RebelMouse Blog Threads’ Unremarkable Problem

Meta launched Threads in response to the spiraling catastrophe of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. It quickly grew to 175 million active users and has become a significant new social platform for Meta. We keep all of our clients modern through our cloud-based CMS solution, and so integrating with the Threads API as soon as it became available was a no-brainer. We encouraged all of our clients to immediately create and promote their Threads channels. Some of our clients, including George Takei, became very popular very quickly on Threads. It’s an important social platform and it increasingly can drive real traffic and audiences. So we shared with our product team all of the API details for the Threads integration. We already have beautiful support integrated into our platform for creators and editors to publish to all of the usual distribution channels and win at organic SEO. Our next product update will add a “Publish to Threads” option to live alongside the Facebook, Instagram, and other social-sharing options that users have become accustomed to. During the course of that planning, our engineering team immediately asked why we didn’t have work planned to support optimized embeds of Threads content the way we do with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others. That turned out to be a really interesting moment of extra analysis that our strategy team performed. Nobody, it turns out, is embedding Threads content anywhere. None of us are finding Threads in media stories, and none of the Threads content being created is sparking new stories at all. While Mark Cuban and Elon Musk play out the good guy vs. bad guy superhero roles on Twitter, Threads marches along as an entirely unremarkable ecosystem. Trending topics in the Threads app yields largely benign, uncontroversial content. Meta explicitly stated that by launching Threads, the company wanted to own a text-based social network, but they also wanted to avoid the fighting, trolling, and warring that had become an intrinsic part of Twitter’s DNA. And so the Threads algorithm has spent a year rewarding soft content instead. It’s surprisingly easy to quit Threads because there is so little that’s addictive about the content itself. The algorithm has made the experience explicitly unremarkable. This leaves space for a company that’s ready to take on the real town square of the world’s conversations. One that is moderated, intelligent, and is built to amplify the most sophisticated and evolved viewpoints of any debate.