Exactly! I'm sure lots of people will stay on Twitter. But ad buyers, celebrities and brands are not very interested in the niche communities, and thus Twitter as business will be extremely hurt.
This made me think of the ad business on Twitter which I think might be its real killer.
If a community builds up on Threads (and why wouldn't it, reserving spots for 2B Instagram users?), the ad value will then probably be much greater there, and businesses (and thus influencers) will see a more lucrative environment there.
Why?
1. Meta harvests more data from your phones than Twitter which provides more accurate ad targetting.
2. Twitter is poorly ran and struggles even with basic things like not pissing advertisers off as they keep making controversial decisions for the network.
The news of rate limits must have spread like shock waves through the ad community, as one example. Reducing reach by now walling their garden and killing embedded tweets to make it harder to get to their ads another.
As for celebrities, they already have good community contact on Instagram since the visual medium lends itself extremely well in that regard, and I'm 100% sure Threads will ultimately become an extension to Instagram.
Isn't it funny how Elon has hunted his X.com idea for a "social network for everything"?
Instagram is far ahead than him now. They have Instagram photos, Snapchat stories, TikTok reels, and now Twitter threads.
> Twitter is poorly ran and struggles even with basic things like not pissing advertisers off as they keep making controversial decisions for the network.
This trope of "pissing advertisers off" is repeated ad nauseum, but there is no evidence that rational advertisers have preferences regarding which content surrounds their advertisements. They only care about paying less money for advertisements than they make in revenue attributable to those advertisements. And therein lies a Yogi Berra-esque paradox: if all the advertisers leave Twitter, then the advertising prices will decrease, and advertising to Twitter users will become cost-effective ("Republicans buy sneakers too.")
What advertisers do care about is angry mobs of people harassing them about all the wrongthink their ads are appearing next to. It would be more accurate to say that "advertisers don't like being harassed by a mob of people who are pissed off at the platform that hosts the ads."
Given how many social networks have launched, for me the interesting questions aren't "what technology" or "what policy", but "what people are using it" and "what are they using it _for_".
This may take some time to evolve. Indeed, sometimes it evolves with the platform; Instagram basically _created_ "influencer" as a job description. Youtube created its Youtubers. So what's happening on Threads? Anyone got any good launch content to post here?
