The big question for Threads: What’s left after the hype?

Black squiggles with the words “SAY MORE,” repeated over and over, greet users on the welcome screen of Threads, the new social media app from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. A string of rainbow colors like that of the Instagram logo, with the word ‘Threads’ repeated over it, snakes across it. Behind this lies the promise of a new social network like Twitter – without the volatility of that company under CEO Elon Musk.

More than thirty million people have downloaded the app, with which Meta is going head-to-head with Twitter, since it was first available from Apple and Google on Wednesday evening. The app is available in more than a hundred countries, but not yet in the European Union, due to stricter European privacy rules. Meta is under fire for collecting personal information through its apps, including Threads.

Signing up is dead simple for Instagram users, more than two billion people worldwide: it’s a matter of selecting that account on the welcome screen, importing your profile picture and description, and — an effortless but no small step — agreeing to Meta’s terms of use and privacy policy . After pressing the ‘Join Threads’ button, a new Twitter world opens up for you.

Don’t retweet, repost

The first thing you notice is how much it resembles the old Twitter world. The screen with the timeline is almost identical to that of Twitter, albeit more in the style of Instagram: an endless amount of short messages and images behind profile pictures, with the option to like them with a heart, react to them via a speech bubble (Instagram round instead of Twitter oval) or ‘repost’ or retweet them with a double arrow. How often that has happened is stated below, instead of behind the symbols, as with Twitter.

At the bottom you can switch between the home screen (house), a search screen (magnifying glass), a writing screen, a screen with interactions (heart instead of a bell), just like Twitter. The fifth icon is for your personal feed, rather than Twitter’s direct messages. Because Threads doesn’t offer that (yet).

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joked about the similarity in a tweet, his first in over a decade, featuring a Spider-Man meme. But Twitter couldn’t laugh about it; a lawyer for the company has sent Zuckerberg a letter accusing Meta of stealing trade secrets and intellectual property by recruiting former Twitter employees to copy Twitter. The company is considering legal action.

Meta denies the allegations. “Nobody on the Threads technical team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just out of the question,” a Meta spokesperson said Thursday. Musk nevertheless wrote in a tweet: “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

Rollingstone

Despite the familiarity of the app, it is at the same time alienating, as if you are in an environment that seems at home but is not. Especially the absence of hashtags makes a bare impression. There are also no ‘trending topics’, which makes it more difficult to reach your goal, and you cannot search by keywords (but you can search by accounts). In addition, it is opaque why certain messages in your feed end up, apart from the messages from accounts you follow. An algorithm selects it for you, based on what it knows about your interests. Multiple celebrities, from Oprah Winfrey to Kim Kardashian, and prominent media outlets, from CNN to Rollingstoneare already active on the social network.

By far the main topic of conversation at Threads for the first few days was Threads. From silly memes (a crowd of people running down an escalator on their way from Twitter to Threads), to first impressions and questions from users. Some express the hope that hate and “neo-Nazis” will be banned from Threads, unlike Twitter. Others see Threads as “a car without air conditioning or extra options.”

Compared to Twitter, the content at first glance seems lighter, more like Facebook users post, than the serious content of policymakers and other influential Twitterers who can be found on Twitter like cherries in the pie. While there’s no shortage of petty opinions on Threads already, it remains to be seen how many curious early adopters will keep coming back for the content they get.

The creators of Threads seem to realize that. “The real test is not whether we can build a lot of hype,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote on Threads, “but whether you will all find enough value in the app to keep using it over time.”

Read also: Meta’s Zuckerberg goes into slugfest with Twitter