Twitter, Bluesky and Threads. Does Stickiness and Critical Mass Still Matter?
Thanks for subscribing and reading. Please email me david@artemonstrategy.com if you have any thoughts or questions.
If you like this newsletter, do please subscribe and share. And please click the ♡symbol at the top of the post - Substack’s algorithms love the like symbol.
If you’re a free subscriber, please do think about upgrading to become paid - one month is about the price of a pint of beer in London!
A quick reaction newsletter now to the rapidly moving world of text-based social media. After years of Twitter being the only game in town, several new rivals have launched over the past few months. Bluesky, the brainchild of Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO has been running on an invite only basis for months. Yesterday, Instagram launched Threads as a Twitter rival and was downloaded ten million times in seven hours.
But is there a genuine product-market fit for a new social media app or are the new social media apps products in search of a market? Can we ignore the importance of network effects, the need for critical mass or the “stickiness” that has previously applied to established social networks? It’s too soon to tell whether we’re at the start of a disruption or just at a bump in the road for Twitter.
Social Media? A saturated market or the verge of disruption?
Is this the social media equivalent of the London buses problem. You wait years for a new text based social media app and then two or three come along at once.
On Sunday, I signed up to Bluesky, which is an invite only social media text network, with basic similarities to Twitter. And this morning I signed up to Threads - Instagram’s new text based app, with basic similarities to Twitter. Handles are below if you want to follow one or all!
Twitter: djskelton
Bluesky: djskelton.bsky.social
Threads: djskelton1
It’s too early to offer a detailed analysis of what this means for the social media environment, but the sudden churn does lend itself to some important questions:
How difficult and how important is critical mass?
On Twitter, I have over 8,000 followers. On Bluesky, I have 35. This makes for a very different experience. The whole place is calmer, more reasoned, more chilled. Part of Bluesky’s early intrigue is its exclusivity, which, in itself makes it a talking point. The American tech podcasts (the ones full of fake laughter and bonhomie) were full of Bluesky chat a few weeks ago. At the moment, it’s largely populated by people who have worked in and around tech or media. But is that quietness and relative exclusivity a novelty factor, which will soon wear out? For a new app like Bluesky, building critical mass and maintaining that high-minded civility is going to be crucial in the long-term. People might like drinking in an exclusive bar, but they don’t like drinking in a bar that seems empty.
The social element of social media is important after all and when there isn’t an outage (as there was at the weekend) Twitter remains the place to go to fully engage in discussion. Of course, there’s also the argument that plenty of people go on to Twitter because they actively want to have a row about politics, or cricket, or Taylor Swift. The lack of civility, combined with substantial reach might for them be a feature, not a bug.
Plenty of high-profile political commentators have built a career on being controversial on Twitter. Plenty of grifters made their name from making the most of the numbers and reach on Twitter. And that desire to reach for clicks is always going to be there.
Threads have chosen a different model, of course. Compared to Bluesky, they’re not trying to launch a social network from a standing start. By basing your initial follower base on your Instagram followers who have also signed up to Threads, they are trying to build a critical mass based on an already existing social network. They’ve also successfully made the app feel busier than Bluesky by populating the app with what might seem like random content (something that Instagram have effectively used AI for on the main Instagram app).
I’ve been on Threads for a few hours and already have five times as many followers there than on Instagram. But Instagram is a very different kind of social network to Twitter and people who are on both Instagram and Twitter would be expected to behave very differently on both (try posting a holiday photo on Twitter or quoting Aristotle on Instagram). Instagram is much more likely to resemble your physical, real-life social network than Twitter. Threads will be an interesting experiment about whether network effects can be shifted from one type of social network to another.
How important is user experience? Will people be less sticky with social networks?
One of the big drivers towards Bluesky at the weekend were the problems with Twitter functionality that troubled the network over the weekend. The launch of Threads a few days after this outage is almost certainly not coincidental. For English and Aussie Twitter users the fact this outage happened during an enthralling cricket test match, with one of the most controversial sporting moments in recent sporting history, was unfortunate.
Plenty of people have demanded that they want a better user experience. But it’s unclear exactly what better means. For some it might be more engagement. Others would want a smoother experience. Others might look for fewer bots and better moderation. More might demand an emphasis on free speech. Exactly where that sweet spot is harder to identify.
User experience clearly matters and if outages render a social media app largely unusable that’s clearly going to have an impact on usage and a drift towards Twitter rivals. What’s notable about both Bluesky and Threads is how close they are to the look and feel of Twitter - suggesting that they believe that Twitter have largely got this aspect right and there isn’t scope for a more disruptive approach to the medium. They could, of course, have got this wrong and an even more disruptive app could shake them all up.
Both alternatives seem a little smoother and have subtle differences (such as maximum word count). But as usage grows, they will quickly face the same challenges with moderation, political speech and bots that Twitter has. Steve Jobs famously said that to successfully disrupt the incumbent you need to be 10 x better. It’s unclear where Bluesky or Threads are going to get that level of differentiation from. It’s also unclear where the demand or product/ market fit beyond people who work in tech or media is for a new text based social media product.
The importance of habit and what you already know shouldn’t be exaggerated. So far, social network users have been “sticky” - unwilling to move when they can’t take their network with them. This time might be different. But there’s a good chance that it won’t.
There has to be a good chance that people will pop in to Threads out of curiosity to see what the media buzz is about before returning to the place that they’re used to and where active engagement can be guaranteed. Frustration at lack of engagement (there’s no point posting if nobody replies) and the importance of network effects could soon become an issue. As veterans of Google’s attempts to launch a social media product will remember, technical quality and a good user experience isn’t always enough to dislodge an incumbent.
Will social networks splinter? Or will people use different networks for different things?
For the past decade or so, it’s been pretty clear which platforms were used for different things. Instagram for photos; YouTube for videos; Google for Search; Linked In for job searches and occasional virtue signalling; Twitter for text based social media. Now there are at least three (four if you include Mastodon) sites for text based social media. Will that change things?
At the moment there are a variety of Twitters within Twitter. For me, there’s a tech Twitter; a football Twitter; a racing Twitter; a politics Twitter; a music Twitter etc. Different communities engaging differently but within the same app. This is, of course, made possible by the critical mass that we discussed above.
But as more text based social media apps become available, will these different communities splinter? Will people choose different social media apps to discuss different things as they effectively become more subject based created communities? For example, will an app driven by Instagram be more likely to be used by those interested in fashion, music and fitness, whilst Twitter maintains politics and sport users? Will the use of celebrities by Instagram accelerate this trend or is the importance of network effects and engagement too important to overcome this?
Will the same people use different apps for different topics? Will we return to the early internet concept of channels and sub forums? Alternatively, Twitter’s sheer size and scale might mean that it remains the all purpose social media app.
Could this increase polarisation?
There’s been a lot of discussion about the rise of political polarisation, particularly in the United States, but also more markedly in Brazil, the UK, France and Italy. In the United States, the lack of shared experiences has become notable - people get their TV news from different cable stations; shop in different places; listen to different music; and increasingly live in different places. But most politically interested people of any stripe were still drawn to Twitter. It might have been a vehicle for radicalisation, political pile-ons and certainly for argument, but it was also the vehicle for engagement across the divide too. Might this quickly change if people choose different social media apps based on partisan preferences and social media follows down the road of American TV news. If, say, Twitter becomes known as social media preferred by the right and Threads becomes the social media of choice on the left, could a splintering of social media worsen an already savage polarisation?
Will anyone crack monetisation?
Twitter has been good at many things, but monetisation has not been one of them. And this was the case long before the Musk takeover (indeed it was in many ways a driver of it). Monetisation of some web platforms is built on a user mindset (Search ads are served to people who’ve already said what they are searching for, Instagram ads are often aspirational). In contrast, the often confrontational mindset of Twitter users hasn’t always been conducive to ads or monetisation. Not many people will go to politics to argue about politics and end up buying an armchair.
It will be interesting whether any of the new social networks choose a completely different approach to monetisation. For example, they could reach agreements with news publishers; push towards micro-payments; aim to maximise the live sport or TV event experience; or eventually go for the total subscription route.
Is the Threads no show in the EU a sign of things to come?
I’ve already spoken with friends on Threads in the UK, Singapore and the United States. Notably, the whole of the European Union is shut out from the app. Meta suggest that this is due to “the complexities with complying with some of the laws coming into effect next year”. This comes only a few months after Google’s Bard wasn’t made available in the EU for regulatory reasons. I’ve written about the Splinternet and the lack of regulatory coherence on a few occasions and this is the second time in as many months where regulation is causing significant product differences. As EU style regulation spreads around the world there is a chance that lack of regulatory coherence could lead to a lack of product coherence.