Why Insta’s Threads Matters
Because we can leave, which changes nearly everything.
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Apparently the open web has finally died. This the very same week Meta launches Threads, which, if its first day is any indication, seems to be thriving (10 million sign ups in its first few hours, likely 50 million by the time this publishes…).
But before Threads’ apparent success, most writers covering tech had decided that the era of free, open-to-the-public, at scale services like Twitter, Reddit, and even Facebook/Insta is over. I’ll pick on this recent one from The Verge: So where are we all supposed to go now?
The piece argues that the decline of Twitter (Elon’s killing it), Reddit (it’s killing itself), and Instagram (it’s just entertainment now!) has left “an everybody-sized hole in the internet. For all these years, we all hung out together on the internet. And now that’s just gone.”
Umm…no. And not because of Threads (I’ll get to that in a minute). We never did “hang out together on the internet.” Anyone who knows Twitter knows it’s always been a cliquey echo chamber run by public narcissists. Reddit’s always been where a relatively small group of highly disaffected kids make fun of…everyone. And Instagram? Last I checked, it was still growing — even before Threads. Besides, no one ever “hung out” on Insta, I mean, it started as a photo service, remember? Complaining that it’s become an entertainment service is equivalent to moaning that TikTok is unusable because you’re getting old. Oh wait, Vox, parent of The Verge, has already done that too.
Sure, you can “hang out” on some random subreddit, or get into endless flame wars with 12 other idiots on Twitter, or join an Instagram Live with a few hundred other voyeurs, but…that’s certainly not “everyone hanging out together on the Internet.” The very idea is ridiculous. We’re not built to “hang out with everyone,” and we never will be. Many of us, me included, are built to hang out with about six people at a time. And they change depending on context.
Trend pieces noting that the web has changed aren’t annoying because they’re wrong (of course the web is changing), they’re annoying because they miss the core problem: Centralization. We’ve been living in a centralized web world for more than a decade…
