It's been just over a year since Meta launched Threads, a microblogging platform built upon Instagram's foundation. While still in its infancy, the team has quickly added features that present itself as a viable alternative to its contemporaries, the most important being a TweetDeck-like desktop UI.
But there seems to be an existential question that keeps bubbling up under the surface every few weeks that finally came to a head on its first anniversary: Why does Threads exist?
The obvious reason is to be an alternative to Elon Musk's X. But considering its heavy-handed approach to the kind of content Meta wants on the site, along with statements in early interviews, it's clear that they don't want to beat Twitter. Like Mastodon, Threads has very different ideas of what microblogging should be, which still leaves space for Twitter to exist for specific niches.
This isn't inherently bad - Twitter wasn't a great place for anyone's mental health and is even less so now.
But here's the thing—a platform can't exist to be "an alternative." It should be able to stand alone with its unique purpose and be built to incentivize users to follow that purpose. Meta needs to be transparent about what user success looks like based on what it wants the platform to look like years from now. Actions matter more than words.
Like any social network, you need to spend days, weeks, and months on it before really understanding what the culture is outside of what others–including the company running it–are telling you.
Contrary to popular belief, there are thriving communities on the platform, even if they look almost nothing like they did on Twitter. Talk to your typical active Threads user, and they'll tell you that they either enjoy the experience more than they did on Twitter or that this is their first social media experience and that the pros outweigh the cons of being on the platform.
I want to dive into what Threads really looks like as someone who's deeply embedded himself into the platform over the last year. With that understanding, I want to explore how the humans who have worked tirelessly to build those communities are not being incentivized or given the tools to do that work.
The Elephant in the Room
I keep saying user, but those familiar with the social media business know precisely who I'm talking about. Creators.
Wait, don't leave! At least not until I can explain myself.
Every platform has a successful user base segment, and as they gain followers, they become that platform's native creators. TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram have "celebrity" creators, with a mostly one-way relationship between posters and commenters.
Microblogging works a bit differently. On sites like Twitter and Mastodon, creators are analogous to community builders. They engage back and forth with their replies, boost people with similar ideas, and help connect users to each other. They may look like celebrities because of their likes count and thriving discussions in their replies, but if you look closely, they're actually fostering a community around their native content.
That's not to say that celebrity creators don't exist on these platforms, but they're usually celebrities elsewhere and use microblogging as another distribution and promotion tool. They aren't native creators of these platforms; most of the time, their real work and audience-building happen elsewhere.
Based on my observations, this is true for Threads as well. If you peek into NBA Threads or other sub-cultures on the platform, you'll see a few top-level users curating the space and bringing more people into the fold through their replies and reposts. Many of these communities have spun off into Discords and Instagram group chats that leak back and forth into the main Threads feed. Hold that thought because it's an important one.
If you ask anyone in these communities about their experience on Threads, they'll tell you that they've made lifelong friends and have connected with people with interests they didn't think they'd have in common. They'll also tell you they're connecting with people across communities they probably wouldn't have engaged with otherwise because they connected through one or two people who led them to the whole group.
They'll also tell you that most of that work happens outside the platform.
The Community Creators
In Tech Threads, you have users like Eleonor Rose, who flies city to city to attend meetups, open-sources her work, elevates users in the community who build interesting products, and set up a Discord server and multiple Instagram group chats. Johnathan Garelick also started a Seattle Tech Threads meetup series using Meetup. Those Discords, IG group chats, and meetups are where I'm actually discovering some of my closest friends on the platform.
In NBA Threads, creators like David Rushing and Sara Montour Lewis curate community posts, engage across replies to boost other users, and help drive conversations during games. There's also a hilarious rivalry between the two, interwoven across many Threads. That, among other recurring conversations, keeps everyone engaged while games aren't happening. NBA Threads also utilizes Discord as a way to have conversations off of the main feed.
Mind you, none of this is a one- or two-person show, and many other users aid in this work. But the builders are clearly bringing everyone together in these communities.
These are the native creators of Threads. They are thriving, building, and extending, and people around them are truly enjoying the experience. They are celebrities in their own right but community builders first and foremost. I see the hard work they do every day, and they're the ones making Threads a social network that's actually social.
And I've only mentioned two among many other communities that have silently grown on the platform.
The fact is, a lack of creators is not the elephant in the room. Creators exist on Threads, but they aren't the same creators who succeeded on Twitter or Mastodon, nor are they the influencers on Instagram. Threads is a reply and elevate economy, and the people who have realized this are absolutely crushing it.
The problem is that much of that work is done using brute force and tools outside the core platform.
The Creator Paradox
So, if there is a unique way users are becoming native creators on Threads, the next thing we should expect is for the platform owners to invest and foster those creators and the communities built around them. And in some ways, Meta actually has.
Knowing that NBA Threads and other sports-related communities are growing on the platform, Threads has added scoreboards to the search experience for NBA and MLB games. This enables users to see a live feed of content alongside game stats. This is great! They found specific community needs and doubled down on them.
Also, understanding that power users need more of a live feed, they built a TweetDeck-like experience. There aren't lists (yet), but the columns can include real-time search results, which is a good step forward. Lists would be a great addition, though.
But some other moves Meta has made have been more counter-intuitive.
For one, they aren't incentivizing any community builders and meetup planners, nor have they launched discovery features as entry points to these niches. It's tough to find your footing on Threads because the onboarding takes you to a feed of what looks like "celebrity" creators who likely started on sites like Instagram. I started some fresh accounts and used accounts of friends who aren't as active – unless I knew exactly which communities were already thriving on the platform, I had to do direct searches to find these native creators.
Their money flow also speaks the same language. They've started various influencer programs that push Instagram creators (read: "celebrity" creators) to post on Threads with a promise of $5K if they get 10,000 views. They're going for big celebrities like Taylor Swift, who, quite frankly, doesn't care about the platform whatsoever.
With that, I have two simple questions for Meta:
- Why are native creators who bet your platform on day one not getting financially incentivized for the labor they put in to make your platform worth visiting?
- Why do you think that photo and video creators who, as Deirdre Assenza would say, "spam and scram," will do well on a microblogging platform?
And herein lies the Threads creator paradox: Meta believes that the grass is greener if they inject creators from one site to another while ignoring that the creators who succeed on Threads are nothing like the ones on their sister site and are certainly not traditional celebrities. In fact, if they want to inject the kind of creators who succeed on Threads from platforms they own, they're likely to find more ideal users who run Facebook Groups—community builders who engage and give space to their group members.
That said, they don't have to look to their other platforms. There are clearly native creators ready to go who have put in the work over the last year. Give them the tools they're using off-platform, throw money at them to host events, and give them tips to grow and engage with their community.
Invest in your native creators rather than constantly looking outward for validation with creators who will have difficulty finding success and will blame you for not getting it.
Now What?
An interesting turn will occur later this year when Threads federates because, at that point, it will matter less who the native creators are on Threads. But, even in a federated landscape, a platform's culture will still matter because UX decisions, algorithms, and features will define how people create and engage within your ecosystem.
Currently, creators work for themselves while Threads looks for the next batch of users. Instead of pushing community-building features that enable organic growth, they're trying to shove a square peg in a round hole and throw money at it, hoping it fits with enough financial incentive.
But Taylor Swift posted twice during a giant hoopla around her new album and never returned. Instagram creators are nowhere to be found in the communities natively developed on the platform. Creators from X who have large followings peek in every few months, ask if anyone is still there, and then don't even look at the replies.
Suppose Threads really believes in boosting via replies, building communities around accounts that put in the effort, and having a positive culture within the local network. In that case, it needs to prove it by investing in the platform's original creators instead of hoping to strike gold with old friends who are content where they're already comfortable and successful.
Build for the real Threads creators, and I can promise they'll help you build a larger network of communities.
Perhaps a good starting point would be understanding why your top native communities continue the conversation in Discords and Instagram group chats.
And Lists. Definitely Lists.
Thank you for reading! I'll be continuing to post about the Threads and the Fediverse on Threads and Mastodon so follow me there if you're interested or have any questions for me. And if you want to be notified of future issues of augment and my newsletter "Human-Generated Content," you can follow on RSS or subscribe here for free!