July 20, 2023 • 32 mins
Meta’s new Twitter-like social media platform called Threads is signing up users at a record pace. But will it last–and will it be a “Twitter killer”? Bloomberg Businessweek writer Max Chafkin is…skeptical. He says that after years of explosive growth, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are facing big challenges. Many longtime users are spending less time each day scrolling through their feeds. Max joins this episode to talk about why people are putting down their phones and choosing to spend more time IRL.
Read more: Threads, Twitter and the No-Attention Economy
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
The social media app that I use the most is Instagram.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's a tie between Instagram and it had been Twitter.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Had so probably TikTok. I just like that. It's like
short form, It's just like quick videos that you can watch.
I'll probably say TikTok. Reason being is because I'd rather
post videos and the pictures sometimes.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Instagram, and I'm not into the other ones at all.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
I definitely use social media less now because I have
a job and I don't have as much time.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
I use it less now. Quote you get carried away
with it, maybe.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
One hundred percent more. It's like terrible how much I
use it.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
They want you to be addicted.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Definitely less as I've become.
Speaker 5 (00:43):
More aware of the dangers of social media, for sure.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
How are you feeling about your social media habit these days?
For the longest time, Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, we're
growing like crazy, and everyone loved them or love to
hate them, but even then still spent too many hours
scrolling through those endless feeds. Bloomberg's Max Chaffkin the rights
(01:08):
in Business Week that recently, for a lot of people,
the love is gone. He says, even as Meta's new
Twitter substitute called threads is racking up users. Social media
use overall is softening.
Speaker 6 (01:23):
A lot of people want to go outside and see
their friends and they don't want to look at their screens.
But I think there's really a possibility that there's no
next Twitter.
Speaker 5 (01:32):
The next Twitter is nothing.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
I'm west Kosova today on the Big Take borrow that
old Internet cliche, touching screens versus touching grass. Max. Great
to see you again, Yeah, good to see you. So
why did you write this story?
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Well, two reasons.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
One is, for the last year or so, there's just
been this constellation of things that have been happening, especially
in the world of social media, but broader in the world.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
Of online media.
Speaker 6 (02:09):
The biggest and I think most important, being that Elon
Musk bought Twitter and has proceeded to do what feels
like almost everything in his power to destroy it. He's
changed all these policies, he's alienated Twitter's advertisers, he's alienate
a lot of the core users, he's fired most of
the employees. But at the same time, right there are
these challenges for Elon Musk, and I started to think about, well,
(02:31):
what are those challenges? Why is Elon Musk struggling so bad.
Why is a guy who can send rockets into space,
who almost single handedly popularize the electric car, who is
doing brain implants, who seems like he can do almost anything,
he can't run a social media company that should be
like the easiest of those.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
And it's not just Twitter. A lot of social media
platforms are also facing new headwinds.
Speaker 6 (02:54):
The social media platforms are struggling, and not just the
social media platforms.
Speaker 5 (02:57):
So you look at streaming.
Speaker 6 (02:58):
A couple years ago, Netflix and all these streaming companies
basically seemed like they had almost unlimited growth and it
was all we were talking about, and you're suddenly seeing
shrinking subscriber bases. A headline that jumped out on me
a couple months ago was Apple is making its own
movies now, and they announced that they were going to
show those movies in movie theaters, which was kind of
(03:19):
spun in some circles as, oh, like, Apple's just taking
over the world.
Speaker 5 (03:23):
But what it really is is kind of an admission
of defeat.
Speaker 6 (03:26):
It's that they can't market the movies without the movie theaters.
A couple others, you know, Vice declaring bankruptcy. Vice I've
been seen as kind of the future of media. BuzzFeed News,
which was seen as the future of news, just shut down.
Those two were companies that were basically drafting off of
social media, in particular Facebook. So yeah, you just saw
all of these companies that are all facing challenges and
(03:46):
you look at what's happening, and the explanation is, like,
not that complicated. It's that for a long time, there
was incredible growth in this market. Every single year, there
were more people spending more time looking at their phones
and before their phones, their computer screens, and that basically
was almost like a law, and in some quarters of
(04:06):
Silicon Valley they thought of it like as a natural law,
like the law of gravity or the law of the
conservation of matter or something.
Speaker 5 (04:13):
And during the pandemic it became possible to sort of
believe that would go on forever.
Speaker 6 (04:18):
And then you come out of the pandemic and people
are able to see friends, and they start pulling back,
and for the first time in twenty two we saw
a big drop in the amount of time people were
spending on devices. There had been drops before, but this
drop was way bigger. And I think a lot of
these other stories bankruptcies and digital media challenges of streaming giants,
(04:39):
challenges within social media companies.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
They all kind of come back to this basic.
Speaker 6 (04:43):
Reality, which is that a lot of people want to
go outside and see their friends and they don't want
to look at their screens.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
And as you mentioned that, there had been slow downs before,
and you started to see the seeds of this before
the pandemic. But and then of course when everyone was
stuck at home, there was this boom again.
Speaker 6 (05:03):
I think it was around twenty eighteen, and you see
that both in the data. So I cite this data
from GWI, which is a market research company. They basically
send out surveys to almost a million people, maybe more
than a million people every year, basically saying like how
much time are you spending on your device, what are
you doing on your device? How much money are you spending?
And it's in twenty eighteen when they picked up this decline.
(05:24):
But I think you can also see it in things
that were happening at the time. So the same year,
in twenty eighteen, Bloomberg did a story. It was about
how people were getting a lot of pings from Facebook.
There were all these intrusive notifications that users were complaining about,
saying like you haven't logged into Facebook for a long time.
Your friend is on Facebook. Just these kind of like
almost thirsty kings from this digital media company that was
(05:47):
going around talking about as if the growth is going
on forever. You also saw Facebook doing all these kind
of wild things that were designed to get bigger audiences.
There's obviously been a lot of Internet penetration, a lot
of cell phone penetration in much of the world, but
there were you know, parts of the world in particular,
you know Sub Saharan Africa, parts of Asia where there's
very poor connectivity, and Google and Facebook we're going to
(06:09):
try to solve that in novel ways, Google by floating
these balloons. The company was called Loon and it was
going to broadcast a signal. The balloons act like satellites essentially,
and Facebook had basically the same plan, except with drones.
These were high flying, gigantic airplanes that would sort of
be way above the clouds and zipping Internet down to
(06:32):
the furthest corners of the world. And again, like looking back,
you're like, how did they plan on making money there?
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Because it's not just about the audience.
Speaker 6 (06:39):
You need advertising, and so I think there was just
this conception that it would go on forever, and you
start to see skepticism building in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen,
but then the pandemic happened, and the pandemic instantly everybody
is stuck at home, right, we have nothing, no other
way to communicate with people, So people are spending more
time online. There was a lot of inks build in
(07:01):
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one about kind of like
a new normal, how this wasn't a temporary public health crisis,
this was an accelerant. In other words, we would never
get off of zoom. And you see that in the statements,
especially made by these tech companies that were really invested
in these services. So, like all of the tech companies
were the most enthusiastic supporters of remote work because of
(07:23):
course remote work, in addition to like keeping people from
getting COVID, was a great way for them to make money.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
Mark Zuckerberg relocated to Why and.
Speaker 6 (07:31):
Made all these statements in twenty twenty about how half
of Facebook's work force would be remote and one of
the reasons Zuckerberg was saying, you know, everyone's gonna be
able to work remotely is because he believed that everyone
would have these headsets that they would plug into to
have meetings, and it was he believed also going to
be like the center of our social interactions. The idea
(07:54):
of the metaverse was that it was going to be
this new platform like social media, but like moral compass
than social media. Facebook changed its name to meta you know,
with much fanfare. Zuckerberg invested and has continued to invest
huge sums of money.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
You had books written.
Speaker 6 (08:10):
I looked, you know, there's so many business books about
how to set your company up for the metaverse, how
to profit from the metaverse, how the metaverse is going
to change everything. And they bought a Super Bowl ad
and they spend all this money, and you look, and
the results are just incredibly piddling. We're also seeing Apple,
another company that is trying to make the metaverse happen,
(08:31):
announce this headset and they had a whole event, and
you're seeing the sales projections get smaller and smaller. When
you look at this trend of declining interest in screen
time and social media, you can see you can predict
that the metaverse would not do very well because if
you're dealing with a situation where consumers are like not
wanting to spend as much time on Facebook and Twitter
(08:52):
and so on, and then your pitches. I've got Facebook,
but it's strapped to your face. You can see why
consumers would be like, thanks, I'll stick with what i've got.
There was this feeling that there were certain parts of
the pandemic that would just sort of last, maybe forever,
and I think that part just has not borne out.
And when you look at the increase in the time spend,
(09:15):
it's almost not that encouraging. It was only about fifteen
minutes more per day that people were spending on their devices.
And you might imagine, given that we were all stuck inside,
that the number would be even higher.
Speaker 5 (09:25):
But I think the thing was we were already pretty saturated.
Speaker 6 (09:28):
I mean, when you're talking about seven hours a day,
which is how high it got, that's almost half of
a normal waking day. I think you would really have
to work to spend more time than that. And I
can say that as like an addict of these things.
And so I think we all collectively had a problem,
maybe still have a problem, and the awareness of that
is creating all sorts of dislocation where you have these
(09:51):
social media companies who are increasingly competing for a market
that is no longer growing. So this isn't to say
that social media is dying. Somebody see those headlines, but
it's not. It's just not growing as much and that
has all sorts of knock on effects that makes the
difficult for the social media companies. We basically found a
saturation point, a point where we like, we can't eat
(10:12):
any more Internet. It's seven hours and after that, you know,
you start to go a little nuts.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
Because I've covered.
Speaker 6 (10:18):
Social media and digital media for almost twenty years, thinking
about this caused me to like revisit a lot of
things that I hadn't really thought about. One of the
things was Read Hastings, the then CEO of Netflix, was
going around saying the only competition for Netflix, the only
competition that matters is sleep. It was very pithy and
memorable he said in our earnings calls and in conferences,
(10:39):
and the idea was that you know, if you're watching
Netflix and you're getting tired, but you're really into the show,
you might stay up and you might skip some sleep in.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
Order to watch another episode.
Speaker 6 (10:50):
And like, looking back on that, it really seems weird
and problematic and troubling because, first of all, there's no
disrupting sleep, right, Like, everyone needs to sleep physically, it's
a requirement. But it also kind of gets at the limits.
There's only so much attention. And the idea that Netflix
was going to like cause people to sleep a little
less and that was going to allow them to make
their like quarterly numbers for the foreseeable future. You can
(11:13):
just see that that's a little bit problematic, super memorable
and funny, and he got to go around saying like,
you know, we're at war with sleep and we're winning.
And people at the time kind of loved it, but
I think were looking back that was kind of a
warning sign.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
Or it should have been a warning sign.
Speaker 6 (11:26):
And right around that time is when time spent online
started a level off or even fall a little bit.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
And so there's this parallel between the streaming companies like
Netflix and Apple and Disney and all the rest of
them that are trying to claim our attention and the
social media companies which are also trying to claim our
attention at the very same time.
Speaker 6 (11:49):
Not only that, but they're competing for the same attention.
And I think that's part of what happened. Like you
had growth leveling off where people are sort of spending
as much time as they can looking at screens. You
have parts of the developing world getting online like they're
already online. If you look at the World Bank, like
how many cell phones are there per one hundred people,
it's one hundred and six. They're just like not that
(12:09):
many people out there who are not already potential Netflix customers,
and these companies their fates are tied together because going
back ten years, social media was kind of at the
core of how a lot of culture, a lot of news,
a lot of everything was being consumed by people. So
you're just sort of pushing a lot of stuff into
(12:30):
a funnel, and it's you know, the funnel's not getting
any wider, and again there's going to be dislocation, or
you're going to start to see companies try to pivot,
which is to some extent what happened in social media.
Facebook and TikTok, which sprung up, basically moved away from
having people share stuff and into just serving up this
feed of algorithmic content for people to consume. And you
(12:53):
see social media transforming itself from being more of an
active experience to be more like a passive, consumptive thing.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
After the break. Is Threads a Twitter killer or just
another Twitter wanna be?
Speaker 1 (13:14):
I enjoy Threads. I think it's a good intersection of
you know, Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 7 (13:22):
It's no, Oh my god, I'm trying to stay away
from threads. I don't need anything.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
More to do, just with a stroke of genius to
literally just take Twitter and make a new platform that
it really mirrors exactly what Twitter is. Maybe a couple
months from now, it's even better than Twitter ever was.
It's possible.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
Max. Is interesting that we're talking about people's ambivalence towards
social media and spending less time on it because we're
in the middle of this big promotional surge and a
lot of hype around threads, which is, of course is
Facebook's answer to Twitter.
Speaker 6 (14:02):
And you can see why Facebook Meta is doing this.
I mean they're doing it because Twitter has just been
putting rakes in its path and stepping on them in.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
The online space.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
Metas Instagram has unveiled Threads and op designed to compete
with Elon Musk's Twitter. Red's currently ranked number one among
free apps on the Apple Store. But will the new
platform succeed in knocking the Bluebird off of its perch.
Speaker 5 (14:28):
There's a track record here.
Speaker 6 (14:29):
Zuckerberg has basically, for the last ten years looked out
at the universe of other apps and tried to copy them,
and most of the time he's been pretty unsuccessful, but
there have been a few exceptions. And as you said,
the first couple of days of Threads were really amazing.
It is the fastest growing app ever in the sense
that in just a few days, I think five days,
(14:49):
they had one hundred million users. Now I think there
are reasons to not get too excited about that, And
when you look at the way the stock has performed,
which is like it hasn't really moved very much, you
can sort of see this part of it is that
number one, it's a standalone product, but it's taking the
Instagram algorithm and the Instagram user base and essentially pouring
them over to another app. So that might kill Twitter maybe,
(15:13):
although I'm kind of skeptical of that. But it doesn't
necessarily create a ton of new value for Facebook. It
just becomes a different way to consume Instagram.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
For people who aren't familiar with Threads. Tell us exactly
what it is like, how it's like Twitter, how it's
not like Twitter.
Speaker 5 (15:32):
Threads is basically exactly like Twitter in almost every way.
Speaker 6 (15:37):
But I'd say two important differences in Threads. One is
there is no chronological feed in Threads right now. Threads
is all algorithm. In other words, you can follow people
on Threads and those people will be in your feed,
but you're also going to see like a lot of influencers, celebrities, brands,
kind of what you see in TikTok or if you've
(16:00):
used Instagram in the last year, what you see on Instagram.
It's not really a way to consume content from your
friends as much as a way to consume content from
content creators. The other thing, and this is I think
the most important thing, is unlike Twitter, which when you
sign up for you give them your email and you
create a password and so on, with Threads, you just
go to Instagram and click a button and it basically
(16:21):
takes your Instagram account and moves it over to this
other app. And if you look at it, and it's
really just like Instagram without the pictures, for better or worse.
But again, it isn't as much as standalone app as
it is another version of an app you already know,
and that could be good, could be bad. It definitely
creates a situation where the best case scenario is Facebook
(16:41):
controls yet another part of the social media ecosystem, right
where Facebook already has WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and then they
potentially have like another one of the big apps to
consume and create content.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Why do you think there's been such a huge number
of people moving to threads?
Speaker 5 (17:02):
Well, two things.
Speaker 6 (17:03):
One is that Twitter has been really bad, especially if
you've been a longtime Twitter user as I have.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
I mean, you really notice it.
Speaker 6 (17:11):
The bunch of decisions, some of which have to do
with the technical performance of the app, which is not good.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Twitter's offices set to reopen Monday after a mass exodus
of workers forced a shutdown last Week's sources also say
Elon Musk is considering firing more employees, this time targeting
the sales and partnership side of the business.
Speaker 6 (17:31):
Turns out when you fire almost everybody, things start to break.
But also Elon Musk's decision to prioritize this weirdo right
wing corner of the Internet that he is obviously like
a personal fan of, but it doesn't necessarily have a
much broader audience. So like you went from seeing well
known actors and politicians and journalists and writers, and now
(17:55):
you're seeing basically in your feed a lot of Elon
Musk's friends and these weird right wing meme accounts, like
there's one called cat Turd, which is like, if you're
on Twitter, you know what it is, and if you're not, congratulations,
you're doing better than me.
Speaker 5 (18:07):
So Twitter has gotten worse.
Speaker 6 (18:08):
And the other thing is Facebook made it really easy,
and they are all of these digital enticements inside of
Instagram that urge you to go in that direction, one
of which is if you go into the app and
you click on somebody's profile, you'll see very prominent link
to look at their threads. If you didn't have threads,
you start getting alerts saying so and so is on
threads and posting.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
And then once you're on there, once you click.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
The button, even before you've done anything, you start getting
all of these notifications as people follow you. And this
is a really important thing because once you create a
threads account, you basically are encouraged to auto follow everybody
who already follow on Instagram. So you immediately basically send
three hundred pings to your friends, and those create a
sense of wow.
Speaker 5 (18:52):
There's a lot happening here.
Speaker 6 (18:53):
I kept getting alerts over the weekend that it launched
from people who are following me. You click, you're like, wow,
this person's on Threads. You click on it, and it's
just an empty page. And they're all empty pages because
a lot of people haven't actually posted anything, but they're
all these alerts. Mark Zuckerberg gets a lot of criticism,
but he is very good at marketing and growing a
(19:15):
technological product. And we saw this ten years ago as
Facebook started to run into these growth challenges. So you
could see Threads as a way to address some of
the issues that are already going on on Instagram, where
you're sort of seeing a drop off on engagement, a
drop off and sharing. They're trying to compete with TikTok,
but it's not quite happening. The performance of Reels, which
(19:36):
is their TikTok like product, it just is not doing
nearly as well as TikTok itself. So I think that
the game here for Instagram is to hopefully find a
way to get people to re engage with this product
and give them a reason to contribute to not just
consume content, but also create content. It's not clear that
that's happening or that that will happen.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Though there's been a lot of people writing that Threads
could be the Twitter killer, and whether or not that's true.
But one thing that you write is that even though
a lot of people are signing up for Threads, a
lot of other people just aren't looking for yet another
social media platform to replace Twitter or anything else. They
kind of just don't want to spend that much time
on social media at all.
Speaker 6 (20:17):
We've seen over the last nine months since Elon Musk
took over the company, just this collection of Twitter killers
that is just the last one. There's this thing called Mastodon,
There's Blue Sky, There's Post, there's substack notes, discord. There
have been a lot of efforts to create Twitter killers.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
And some of them have done okay.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
But I think there's really a possibility that there is
no Twitter killer, that there's no next Twitter, the next
Twitter is nothing, and that this just becomes something that
slowly is phased out of people's media diets if they
stop using Twitter itself, which if this trend, which is
the decline in screen time or the lack of growth
and screen time, continues, you're gonna need to see some
(21:01):
apps fall by the wayside, and Twitter maybe one of them.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
There is this perception among a lot of people because
Twitter gets so much attention and because politicians, companies, everybody
uses it, that it gets echoed in news stories in
other places that even if you're not on Twitter, you
wind up seeing tweets. Gives you this impression that it's
really really huge. But by social media platform standards, Twitter
has actually always been kind of small and niche.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
It's big, but it doesn't have anywhere near the scale
of Facebook. And as you said, it's always been this
app that kind of over indexes in media and in
news and in politics. And you can sort of see
why that is. It's like a word based platform. It's
a great way to broadcast an announcement or something like that. Remember,
in twenty twenty one, Twitter and the other social media
(21:50):
companies ban Donald Trump. This was after January sixth, Trump
had been seen as inciting the insurrection.
Speaker 5 (21:57):
There was a sense they'd kind of been itching to
do it for a while. Well, all the platforms.
Speaker 6 (22:01):
Banned him, including Twitter, and it was seen as this
watershed moment. Politically, Trump's appeal to a lot of people
was so tied up in his ability to grab the
news cycle, and there was a lot of inkspilled about
this is going to permanently weaken Trump, It's going to
permanently change the course of social media. And then Elon
(22:21):
Musk bought the company and one of the first things
he did was let Trump back on right and there
was a whole that was a big controversy too, And
a surprising thing happened, which is Donald Trump, despite having
seemed totally and utterly addicted to Twitter before he had
been banned, has managed not to go back since the
band was lifted. But it's also surprising because Trump is
(22:41):
leading the Republican polls by huge margin. It turns out
Trump doesn't need Twitter, and maybe no one needs Twitter
in the sense of as a way to access that
part of the media ecosystem. It really does feel like
it no longer has the importance that it once had,
partly I think because of Elon and partly because there
(23:02):
have been shifts in the media landscape. To be fair
to Elon Musk, Twitter was in a weakening position even
before Elon Musk bought it, but as part of the acquisition,
they've loaded up on a bunch of debt he's alienated
a bunch of key partners, and then you have this
competitor with very deep pockets and competence, and so obviously
(23:24):
it could be a big thread. I think the idea
that Twitter would just go away, that's probably not going
to happen.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
You went to Meta and asked them about threads. What
did they say?
Speaker 6 (23:35):
So? Facebook didn't comment to me directly, but the head
of Instagram who's overseeing threads, has been very upfront about
the shortcomings of this. What they're saying is, look, it's
early days. We understand like we're working on and make
it better. They are very clear that this is an
early product. Of course, they're very excited about the massive
user growth. What they're saying is that we're not trying
(23:55):
to be like Twitter.
Speaker 4 (23:57):
And of course he also went to Twitter. Where did
they have to say?
Speaker 6 (24:00):
Twitter's press account sent me a picture of a poop emoji.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
That was their actual response.
Speaker 6 (24:06):
Twitter has set their press department, insofar as they have
a press department, to respond every email with the poop emji,
which I think says a lot about how they view
the press and how seriously they take their position in
the news ecosystem.
Speaker 4 (24:24):
After the break, So what does the future of social
media look like.
Speaker 7 (24:36):
I used to love Twitter. I did a bunch of
university projects on Twitter. It was like the reliable source
of information in a lot of ways. And because it's
such a controversy, I can't really trust the funnel of
information as much.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
How Musk has taken away jobs from people, and how
he's trying to make the platform more subscription based. It
is not really like something that's for the people. So
I support threats as it's free.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
One of the big things for me as a person
of color was the fact that as soon as he
took over, hate speech and things like that ticked up
a lot because he's pulled back on a lot of
the restrictions max.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
One way that Threads is very different from Twitter is
that they are explicitly trying to stay out of politics
and stay out of controversy. Whereas Twitter, of course is
a giant stew of.
Speaker 6 (25:21):
It, Threads is doing a couple of things, one of
which is the algorithmic feed which I mentioned, which steers
you towards influencers, creators, brands, and so it tells you
a lot about what they're trying to do. They're trying
to make a place that feels safe both for people
to spend time without being delused with controversial or upsetting
or outrage provoking stuff, and I think, more importantly from
(25:44):
the point of view of meta Mark Zuckerberg, it's a
platform that advertisers will feel comfortable with. And then the
other thing that Threads has said, which is they are
not going to prioritize news or politics.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
There was a.
Speaker 6 (25:58):
Time five years ago or so where Facebook was talking
a lot about its place in the news ecosystem. They
were like courting media companies, they were investing in journalism.
They wanted Facebook to kind of be at the center
of the news ecosystem. And that's all gone. They're not
going to do that because that they view as fraught
(26:19):
from a regulatory and brand perspective, and also it's controversial,
and you know, they don't want to have any controversy.
They want this to be a relatively benign, almost sterile environment,
which of course is great for advertising.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
But it's exactly the opposite of what people were on
Twitter for. So you can imagine that some number of
the people who are coming over to Threads looking for
a new home because they're no longer happy with Twitter,
we'll look in there and say, hey, where's all the
real conversation.
Speaker 6 (26:49):
As somebody who has been a Twitter addict and who's
also just totally aware of the shortcomings of the platform,
it makes you appreciate Twitter a little bit because you
go there and you see and this is my own
personal experience with Threads, and you see a lot of
okay jokes, a lot of posts from brands. It's a
lot like Instagram. It's like the way that people sometimes
(27:11):
critique Instagram is this like overly manicured, not that fun,
not that interesting place, and Threads is kind of like
that in text form.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
It definitely doesn't have the free for all quality of Twitter,
which should buy design.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
One thing that you mentioned was that TikTok is really
the breakaway success in the middle of this era of
declining overall interests in social media. Why is TikTok so
successful where others are having more of a hard time.
Speaker 6 (27:40):
TikTok is sort of perfectly pitched to these headwinds that
we've been talking about four years. People have not been
sharing as much, right, and that was a huge problem
for Facebook because your feed is composed of your friends,
and if your friends decide, either because they've read too
many stories about camerge analytica, or that it's just TACKI
(28:01):
or whatever, that they're not going to post every family picture,
they're not going to post every vacation, they're not going
to tell you what they had for breakfast today. All
of a sudden, the feed is empty and you have
to do something about that. And TikTok doesn't have that
problem because although you can create content in TikTok, and
although there's the same kind of friend follower mechanism, the
core of TikTok is the algorithm, which is it's not
(28:22):
about your friends, it's about your interests, and it's just
TikTok serving you up a steady stream of funny, amusing
videos that are tuned to your interests. In other words,
it's an experience that's much closer to television than it
is to social media.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
And I think it's telling that the big.
Speaker 6 (28:41):
Social media breakout of the last decade isn't really a
social media company. And when we're seeing how Facebook, the
dominant social media company, is trying to adapt, they're trying
to do the exact same thing. I mean, this is
how a lot of Instagram works now, and it's how
Threads works. If you go on Threads and you follow people,
you'll see their messages. But eventually you exhaust that and
(29:04):
then you get back to the brand managers and the
brands and the YouTubers. Sometimes it's amusing and sometimes it's
Internet drek, it's stuff on Reddit that was there three
months ago or whatever.
Speaker 4 (29:14):
Because they're going to feed you something. They're not going
to say, salary, we're all out for.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
Today, exactly.
Speaker 6 (29:19):
No, there's no being all out for today because again,
these platforms are dependent both in how they're structured and
what they've told investors on growing. That's why we're seeing
basically all of these companies move towards these algorithmic feeds
that are really like less social than what we normally
thought of as social media.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
So Max, like you say, you've been covering this industry
and watching the changes for twenty years. Now, where's this
all heading? Where do you see it going?
Speaker 6 (29:47):
I mean, I think we've sort of hit the high
water mark of the cultural relevance of social media. That
doesn't mean that social media is going away, or that
there isn't room for innovation, or or that Silicon i
couldn't come up with some new way of drawing us in.
And I think if you ask, why is Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark zacker is a really smart guy, why does he
(30:08):
keep spending moce He's spending money on the metaverse even
though it's obviously kind of not working. I think because
they're hoping that there'll be some technological breakthrough that will
change the equation. And I think some of this is
pinned on hardware. It's like maybe the headsets that's somewhere
down the road will get good enough so that the
prospect of strapping Facebook to your face as I described it,
(30:29):
doesn't feel so unappealing. And I don't think we should
overlook the possibility that these very smart people, these very
big companies, with almost unlimited amounts of money to spend
on research and development, that they won't figure something out.
But I think for now we're just not going to
see the growth, and that creates all sorts of challenges
for the companies and then for other businesses people that
(30:49):
depend on those companies. And we're seeing that now where
news organizations are really really struggling to figure out how
to attract readers, how to find an audience. Now that
you don't don't have this dependable stream of social media,
and you see that in entertainment.
Speaker 5 (31:04):
You see that a lot of the media industry.
Speaker 6 (31:06):
So I think we're still working our way through that period.
It probably won't end until there's some new breakthrough or
there's some sort of cultural shift.
Speaker 4 (31:14):
Max. It's always great to talk to you. Thanks for
coming back, thanks for having me, Thanks for listening to
us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast
from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and
we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or
comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising
(31:38):
producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergolino. Our senior
producer is Catherine Fink. Rebecca Shasson is our producer. Our
associate producer is Sam Gobauer. Rafael m Seely is our engineer,
with additional production support from Nieli Haremio Plata, Abrea Rofin
and Isabelle Webcarey. Our original music was composed by Lee Ocidron.
(32:01):
I'm Westkasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take,
The social media app that I use the most is Instagram.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's a tie between Instagram and it had been Twitter.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Had so probably TikTok. I just like that. It's like
short form, It's just like quick videos that you can watch.
I'll probably say TikTok. Reason being is because I'd rather
post videos and the pictures sometimes.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Instagram, and I'm not into the other ones at all.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
I definitely use social media less now because I have
a job and I don't have as much time.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
I use it less now. Quote you get carried away
with it, maybe.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
One hundred percent more. It's like terrible how much I
use it.
Speaker 5 (00:40):
They want you to be addicted.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Definitely less as I've become.
Speaker 5 (00:43):
More aware of the dangers of social media, for sure.
Speaker 4 (00:47):
How are you feeling about your social media habit these days?
For the longest time, Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, we're
growing like crazy, and everyone loved them or love to
hate them, but even then still spent too many hours
scrolling through those endless feeds. Bloomberg's Max Chaffkin the rights
(01:08):
in Business Week that recently, for a lot of people,
the love is gone. He says, even as Meta's new
Twitter substitute called threads is racking up users. Social media
use overall is softening.
Speaker 6 (01:23):
A lot of people want to go outside and see
their friends and they don't want to look at their screens.
But I think there's really a possibility that there's no
next Twitter.
Speaker 5 (01:32):
The next Twitter is nothing.
Speaker 4 (01:37):
I'm west Kosova today on the Big Take borrow that
old Internet cliche, touching screens versus touching grass. Max. Great
to see you again, Yeah, good to see you. So
why did you write this story?
Speaker 5 (01:57):
Well, two reasons.
Speaker 6 (01:59):
One is, for the last year or so, there's just
been this constellation of things that have been happening, especially
in the world of social media, but broader in the world.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
Of online media.
Speaker 6 (02:09):
The biggest and I think most important, being that Elon
Musk bought Twitter and has proceeded to do what feels
like almost everything in his power to destroy it. He's
changed all these policies, he's alienated Twitter's advertisers, he's alienate
a lot of the core users, he's fired most of
the employees. But at the same time, right there are
these challenges for Elon Musk, and I started to think about, well,
(02:31):
what are those challenges? Why is Elon Musk struggling so bad.
Why is a guy who can send rockets into space,
who almost single handedly popularize the electric car, who is
doing brain implants, who seems like he can do almost anything,
he can't run a social media company that should be
like the easiest of those.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
And it's not just Twitter. A lot of social media
platforms are also facing new headwinds.
Speaker 6 (02:54):
The social media platforms are struggling, and not just the
social media platforms.
Speaker 5 (02:57):
So you look at streaming.
Speaker 6 (02:58):
A couple years ago, Netflix and all these streaming companies
basically seemed like they had almost unlimited growth and it
was all we were talking about, and you're suddenly seeing
shrinking subscriber bases. A headline that jumped out on me
a couple months ago was Apple is making its own
movies now, and they announced that they were going to
show those movies in movie theaters, which was kind of
(03:19):
spun in some circles as, oh, like, Apple's just taking
over the world.
Speaker 5 (03:23):
But what it really is is kind of an admission
of defeat.
Speaker 6 (03:26):
It's that they can't market the movies without the movie theaters.
A couple others, you know, Vice declaring bankruptcy. Vice I've
been seen as kind of the future of media. BuzzFeed News,
which was seen as the future of news, just shut down.
Those two were companies that were basically drafting off of
social media, in particular Facebook. So yeah, you just saw
all of these companies that are all facing challenges and
(03:46):
you look at what's happening, and the explanation is, like,
not that complicated. It's that for a long time, there
was incredible growth in this market. Every single year, there
were more people spending more time looking at their phones
and before their phones, their computer screens, and that basically
was almost like a law, and in some quarters of
(04:06):
Silicon Valley they thought of it like as a natural law,
like the law of gravity or the law of the
conservation of matter or something.
Speaker 5 (04:13):
And during the pandemic it became possible to sort of
believe that would go on forever.
Speaker 6 (04:18):
And then you come out of the pandemic and people
are able to see friends, and they start pulling back,
and for the first time in twenty two we saw
a big drop in the amount of time people were
spending on devices. There had been drops before, but this
drop was way bigger. And I think a lot of
these other stories bankruptcies and digital media challenges of streaming giants,
(04:39):
challenges within social media companies.
Speaker 5 (04:41):
They all kind of come back to this basic.
Speaker 6 (04:43):
Reality, which is that a lot of people want to
go outside and see their friends and they don't want
to look at their screens.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
And as you mentioned that, there had been slow downs before,
and you started to see the seeds of this before
the pandemic. But and then of course when everyone was
stuck at home, there was this boom again.
Speaker 6 (05:03):
I think it was around twenty eighteen, and you see
that both in the data. So I cite this data
from GWI, which is a market research company. They basically
send out surveys to almost a million people, maybe more
than a million people every year, basically saying like how
much time are you spending on your device, what are
you doing on your device? How much money are you spending?
And it's in twenty eighteen when they picked up this decline.
(05:24):
But I think you can also see it in things
that were happening at the time. So the same year,
in twenty eighteen, Bloomberg did a story. It was about
how people were getting a lot of pings from Facebook.
There were all these intrusive notifications that users were complaining about,
saying like you haven't logged into Facebook for a long time.
Your friend is on Facebook. Just these kind of like
almost thirsty kings from this digital media company that was
(05:47):
going around talking about as if the growth is going
on forever. You also saw Facebook doing all these kind
of wild things that were designed to get bigger audiences.
There's obviously been a lot of Internet penetration, a lot
of cell phone penetration in much of the world, but
there were you know, parts of the world in particular,
you know Sub Saharan Africa, parts of Asia where there's
very poor connectivity, and Google and Facebook we're going to
(06:09):
try to solve that in novel ways, Google by floating
these balloons. The company was called Loon and it was
going to broadcast a signal. The balloons act like satellites essentially,
and Facebook had basically the same plan, except with drones.
These were high flying, gigantic airplanes that would sort of
be way above the clouds and zipping Internet down to
(06:32):
the furthest corners of the world. And again, like looking back,
you're like, how did they plan on making money there?
Speaker 5 (06:37):
Because it's not just about the audience.
Speaker 6 (06:39):
You need advertising, and so I think there was just
this conception that it would go on forever, and you
start to see skepticism building in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen,
but then the pandemic happened, and the pandemic instantly everybody
is stuck at home, right, we have nothing, no other
way to communicate with people, So people are spending more
time online. There was a lot of inks build in
(07:01):
twenty twenty and twenty twenty one about kind of like
a new normal, how this wasn't a temporary public health crisis,
this was an accelerant. In other words, we would never
get off of zoom. And you see that in the statements,
especially made by these tech companies that were really invested
in these services. So, like all of the tech companies
were the most enthusiastic supporters of remote work because of
(07:23):
course remote work, in addition to like keeping people from
getting COVID, was a great way for them to make money.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
Mark Zuckerberg relocated to Why and.
Speaker 6 (07:31):
Made all these statements in twenty twenty about how half
of Facebook's work force would be remote and one of
the reasons Zuckerberg was saying, you know, everyone's gonna be
able to work remotely is because he believed that everyone
would have these headsets that they would plug into to
have meetings, and it was he believed also going to
be like the center of our social interactions. The idea
(07:54):
of the metaverse was that it was going to be
this new platform like social media, but like moral compass
than social media. Facebook changed its name to meta you know,
with much fanfare. Zuckerberg invested and has continued to invest
huge sums of money.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
You had books written.
Speaker 6 (08:10):
I looked, you know, there's so many business books about
how to set your company up for the metaverse, how
to profit from the metaverse, how the metaverse is going
to change everything. And they bought a Super Bowl ad
and they spend all this money, and you look, and
the results are just incredibly piddling. We're also seeing Apple,
another company that is trying to make the metaverse happen,
(08:31):
announce this headset and they had a whole event, and
you're seeing the sales projections get smaller and smaller. When
you look at this trend of declining interest in screen
time and social media, you can see you can predict
that the metaverse would not do very well because if
you're dealing with a situation where consumers are like not
wanting to spend as much time on Facebook and Twitter
(08:52):
and so on, and then your pitches. I've got Facebook,
but it's strapped to your face. You can see why
consumers would be like, thanks, I'll stick with what i've got.
There was this feeling that there were certain parts of
the pandemic that would just sort of last, maybe forever,
and I think that part just has not borne out.
And when you look at the increase in the time spend,
(09:15):
it's almost not that encouraging. It was only about fifteen
minutes more per day that people were spending on their devices.
And you might imagine, given that we were all stuck inside,
that the number would be even higher.
Speaker 5 (09:25):
But I think the thing was we were already pretty saturated.
Speaker 6 (09:28):
I mean, when you're talking about seven hours a day,
which is how high it got, that's almost half of
a normal waking day. I think you would really have
to work to spend more time than that. And I
can say that as like an addict of these things.
And so I think we all collectively had a problem,
maybe still have a problem, and the awareness of that
is creating all sorts of dislocation where you have these
(09:51):
social media companies who are increasingly competing for a market
that is no longer growing. So this isn't to say
that social media is dying. Somebody see those headlines, but
it's not. It's just not growing as much and that
has all sorts of knock on effects that makes the
difficult for the social media companies. We basically found a
saturation point, a point where we like, we can't eat
(10:12):
any more Internet. It's seven hours and after that, you know,
you start to go a little nuts.
Speaker 5 (10:17):
Because I've covered.
Speaker 6 (10:18):
Social media and digital media for almost twenty years, thinking
about this caused me to like revisit a lot of
things that I hadn't really thought about. One of the
things was Read Hastings, the then CEO of Netflix, was
going around saying the only competition for Netflix, the only
competition that matters is sleep. It was very pithy and
memorable he said in our earnings calls and in conferences,
(10:39):
and the idea was that you know, if you're watching
Netflix and you're getting tired, but you're really into the show,
you might stay up and you might skip some sleep in.
Speaker 5 (10:48):
Order to watch another episode.
Speaker 6 (10:50):
And like, looking back on that, it really seems weird
and problematic and troubling because, first of all, there's no
disrupting sleep, right, Like, everyone needs to sleep physically, it's
a requirement. But it also kind of gets at the limits.
There's only so much attention. And the idea that Netflix
was going to like cause people to sleep a little
less and that was going to allow them to make
their like quarterly numbers for the foreseeable future. You can
(11:13):
just see that that's a little bit problematic, super memorable
and funny, and he got to go around saying like,
you know, we're at war with sleep and we're winning.
And people at the time kind of loved it, but
I think were looking back that was kind of a
warning sign.
Speaker 5 (11:24):
Or it should have been a warning sign.
Speaker 6 (11:26):
And right around that time is when time spent online
started a level off or even fall a little bit.
Speaker 4 (11:35):
And so there's this parallel between the streaming companies like
Netflix and Apple and Disney and all the rest of
them that are trying to claim our attention and the
social media companies which are also trying to claim our
attention at the very same time.
Speaker 6 (11:49):
Not only that, but they're competing for the same attention.
And I think that's part of what happened. Like you
had growth leveling off where people are sort of spending
as much time as they can looking at screens. You
have parts of the developing world getting online like they're
already online. If you look at the World Bank, like
how many cell phones are there per one hundred people,
it's one hundred and six. They're just like not that
(12:09):
many people out there who are not already potential Netflix customers,
and these companies their fates are tied together because going
back ten years, social media was kind of at the
core of how a lot of culture, a lot of news,
a lot of everything was being consumed by people. So
you're just sort of pushing a lot of stuff into
(12:30):
a funnel, and it's you know, the funnel's not getting
any wider, and again there's going to be dislocation, or
you're going to start to see companies try to pivot,
which is to some extent what happened in social media.
Facebook and TikTok, which sprung up, basically moved away from
having people share stuff and into just serving up this
feed of algorithmic content for people to consume. And you
(12:53):
see social media transforming itself from being more of an
active experience to be more like a passive, consumptive thing.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
After the break. Is Threads a Twitter killer or just
another Twitter wanna be?
Speaker 1 (13:14):
I enjoy Threads. I think it's a good intersection of
you know, Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker 7 (13:22):
It's no, Oh my god, I'm trying to stay away
from threads. I don't need anything.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
More to do, just with a stroke of genius to
literally just take Twitter and make a new platform that
it really mirrors exactly what Twitter is. Maybe a couple
months from now, it's even better than Twitter ever was.
It's possible.
Speaker 4 (13:44):
Max. Is interesting that we're talking about people's ambivalence towards
social media and spending less time on it because we're
in the middle of this big promotional surge and a
lot of hype around threads, which is, of course is
Facebook's answer to Twitter.
Speaker 6 (14:02):
And you can see why Facebook Meta is doing this.
I mean they're doing it because Twitter has just been
putting rakes in its path and stepping on them in.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
The online space.
Speaker 6 (14:13):
Metas Instagram has unveiled Threads and op designed to compete
with Elon Musk's Twitter. Red's currently ranked number one among
free apps on the Apple Store. But will the new
platform succeed in knocking the Bluebird off of its perch.
Speaker 5 (14:28):
There's a track record here.
Speaker 6 (14:29):
Zuckerberg has basically, for the last ten years looked out
at the universe of other apps and tried to copy them,
and most of the time he's been pretty unsuccessful, but
there have been a few exceptions. And as you said,
the first couple of days of Threads were really amazing.
It is the fastest growing app ever in the sense
that in just a few days, I think five days,
(14:49):
they had one hundred million users. Now I think there
are reasons to not get too excited about that, And
when you look at the way the stock has performed,
which is like it hasn't really moved very much, you
can sort of see this part of it is that
number one, it's a standalone product, but it's taking the
Instagram algorithm and the Instagram user base and essentially pouring
them over to another app. So that might kill Twitter maybe,
(15:13):
although I'm kind of skeptical of that. But it doesn't
necessarily create a ton of new value for Facebook. It
just becomes a different way to consume Instagram.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
For people who aren't familiar with Threads. Tell us exactly
what it is like, how it's like Twitter, how it's
not like Twitter.
Speaker 5 (15:32):
Threads is basically exactly like Twitter in almost every way.
Speaker 6 (15:37):
But I'd say two important differences in Threads. One is
there is no chronological feed in Threads right now. Threads
is all algorithm. In other words, you can follow people
on Threads and those people will be in your feed,
but you're also going to see like a lot of influencers, celebrities, brands,
kind of what you see in TikTok or if you've
(16:00):
used Instagram in the last year, what you see on Instagram.
It's not really a way to consume content from your
friends as much as a way to consume content from
content creators. The other thing, and this is I think
the most important thing, is unlike Twitter, which when you
sign up for you give them your email and you
create a password and so on, with Threads, you just
go to Instagram and click a button and it basically
(16:21):
takes your Instagram account and moves it over to this
other app. And if you look at it, and it's
really just like Instagram without the pictures, for better or worse.
But again, it isn't as much as standalone app as
it is another version of an app you already know,
and that could be good, could be bad. It definitely
creates a situation where the best case scenario is Facebook
(16:41):
controls yet another part of the social media ecosystem, right
where Facebook already has WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and then they
potentially have like another one of the big apps to
consume and create content.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Why do you think there's been such a huge number
of people moving to threads?
Speaker 5 (17:02):
Well, two things.
Speaker 6 (17:03):
One is that Twitter has been really bad, especially if
you've been a longtime Twitter user as I have.
Speaker 5 (17:10):
I mean, you really notice it.
Speaker 6 (17:11):
The bunch of decisions, some of which have to do
with the technical performance of the app, which is not good.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Twitter's offices set to reopen Monday after a mass exodus
of workers forced a shutdown last Week's sources also say
Elon Musk is considering firing more employees, this time targeting
the sales and partnership side of the business.
Speaker 6 (17:31):
Turns out when you fire almost everybody, things start to break.
But also Elon Musk's decision to prioritize this weirdo right
wing corner of the Internet that he is obviously like
a personal fan of, but it doesn't necessarily have a
much broader audience. So like you went from seeing well
known actors and politicians and journalists and writers, and now
(17:55):
you're seeing basically in your feed a lot of Elon
Musk's friends and these weird right wing meme accounts, like
there's one called cat Turd, which is like, if you're
on Twitter, you know what it is, and if you're not, congratulations,
you're doing better than me.
Speaker 5 (18:07):
So Twitter has gotten worse.
Speaker 6 (18:08):
And the other thing is Facebook made it really easy,
and they are all of these digital enticements inside of
Instagram that urge you to go in that direction, one
of which is if you go into the app and
you click on somebody's profile, you'll see very prominent link
to look at their threads. If you didn't have threads,
you start getting alerts saying so and so is on
threads and posting.
Speaker 5 (18:30):
And then once you're on there, once you click.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
The button, even before you've done anything, you start getting
all of these notifications as people follow you. And this
is a really important thing because once you create a
threads account, you basically are encouraged to auto follow everybody
who already follow on Instagram. So you immediately basically send
three hundred pings to your friends, and those create a
sense of wow.
Speaker 5 (18:52):
There's a lot happening here.
Speaker 6 (18:53):
I kept getting alerts over the weekend that it launched
from people who are following me. You click, you're like, wow,
this person's on Threads. You click on it, and it's
just an empty page. And they're all empty pages because
a lot of people haven't actually posted anything, but they're
all these alerts. Mark Zuckerberg gets a lot of criticism,
but he is very good at marketing and growing a
(19:15):
technological product. And we saw this ten years ago as
Facebook started to run into these growth challenges. So you
could see Threads as a way to address some of
the issues that are already going on on Instagram, where
you're sort of seeing a drop off on engagement, a
drop off and sharing. They're trying to compete with TikTok,
but it's not quite happening. The performance of Reels, which
(19:36):
is their TikTok like product, it just is not doing
nearly as well as TikTok itself. So I think that
the game here for Instagram is to hopefully find a
way to get people to re engage with this product
and give them a reason to contribute to not just
consume content, but also create content. It's not clear that
that's happening or that that will happen.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Though there's been a lot of people writing that Threads
could be the Twitter killer, and whether or not that's true.
But one thing that you write is that even though
a lot of people are signing up for Threads, a
lot of other people just aren't looking for yet another
social media platform to replace Twitter or anything else. They
kind of just don't want to spend that much time
on social media at all.
Speaker 6 (20:17):
We've seen over the last nine months since Elon Musk
took over the company, just this collection of Twitter killers
that is just the last one. There's this thing called Mastodon,
There's Blue Sky, There's Post, there's substack notes, discord. There
have been a lot of efforts to create Twitter killers.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
And some of them have done okay.
Speaker 6 (20:37):
But I think there's really a possibility that there is
no Twitter killer, that there's no next Twitter, the next
Twitter is nothing, and that this just becomes something that
slowly is phased out of people's media diets if they
stop using Twitter itself, which if this trend, which is
the decline in screen time or the lack of growth
and screen time, continues, you're gonna need to see some
(21:01):
apps fall by the wayside, and Twitter maybe one of them.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
There is this perception among a lot of people because
Twitter gets so much attention and because politicians, companies, everybody
uses it, that it gets echoed in news stories in
other places that even if you're not on Twitter, you
wind up seeing tweets. Gives you this impression that it's
really really huge. But by social media platform standards, Twitter
has actually always been kind of small and niche.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
It's big, but it doesn't have anywhere near the scale
of Facebook. And as you said, it's always been this
app that kind of over indexes in media and in
news and in politics. And you can sort of see
why that is. It's like a word based platform. It's
a great way to broadcast an announcement or something like that. Remember,
in twenty twenty one, Twitter and the other social media
(21:50):
companies ban Donald Trump. This was after January sixth, Trump
had been seen as inciting the insurrection.
Speaker 5 (21:57):
There was a sense they'd kind of been itching to
do it for a while. Well, all the platforms.
Speaker 6 (22:01):
Banned him, including Twitter, and it was seen as this
watershed moment. Politically, Trump's appeal to a lot of people
was so tied up in his ability to grab the
news cycle, and there was a lot of inkspilled about
this is going to permanently weaken Trump, It's going to
permanently change the course of social media. And then Elon
(22:21):
Musk bought the company and one of the first things
he did was let Trump back on right and there
was a whole that was a big controversy too, And
a surprising thing happened, which is Donald Trump, despite having
seemed totally and utterly addicted to Twitter before he had
been banned, has managed not to go back since the
band was lifted. But it's also surprising because Trump is
(22:41):
leading the Republican polls by huge margin. It turns out
Trump doesn't need Twitter, and maybe no one needs Twitter
in the sense of as a way to access that
part of the media ecosystem. It really does feel like
it no longer has the importance that it once had,
partly I think because of Elon and partly because there
(23:02):
have been shifts in the media landscape. To be fair
to Elon Musk, Twitter was in a weakening position even
before Elon Musk bought it, but as part of the acquisition,
they've loaded up on a bunch of debt he's alienated
a bunch of key partners, and then you have this
competitor with very deep pockets and competence, and so obviously
(23:24):
it could be a big thread. I think the idea
that Twitter would just go away, that's probably not going
to happen.
Speaker 4 (23:30):
You went to Meta and asked them about threads. What
did they say?
Speaker 6 (23:35):
So? Facebook didn't comment to me directly, but the head
of Instagram who's overseeing threads, has been very upfront about
the shortcomings of this. What they're saying is, look, it's
early days. We understand like we're working on and make
it better. They are very clear that this is an
early product. Of course, they're very excited about the massive
user growth. What they're saying is that we're not trying
(23:55):
to be like Twitter.
Speaker 4 (23:57):
And of course he also went to Twitter. Where did
they have to say?
Speaker 6 (24:00):
Twitter's press account sent me a picture of a poop emoji.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
That was their actual response.
Speaker 6 (24:06):
Twitter has set their press department, insofar as they have
a press department, to respond every email with the poop emji,
which I think says a lot about how they view
the press and how seriously they take their position in
the news ecosystem.
Speaker 4 (24:24):
After the break, So what does the future of social
media look like.
Speaker 7 (24:36):
I used to love Twitter. I did a bunch of
university projects on Twitter. It was like the reliable source
of information in a lot of ways. And because it's
such a controversy, I can't really trust the funnel of
information as much.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
How Musk has taken away jobs from people, and how
he's trying to make the platform more subscription based. It
is not really like something that's for the people. So
I support threats as it's free.
Speaker 2 (25:00):
One of the big things for me as a person
of color was the fact that as soon as he
took over, hate speech and things like that ticked up
a lot because he's pulled back on a lot of
the restrictions max.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
One way that Threads is very different from Twitter is
that they are explicitly trying to stay out of politics
and stay out of controversy. Whereas Twitter, of course is
a giant stew of.
Speaker 6 (25:21):
It, Threads is doing a couple of things, one of
which is the algorithmic feed which I mentioned, which steers
you towards influencers, creators, brands, and so it tells you
a lot about what they're trying to do. They're trying
to make a place that feels safe both for people
to spend time without being delused with controversial or upsetting
or outrage provoking stuff, and I think, more importantly from
(25:44):
the point of view of meta Mark Zuckerberg, it's a
platform that advertisers will feel comfortable with. And then the
other thing that Threads has said, which is they are
not going to prioritize news or politics.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
There was a.
Speaker 6 (25:58):
Time five years ago or so where Facebook was talking
a lot about its place in the news ecosystem. They
were like courting media companies, they were investing in journalism.
They wanted Facebook to kind of be at the center
of the news ecosystem. And that's all gone. They're not
going to do that because that they view as fraught
(26:19):
from a regulatory and brand perspective, and also it's controversial,
and you know, they don't want to have any controversy.
They want this to be a relatively benign, almost sterile environment,
which of course is great for advertising.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
But it's exactly the opposite of what people were on
Twitter for. So you can imagine that some number of
the people who are coming over to Threads looking for
a new home because they're no longer happy with Twitter,
we'll look in there and say, hey, where's all the
real conversation.
Speaker 6 (26:49):
As somebody who has been a Twitter addict and who's
also just totally aware of the shortcomings of the platform,
it makes you appreciate Twitter a little bit because you
go there and you see and this is my own
personal experience with Threads, and you see a lot of
okay jokes, a lot of posts from brands. It's a
lot like Instagram. It's like the way that people sometimes
(27:11):
critique Instagram is this like overly manicured, not that fun,
not that interesting place, and Threads is kind of like
that in text form.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
It definitely doesn't have the free for all quality of Twitter,
which should buy design.
Speaker 4 (27:25):
One thing that you mentioned was that TikTok is really
the breakaway success in the middle of this era of
declining overall interests in social media. Why is TikTok so
successful where others are having more of a hard time.
Speaker 6 (27:40):
TikTok is sort of perfectly pitched to these headwinds that
we've been talking about four years. People have not been
sharing as much, right, and that was a huge problem
for Facebook because your feed is composed of your friends,
and if your friends decide, either because they've read too
many stories about camerge analytica, or that it's just TACKI
(28:01):
or whatever, that they're not going to post every family picture,
they're not going to post every vacation, they're not going
to tell you what they had for breakfast today. All
of a sudden, the feed is empty and you have
to do something about that. And TikTok doesn't have that
problem because although you can create content in TikTok, and
although there's the same kind of friend follower mechanism, the
core of TikTok is the algorithm, which is it's not
(28:22):
about your friends, it's about your interests, and it's just
TikTok serving you up a steady stream of funny, amusing
videos that are tuned to your interests. In other words,
it's an experience that's much closer to television than it
is to social media.
Speaker 5 (28:39):
And I think it's telling that the big.
Speaker 6 (28:41):
Social media breakout of the last decade isn't really a
social media company. And when we're seeing how Facebook, the
dominant social media company, is trying to adapt, they're trying
to do the exact same thing. I mean, this is
how a lot of Instagram works now, and it's how
Threads works. If you go on Threads and you follow people,
you'll see their messages. But eventually you exhaust that and
(29:04):
then you get back to the brand managers and the
brands and the YouTubers. Sometimes it's amusing and sometimes it's
Internet drek, it's stuff on Reddit that was there three
months ago or whatever.
Speaker 4 (29:14):
Because they're going to feed you something. They're not going
to say, salary, we're all out for.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
Today, exactly.
Speaker 6 (29:19):
No, there's no being all out for today because again,
these platforms are dependent both in how they're structured and
what they've told investors on growing. That's why we're seeing
basically all of these companies move towards these algorithmic feeds
that are really like less social than what we normally
thought of as social media.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
So Max, like you say, you've been covering this industry
and watching the changes for twenty years. Now, where's this
all heading? Where do you see it going?
Speaker 6 (29:47):
I mean, I think we've sort of hit the high
water mark of the cultural relevance of social media. That
doesn't mean that social media is going away, or that
there isn't room for innovation, or or that Silicon i
couldn't come up with some new way of drawing us in.
And I think if you ask, why is Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark zacker is a really smart guy, why does he
(30:08):
keep spending moce He's spending money on the metaverse even
though it's obviously kind of not working. I think because
they're hoping that there'll be some technological breakthrough that will
change the equation. And I think some of this is
pinned on hardware. It's like maybe the headsets that's somewhere
down the road will get good enough so that the
prospect of strapping Facebook to your face as I described it,
(30:29):
doesn't feel so unappealing. And I don't think we should
overlook the possibility that these very smart people, these very
big companies, with almost unlimited amounts of money to spend
on research and development, that they won't figure something out.
But I think for now we're just not going to
see the growth, and that creates all sorts of challenges
for the companies and then for other businesses people that
(30:49):
depend on those companies. And we're seeing that now where
news organizations are really really struggling to figure out how
to attract readers, how to find an audience. Now that
you don't don't have this dependable stream of social media,
and you see that in entertainment.
Speaker 5 (31:04):
You see that a lot of the media industry.
Speaker 6 (31:06):
So I think we're still working our way through that period.
It probably won't end until there's some new breakthrough or
there's some sort of cultural shift.
Speaker 4 (31:14):
Max. It's always great to talk to you. Thanks for
coming back, thanks for having me, Thanks for listening to
us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast
from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and
we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or
comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising
(31:38):
producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergolino. Our senior
producer is Catherine Fink. Rebecca Shasson is our producer. Our
associate producer is Sam Gobauer. Rafael m Seely is our engineer,
with additional production support from Nieli Haremio Plata, Abrea Rofin
and Isabelle Webcarey. Our original music was composed by Lee Ocidron.
(32:01):
I'm Westkasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take,
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