Good morning! Hello there, how are you today? Did you sign up for Threads last night? God. I am so deeply conflicted about this. Threads is Instagrams — er, Meta’s — er, Facebook’s new Twitter clone. It launched last night.
It is… pretty good? I mean first and foremost, this is absolutely, 100%, exactly a classic case of using monopoly power to defeat the competition. Meta piggybacked Threads off of Instagram, and Instagram does all the heavy lifting for a ton of functionality that is incredibly tedious to build but necessary: just look at all the little “external” link icons in the settings that link out to Instagram: Personal information, Supervision, Security, Language, Download your information, Transfer your Information, Account Status. All necessary stuff to build, that takes time, lots of time to build when a bajillion people are racing to build the best Twitter competitor. But all stuff that doesn’t have a ton of utility or give a dopamine rush to new users. Threads got all that for free.
They also got Facebook’s cloud architecture for free, which meant they could do a big launch at 7PM ET last night and not use an invite system. Just open the thing up to everyone, let ‘er rip. Which meant that 2 million people signed up in a couple hours, and by this morning it is almost certainly the biggest of the new Twitter competitors: Bluesky, Spoutible, Post, etc. Maybe Mastodon, with a decade of growth, is still bigger. Today. I doubt it will be by Monday.
And all of that, all of that, is classic unfair competition, but whatever. All of these are free, for one reason or another, so as far as our courts are concerned, still, it doesn’t count. Until there’s a “market” with “money.” One would hope that this meant that Zuck took his sweet time monetizing this thing. The Instagram team is hardly known for their light touch with ads and algorithmic garbage, so the enshittification of this thing is inevitable. But maybe they’ll slow their roll a bit to keep the FTC at bay. Fingers crossed.
Which is the depressing part of this. There was a good chance that Bluesky, or Spoutible, or Post would ultimately get enshittified. Bluesky, being a non-profit, is probably gonna take the longest, Spoutible, as far as I understand it, has got some Bot Sentinel revenue to take it a little longer, but I suspect they’d all get enshittified eventually. But Threads? Barring Zuck playing a bit of 4D chess with the FTC, but given the hyper-speed user adoption, enshittification is guaranteed to happen in months. That is depressing.
All this aside, I do have to say that Bluesky wiffed this. Post and Spoutible had to start from complete scratch, including finding funding. Bluesky already had funding and had a team in place and was already building even before Elon bought Twitter. They seem… very slow. Yes, yes, they had to do all the things from scratch that Threads got from Meta, but, I mean, you still can’t even read a, erm, thread over there. If two people you follow get into a long conversation, your timeline becomes unreadable. Unfair competition aside, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Bluesky missed its chance, my completely uneducated guess would be because of its non-profit structure fostering generally chill vibes.
Pre-launch, I deeply questioned whether Meta could make a product anymore. They have answered that concern resoundingly. Threads isn’t there yet but I assume it will be soon, and it’s now the best of the batch.
My level of conflict about this is deep. I’m utterly tired of this whole depressing period of social media and wish all of “good Twitter” could hurry up and settle on a single new platform because I’m sick of looking at four apps. And doing it off of the back of Instagram has some nice benefits. By this morning some normie friends of mine — utterly divorced from the tech scene and people who never even used Twitter — were signing up for Threads and that is nice. Maybe there will be something there other than activists arguing about tactics and hustle culture.
But.. but.. Facebook! I mean yes I guess at this point I dislike Zuck less than Elon but my god this is the choice we have on the internet now? It is so depressing, so depressing.
And this whole period was gonna wash out eventually. Eventually things were going to settle and maybe it wasn’t gonna be into a single Twitter replacement but a few nice little communities. This whole process didn’t need Facebook. The problems with Facebook are still profound. And losing Twitter in our social media ecosystem only for the largest social media player to capture one of the few corners of that ecosystem they didn’t already have is deeply concerning.
In the meantime, here’s the link to my Threads profile. May god have mercy on us all.
In other news, the WHO is going to classify Aspertame as a carcinogen which is just hilarious given that a) earnest scientists have been saying for decades the stuff is fine, b) we all knew it was poison anyway, and c) we’re all still drinking Diet Coke or DMD. A friend last night told me that he had spoken to one of the “inventors” once and the guy said it was never meant for human consumption and probably causes cancer. And it turns out Donald Rumsfeld and regulatory capture was involved in its eventual, after many tries, approval by the FDA over the objections of the advisory board. I mean, this is America. Of course. Of course. Super sweet.
For my part, I’m down to a single 12-oz can of aspartame-tainted beverage a day. I should probably give that up. It will be hard. And then, of course, when I leave the comfort of my home and have to deal with the real world where they do not have fountain Zevia, all bets are off, but thankfully I am a hermit and that is rare. Emma and I pack Zevias in the car with us. We buy them at grocery stores immediately upon arrival in another town for an extended stay. But yes, still Diet Coke on the road. I need to find a widely available Diet Coke or Diet Mountain Dew replacement that has no Aspartame. This world is impossible. Recommendations welcome.
Also if you have any recommendations for finger yoga for my stupid arthritis, that would be welcome too.
Here is a drawing of two girls sleeping in bunk beds sharing the same dream. I wish Jane’s Magnadoodle was higher res.
Daddy-Jane Dance Party and bedtime in general was back on track last night. She was happy and snuggly and told me she loved me and played silly games and we had a good dance party, wherein I played too much CHVRCHES until it was her turn to choose. CHVRCHES are an enigma. They are good, yes. But they are, paradoxically, not as good as the sum of their parts. The dudes in the band used to be Aerogramme and that band was amazing. Lauren Mayberry is an amazing singer, amazing performer, just all around Amazing. Aerogramme plus Lauren Mayberry is really good, but I’m sorta shocked it’s not absolutely the greatest thing ever.
And Jane chose Katy Perry and Taylor Swift for her songs last night. Alas. “Delicate” is growing on me, though, still. And I cannot tell you the depths of critical thinking I have no applied to the “California Girls” video by Katy and Snoop. I could write a thesis. If I were ever sitting with you at Tom and Jerry’s, I could talk about that video for hours. I have so many thoughts.
Maybe someday I’ll do a single-topic issue of GMHHAY only about the California Girls video.
Drone mix for you, okay, there are a few chord changes these days I am getting a little looser in my definition of drone. But, you know, four or five chord changes in an hour long mix… pretty minimal.
Until tomorrow.
yes. yes, i *do* want the "california girls" thesis.