Instagram's Threads Early Fixable Mistake
Threads has massive growth but is already absorbing toxic behaviors from Twitter
Early active users on social networks are important because they set expectations for behaviors that are modeled by all users thereafter. In this regard, Threads is making a colossal mistake with their their default feed.
Instagram’s largest value comes from their audience of women that controls the majority of discretionary consumer spending decisions around the world (sans China). Threads’ current feed construction abandons the most valuable audience in the world for high engagement with low-value twitter engagement farm content and audiences. This is a colossal missed opportunity and here’s why it is happening.
The initial user journey for Threads begins through Instagram. The user’s social graph is imported. Things are happening correctly here. Things go south because the feed is a FYP style algorithm that favor volume. There is no option to only see content from people you follow and know.
I suspect this decision was made because of the success of the TikTok FYP feed. The mistake is that the current algorithm favors celebrities, news and meme accounts with large followings on Instagram. These accounts have the most followers on Instagram even if most people ignore them. However, they have the most engagement because of a default follow all social graph import. Now the entire feed becomes large accounts that are reposting content in a format that drives the highest engagement on Twitter.
Many Instagram users don’t user Twitter. It’s because they have no interest in the content there. It isn’t because they are not aware of Twitter.
On the second day of Threads being live you have a situation where users who dislike Twitter see almost exclusively Twitter style content on Threads. Threads effectively becomes a Twitter clone that splits Twitter’s audience. This strengthens Meta’s empire but comes potentially with damaging repurcussions.
It’s important to remember that Facebook used to be a place where people shared primarily positive things in their lives. Facebook was Instagram before Instagram. Out of concern of Twitter’s rise, news was emphasized on Facebook newsfeed. The twitter news feature replication became a feature poison pill that lead Facebook users to debate news and politics. Shortly after, Facebook’s users began unfriending each other before reducing their usage to become what it is now. Facebook is a modern address book with a backyard sale in the form of marketplaces that has lost all of its joy. Allowing Twitter style content to infect the Instagram social graph comes with potentially unintended consequences.
Instead of this path, Threads should be encouraging more personal interactions making use of the Instagram social graph. This requires heavily changing their current algorithm prioritization. Otherwise, this is a pyrrhic victory where the only yield to Meta comes from increased training data for large language models. This is a missed opportunity as Meta’s LLMs could learn from a data set that is trained by higher value women from Instagram writing actively instead of low value engagement farms and shitposters form the Twitter cohort.
What are your early thoughts on Threads?
