A 'Thread' About Twitter....And The End Of The Honest Internet

Like most of my friends online I am trying out Face/MetaBooks new ‘Threads’ product.

If you had told me last year I would be linking my Instagram to a Twitter ‘clone/competitor’ I would have rolled my eyes.

But, Elon has made it easy to root against him and the company. This tweet from Zach made me laugh:

So now I have an account with Insta/Face/MetaBook even though I would never root for Zuckerberg:

Only Elon could have made all this happen. He has been the most charitable tech person of 2022 and 2023 by paying out ex-Twitter employees that he despises top dollars for their Twitter shares last year and now juicing the stock of his competitor Face/Insta/Metabook shares to $300 by destroying his own shareholder’s value at Twitter. Bravo.

While people dismiss the idea of ‘Threads’ because it is Zuckerberg and data evil, as Fred Wilson (a seed investor in Twitter who has stopped using Twitter) says in his post today …

So far, ‘Threads’ WILL NOT work for me as a replacement for Twitter. There is no chronological timeline so while it may be fun to share and interact with some old friends that have left Twitter, I will not spend much time on the app.

Because I am a VC and part of my job is to help our companies network and be promoted, I have to use Twitter. I do need to figure out a smarter, less time consuming way to invest my time on Twitter. That will involve paying $8 month for Twitter Blue. While Elon and his cronies will chuckle, the joke is on them as I would pay hundreds a month for the right features.

As for Elon’s ‘brilliant’ hire Linda…her first tweet is a complete lie…not even trying to be ‘honest’.

I have been throttled by the Twitter algo for who knows why. There is no ‘free’ speech on Twitter. She is right though that it is people like me who built the community.

Rome was not built in a day and Twitter (the network) won’t be destroyed by any one event. Facebook is not Rome and Twitters network effects are not guaranteed to last forever.

I have always been too close to Twitter because the product was so perfect when it began. I was in the first few thousand people to sign up. It was silly, fast, light, fun, open, hard to use and buggy. The company was born out of a pivot from a podcast product called ‘Odeo’. The open Twitter ecosystem dragged me in and even though the greed and fear raged as it grew, I was fortunate enough and early enough to the network to profit from it (investments in Tweetdeck, Bitly, Betaworks). I was loyal.

Twitter was the wild west. You could share and be heard if you were interesting and unique. From its open beginnings Twitter inspired me to start Stocktwits . We came up with the $cashtag which contributed to Twitter’s growth especially ‘Fintwit’.

Threads is not the wild west and won’t stay a happy place for very long. And Twitter is not as bad as the haters would lead you to believe.

Just another day on the internet.

Have a great Friday.

PS - You may also enjoy these takes On Twitter and Threads….

Ed’s post - ‘The End Of The Honest Internet’

I also enjoyed Bob Lefsetz riff…

Have you signed up yet?

We haven't had this spirit here since 2006, when Facebook opened up to the general public. Or maybe 2010, with the launch of Instagram. Or 2017, with the launch of TikTok. Only this time it's different, we're not excited about a new platform because of the possibilities, but because of the hatred of the old platform, Twitter. We're seeking a refuge.

It's all about community. In every vertical these days. That's the hardest lift, the biggest climb. It doesn't matter how good your idea is, it comes down to whether it spreads, whether you can build a fan/user base. It's nearly impossible to do. People are overwhelmed, they want less clutter, not more. And in a world split into narrow niches, they might not be interested in your vertical.

But we couldn't wait to sign up for Threads. I did. I'm eager. Because not only am I down on Elon Musk, I'm down on the experience. Twitter has become less fulfilling, I don't need it as much, I'm not nearly as addicted as I used to be, it's no longer the heartbeat of the world, it's been taken over by bro culture, a tiny sliver of society that most of us decry.

Elon Musk might have been good at getting ahead of the public, with PayPal and Tesla, but he's not good at actually living in the moment, with the rest of us. You see Musk's input is limited. What I mean is he doesn't have enough sources, he's living in an echo chamber. He believes the hype. He believes the problem with Twitter is freedom. He's become the hero of ignorant, alienated males, and that's a bad look. Furthermore, you fail upon launch, not when you're dealing with a mature platform. There was this insanity with check marks. You have to pay, or maybe you don't have to pay. Some people can post endless screeds. It's no longer a microblogging platform, it seems to be going backward to something like Blogger or LiveJournal. And we learned with Tumblr that you never alienate your core customers, whether it be users or advertisers, because it all depends upon community, you've got to keep the eyeballs, otherwise you've got nothing.

In other words, this is a maintenance mission as opposed to an innovative mission. You take what you've got and tweak it, you don't trash it, throwing the essence overboard.

Steve Jobs believed in small teams. He thought they accomplished more than large teams. But he didn't believe in eliminating the team. It's one thing to be lean, it's another to be strapped. And in a world run by Millennial and Gen-Z values you don't want to abuse workers and not pay your bills. That's anathema to them, they hate you on principle, you've got to assuage them first. You have to know who your customer is.

And then messing with the content... It's bad enough we have to see ads, now we don't even get to see the content we want to?

As for Zuckerberg... He's no prince, but we haven't heard anything about the metaverse in months. He seems to have pivoted, refocused, without trashing his past efforts. He's just moved on, like a band that made a bad album and now wants to recover, like Garth Brooks after he morphed into Chris Gaines.