces and how they want those spaces to be run and controlled, And yeah, it's kind of like the little guy sticking it up to the big corporations and saying, Hey, I don't want to be a part of this. Just because you can do something and just because you have the money to do something doesn't mean that you necessarily should do that thing.

[00:06:01] Anne: But Wanjiru, some people might say “a hundred million people in three days can't be wrong”. Does either side of this battle, Twitter or Threads, hold any relevance to your generation?

[00:06:12] Wanjiru: As an African, I find that a lot of the conversations around Threads and Twitter have a lot of Western influence, politically. There's like a lot of conversation around the left wing and the right wing, which is a little irrelevant to my day-to-day thoughts and ways of navigating social media and the internet, as well as the very obvious, you know, testosterone measuring contest that is happening between these two white men. A little off-putting. 

[00:06:44] Anne: David Arnoux, co-founder of Growth Tribe, reminds us of the power that we do hold in our own hands.

[00:06:50] David: As to whether the internet will be more safe and equitable. Uh, no. If you really want more equity and safety, get off the internet right now. But jokes aside, it really depends on who you're gonna follow. But being more safe or equitable. Probably not. 

[00:07:06] Anne: Okay, so where do we all think this is headed? Does threads have sticking power or will it go the clubhouse way? Let's grab our crystal balls.

[00:07:15] Wanjiru: Tons of competitors have come and gone trying to dethrone Twitter. None of them have been too successful. There was Truth Social, Parler, Blue Sky, Mastodont. 

[00:07:24] David: I think it's interesting that they're scooping up millions of users. I think their last numbers were like 120 million, something like this but those are only registered users with quite a low hurdle to register. 

The real question is how many of these will end up being retained users - truly engaged. That's gonna depend on whether they can develop a true use case for their users. 

You know, use cases like Twitter. They own the news, journalists, politics. Vine. It was seven second videos. TikTok, it was the algorithm and, and the format that they came out with and the dances, of course. Clubhouse was audio, which was also copied by Twitter spaces by the way. Instagram - pictures, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So let's see if they can come up with a compelling USP slash use case that makes them sticky. But it's meta, so if anybody can pull this off, it's them. 

[00:08:11] Gabu: It's exciting to watch. We all know Meta swallows apps that don't accept it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's exciting to see that there can still be new creations in the space of social media. I'm extremely excited to see one that's completely AI enabled. Cause I love technology, I love exploring, I love experimenting. So let's see where this takes us.

[00:08:37] David: It'll be interesting to see how this plays out, but for those of you who missed the Twitter train and didn't build up sort of a good following, uh, on, on that platform, this is maybe your chance to shine on a new up and coming, uh, platform.

[00:08:49] Anne: I'm giving Carlos the last word on threads today.

[00:08:52] Carlos: It really depends what the purpose of threads is really. And, and I don't know enough. Twitter was the pulse of the world. Threads is, dot dot dot...