Meta's Threads Is Already Unravelling

How long before the bubble bursts?

Image: Midjourney

Meta's Threads app became the fastest-growing consumer application in history when it hit the 100 million user mark in the blink of an eye. Even a diehard Meta-cynic like myself couldn't help but be impressed with the rollout. And while I was less impressed with the product — I stopped using it after a few days — I thought it was only a matter of time before Threads surpassed the user numbers of Twitter (now, of course, called X). I even wrote as much: 

It's only a matter of time before Threads is bigger than Twitter. It could even happen in the next couple of weeks. But it's also clear this app won't kill Twitter, not in its current copy-and-paste format.

Nearly a month on, I sit at a 50% strike rate for those predictions. Threads hasn't leapfrogged X, but nor has it killed its rival. While Elon Musk seems to be doing his best to try (we only need to look at the spontaneous rebrand and destruction of 15 years of brand equity), it’s still alive and kicking. In reality, Thread’s growth is already stagnating, with the estimated user count currently at 120 million. Bear in mind 100 million turned up in the first week. It appears most users who were eager to switch over have done so, and now the flow is starting to trickle. That’s despite Instagram’s user base being over 1.4 billion; it only needed to convert ~20% of those users to achieve that target. 

With Zuckerberg’s goal set at the seemingly impossible number of 1 billion users, this obvious tailing off spells bad news. The success of Threads depended on whether it could build on the initial hype. Every app that launches enjoys a honeymoon period but then comes the drop-off, and the hard work begins to win them back and grow. For Meta, it needed to clear X’s numbers before the slide started to give it any hope of actually replacing the platform as the main text-led social platform. Beating out Twitter would have given it leverage, authority, and bragging rights. 

It hasn’t come close. 

Worse, the time spent on the platform is shrinking fast. That shouldn't come as a surprise — the content on Threads is far worse than X. It might want to position itself as a "happier" place, with more focus on community, but without that in-the-moment culture commentary, there’s no buzz. There’s no excitement. As a result, users average just over 6 minutes of daily activity, down from 21 minutes on launch. For context, time spent on X, despite all the recent turbulence, is over 25 minutes per day. That’s bad for the platform, bad for convincing new users to join, and bad for converting that into ad revenue. With Threads still missing fundamental features, the stark realization has set in that it’s nothing more than a skeletal version of its rival, really only useful to those with a huge Instagram following or burning hate for Elon Musk. With the honeymoon period over, there is already the sense this could be another doomed attempt by Meta to replicate its competitors. 

Meta has a long history of failed copycats. Is this one going the same way? There was another interesting play in the social media space late last month that may shed light on where this will end. 

TikTok, the platform that Zuckerberg has been long-obsessed with copying, has pulled a fast one, adding the ability to share text-based posts with music and stickers, similar to Instagram Stories. Oh, how the tables have turned. The imitator becomes the imitated.

Should this prove successful, TikTok will dip its toes further into text-based posts. The outcome of that will be exactly what Adam Mosseri told the Hard Fork podcast Meta had already tested internally, to no avail — a sort of hybrid Twitter meets Instagram. (I know I’m interchanging Twitter and X. I’ll settle on one eventually.) It’ll be TikTok videos, with a Twitter-style feed underneath, but these posts will also be available in the endless scroll homepage, perhaps through some version of reposting. It's the best of both worlds. If this final form is a hit, Meta will follow; it will have no choice but to or concede ground to its bitter foe.

In sum, that was a roundabout way of saying that Meta will try feature-stuffing Threads to win users, fail, give up, and eventually, the company will bury Threads and integrate any valuable bits into Instagram.

Threads is beginning to unravel. How long before it falls apart at the seams?