Without Real Time Information, Threads is Pointless

Late last week, Scottie Scheffler, currently, without question, the best golfer in the world, was arrested just before the second round of one of golf's Major events. If that sounds crazy, it's because it was crazy. And it just got crazier from there, since Scheffler went to jail but also made it out in time to still make his tee time and play the round. We had video of basically all of this, including the arrest. Mug shots. Interviews. All in real-time thanks to social media.

And by that I mean every service that's not called Threads.

Threads is infuriating in this regard. It looks like Twitter, in many ways it sounds like Twitter, it has more or less everything it needs now to be Twitter – not Xitter, mind you, but the Twitter we all loved and lost – except one vital element: a focus on real time information.

Meta has gone out of its way to say that they don't want Threads to be this kind of network. They don't want it to be some news junkie haven. Because there are problems inherent in such usage when it comes to disinformation. And Meta has enough of those issues to deal with on their other properties. Plus, Threads is still directly tied to Instagram. It's for creators. Whatever that means. I'm of the old school mind where a "creator" can also perhaps be a poster or even just a curator of information. But apparently I'm wrong. A creator is whatever kind of users TikTok attracts and Meta wants to lure away.

I fully understand that it's quite likely that part of the reason why Twitter could never grow into the size of a network that Meta prefers is because of how it was being used. Again, by a relatively small subset of people looking for and sharing real time information. Obviously, Twitter was more than that, but that's sort of the stereotype and I think there's truth to it. Twitter's greatest strength was also a weakness. And it ultimately left it vulnerable to be taken over by Elon Musk.

But Meta is not Twitter, the company, of course. When Threads launched, I was hopeful that Meta's prowess in everything from engineering to monetization could create a newfangled Twitter-like service that could truly thrive. Again, all the scaffolding is now pretty much here – including, recently, a TweetDeck-like UI they're testing – but the data flow remains a critical issue.

Go ahead, load up Threads right now, I'll wait. What's the top posts you see? It's undoubtedly some random things from the past day or two from those you follow. On the surface, that's fine. Those are the general rules that make Instagram great and Facebook (the blue app) still print a bunch of money.

But now load up Xitter (X, if you must). AHHH! So much screaming. Viral nonsense. SOMETHING in Bio! Crypto spam. Close that tab! Quick!

Sorry about that. While that is Xitter most of the time these days, it remains king when there's a breaking news story happening. Like the aforementioned Scottie Scheffler saga. Or just a few days ago, the President of Iran's helicopter crashing (after a search that unfolded in real time, he, along with others, were eventually declared to have died in the crash). Again, you would never have known anything had happened yesterday if you loaded up Threads.

Perhaps I'm just not following the right accounts. Perhaps. But the problem seems to be more about Meta not wanting to boost those accounts anyway. And I do follow some accounts that would usually serve up such real time news, either they're not doing it because they know the Threads algo doesn't want such content. Or, more likely, it's going to be served to me 24 hours later.

Holidays like Mothers Day highlight the latter issue. With Threads, you literally re-live all the joy and well-wishing of such a holiday 24 hours after it happened. It's really weird. And it makes sports content (even outside of players arrests) just garbage to follow. It's a waste of time. If I care enough about a team/game to follow them, I already know the outcome. I don't need score updates pushed at me a day later. But this is exactly what Threads does. Over and over again.

It's not only quite annoying, it makes me concerned that Meta doesn't really know what it has on their hands here. Those hands only seem to care about things that have worked in the past for their other networks. And the data will point the way, second-order effects be damned. What I'm saying is that it's the intangibles that made Twitter, Twitter. And Threads needs to wake up.

More generally, loading up Threads usually just feels dead. It feels like a stale network where the same post is always at the top of my feed unless I reload. I know this is the opposite of a problem that Twitter and other networks including Instagram used to have. But they've veered too far in the cautious direction.

If Xitter is like a crazy uncle on crystal meth, Threads is like an out-to-lunch aunt who hasn’t read a newspaper in weeks.

Again, I understand that most of the above is and was intentional on Meta's part. I'm just saying I disagree with the choice. And I know they don't care – certainly not about me! – but I think they should because I do think it's actually in their best interest to own and operate a real time information network, potential pitfalls and all.

And everyone knows that Mark Zuckerberg has long wanted to own this "town watercooler", at various points over the years pivoting Facebook's own Newsfeed in that direction. But you can always count on Facebook to change their collective minds and focus. And so the clown car that fell into the goldmine drove on...

Until it didn't.

But even if Zuckerberg long ago moved on from his Twitter obsession, he clearly still cares about rivalries, and in this case, perhaps besting Elon Musk. Fighting in a literal ring was always a bit much and beyond ridiculous. But fighting in the proverbial one is fair game, and something again, Meta could quite easily win by putting some real time muscle behind Threads.

And I think doing so, while perhaps running into some of the same issues that Twitter did, eventually, will have halo effects around their other products. Including, of course and importantly now, AI. That's the key thing xAI potentially has going for it – Xitter's real time information. Meta could have a similar proprietary source of data. Something OpenAI couldn't dream of. No user will want to hear/read that, but it is what it is.

Threads can be a real time information nexus. A place you visit and linger to not only find out about the news, but to chat about it. A true watercooler. Everything alive and happening fast as events unfold. Yes, again, basically the opposite of what Meta is aiming for right now. But what they're aiming for is boring. This is where the action is. TikTok will fade as all products do. Zag back to a network where text can go viral. Where information reigns supreme and culture congregates. Xitter, but with better tech and less baggage. Twitter as it should have been. Come on Threads, let's do this. You're so close on product now, you just need to unleash the feeds.