Despite the similarities, Instagram threads are not X. At least it's not X yet. The text-centric social network, and meta answer to Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter), missed its moment to shine on Friday when users turned to X again to discuss the New York/New Jersey area earthquake. The surge in traffic propelled #earthquake to the top of X's trending section, followed by other affected regions such as “East Coast,” “Long Island,” “Philadelphia,” “Manhattan,” and “Brooklyn.” I did. Meanwhile, even though the quake occurred shortly before 10:30 a.m. Friday morning, earthquake-related terms didn't appear in the trending section of the thread until nearly 2 p.m. ET.
That's not to say people weren't discussing earthquakes in threads, many were. In addition to conversations centered around the earthquake, people are even tagging their discussions as earthquake threads, New York City threads, etc. to help make their posts visible to the broader thread community. was doing.
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Another reason this term may not have trended is that unlike Twitter/X, Threads does not use hashtags.
This design choice makes for a cleaner user interface, but it can also make it harder to understand how to tag trending terms. It's clear that discussions about earthquakes should be tagged with #earthquake (earthquakes without hashtags are also possible, like in threads), but people on the meta-owned platform are using the tag ” I'm starting to use labeling rules.[term] Threads” — something like “Tech Threads” for people in the tech industry to talk about technology.
This can complicate things when big trends arrive. Because some tag it as “earthquake,” some tag it as “earthquake thread,” and some target it to their local community, like “New York thread.” Gain the speed and momentum you need to break into the top trending threads even though all of your threads are referring to the same event.
Around 1pm on Friday, TechCrunch reached out to Instagram to ask why Earthquake wasn't among the top trends on Threads.
I've heard that Threads' top 5 trends are based on a variety of signals, including the number of people talking about a particular topic and the number of people engaging with posts about the same topic. Because the earthquake is a local event and the trend is based on a national conversation, it may have simply taken a while for enough people to join the conversation, Instagram said.
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Not long after I checked into Threads, the hours-old earthquake became the #1 trend on the platform.
Unfortunately for Threads, the inability to keep up with trends in real time may hinder its ability to fully compete with X. Combined with Meta's plan to distance itself from discussions of a political nature, it may even not “endorse” political content. The entire Instagram and Threads platform — Threads may not fully replace X, even though it builds out many of the same additional features, such as reposting, search, bookmarking, linkable tags, etc. .
This goes a long way to how Twitter's founders recognized the power of a new platform to deliver real-time information, and why Twitter has become a home for breaking news, lively topical discussion, and a hub for journalists. It's contradictory.
Not long after TechCrunch first covered Twitter (then called Twttr), the San Francisco earthquake rocked the service and helped founders and users alike understand Twttr's potential. Later that fall, the app had grown to thousands of users.
Former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey said in a 2016 interview with Harvard Business School's Newsroom: Shortly after, we actually felt the shaking in San Francisco. The phone kept ringing, saying, “Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake.'' ”
“What surprised me was that I was going through something in the world, and it was obvious that other people were going through the same thing, so I immediately felt at ease,” Dorsey said. Ta. “I thought, 'Wow, the world is so small.' Really, just sharing that feeling and sharing the experience makes it feel like we're all in this together.”
Threads has 130 million monthly active users and is the largest player in the “fediverse,” a social network of interconnected servers and services that includes Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and more. But despite declining usage, the X remains more “sticky” than some thought, especially given the wide range of competitors that have emerged to counter Musk's his X. is maintained. In fact, according to one report from Sensor Tower, X usage remains primarily by power users. It hasn't changed since last fall.
There are already signs that Threads isn't delivering a true X-like experience. “Threads is a leaky social network,” Max Read explained in his March newsletter, noting the randomness of the posts that fill users' For You feeds.
“It appears that all participants on the platform, including you, have suffered some form of mild brain injury,” Reed wrote. “…Who are these people?” What are they talking about? Are they reacting to something I'm missing? Why are you reading this? How did it get into my feed? How should I react? ”
Threads cannot leverage real-time information such as earthquakes or current political debates. If your feed bubbles very old posts. And if that trend remains a few hours behind, Threads' ability to become a viable alternative to Twitter could be undermined. Some people may use it because they don't particularly like the new direction of X or Elon Musk, but they'll never get a true X-like experience.