"Why? Because the thread count was too low, you idiot."

Some thoughts on Threads + AMA about software design, social systems, etc.

The other day, despite myself, I wound up posting about software design:

I don’t do this often and am not sure it’s what subscribers to Sucks to Suck signed up for, so I tend to post this sort of thing only to the web. But

John Ward

said he wanted more, so here’s more that’s been rattling around my head, even though —as the above note should make clear— prognosticating in this space is dicey and I’m really dashing this one off, so it’s incomplete and probably wrong often!¹

Threads

I think Threads is awesome. I’ve opened it twice since I reluctantly downloaded it, and both times every single post I saw sucked IMO; but in the Os of hundreds or thousands of other people, these same posts were, in fact, good. I’m happy for them all, although I doubt I’ll ever use it.

I thought the effect of Twitter’s trajectory would be balkanization, which I generically favor and which we should secularly expect anyway. As software development and operation costs decline and best practices (in design, development, maintenance) commodify, centralization delivers less benefit and its costs become unbearable in context.

Once, only large companies like Twitter or Facebook were able to

• show constantly fresh and interesting inventory;

• have people you knew (either socially or culturally);

• come to seem like places you “should” check regularly;

• work well and have best-in-class features and performance on all relevant platforms.

Part of why this was the case was that it was hard to fundraise for, design, develop, grow, and operate adequately large social platforms for many years. It was also hard, critically, for users to understand them, what they were good for, etc. This made early social platform development a brutally winner-take-all environment; it may seem silly now, but it really appeared to be a first-mover market, too, until several copy-cat strategies worked well enough to reveal that it wasn’t only novelty being rewarded.

In any event: the Internet has continued to grow; more people use it more than ever. More of them are literate in every sense that matters for posting (and reading online writing), too: literate about online culture, about user interfaces, about payments and privacy, etc. And the Internet continues to diversify, painfully for many who were unaware that earlier eras were in many respects bubbles. It’s still a bubble, of course, but a larger one with more fractious constituencies inside it.

So: when the costs and complexities of implementing scaled social networks have plummeted and the tensions of centralized, scaling platforms are exacerbating, it’s not surprising to see competitors proliferate and consumers suddenly become migratory after more than a decade of immobility. It happened to Friendster and MySpace; it can happen to anyone.

Different groups will find different networks that better-cater to what they’re looking for (or seem to); there will be memes and stereotypes galore about this sorting process, but the reality will probably be more individuated than these will suggest. We go where it feels good and right for us to go. Lots of things like cultural affinities or platform policies or brand vibes or particular individuals inform that, but so too do our weird, inimitable interiors. Don’t judge someone who likes Threads!

I think timing is weirdly perfect for Threads, and not just because of what’s happened with Twitter.

• Twitter has always been too niche, in every sense; it remains inscrutable to giant numbers of people and I’m sure no product has been tried and abandoned in confusion by more humans. But the size of the population conversant in the dynamics Twitter entails has grown a lot since Zuck and others last tried seriously to compete with it. I suspect that it’s a great time for a “mass market friendly” Twitter competitor, in market terms. This category of product has never been more intelligible, and even the desperately basic way brands have “mastered” the Twitter “vibe” and ported it to Threads is a great e.g. of something that disgusts people like me but probably marks the apotheosis of the scene.

• In technology terms, I think this is also true. Many have noted that Threads uses TikTok’s “For You” approach, which is rapidly commodifying but not without problems and detractors; in this approach, the default view of the app is a feed that is not based on people or entities you’ve chosen to follow. Instead, the feed is algorithmically generated based on what the platform thinks you’ll like most (as measured in whatever proxy metric or set of proxy metrics). Lots of smart people hate this, but most regular people love it when it works, and I think ML has improved enough that although TikTok’s format —full screen videos you see individually and must swipe on individually to dismiss— is vastly superior for ranking, Meta should still be able to rank well over time. I’m not sure this was true the last time they looked at this space, and it really changes how ready this product is for casual / mass usage. Twitter is also trying the “For You” approach, but probably no axis of competition is worse for them than “going head to head on ranking with Meta.”

• I think this is also true in policy terms. I know everyone hates this, but Americans —and, I bet, everyone— get really sick of serious shit and conflict and problems. I think people are presently eager for milquetoast, reassuring figures to stabilize chaotic situations through the restoration of boring, already-mocked and therefore-symbolically-defanged² regimes. In other words: here comes Zuck, the parent-teacher-referee, to tell everyone to quiet down and stop psycho-posting about culture war issues when advertisers are trying to sell nice products and people are enjoying photos of the pets of actors, and if you think America is going to be irritated by this, I think you’ll be surprised. This is Zuck-as-Reagan, and if nothing else, the brands must be elated.

So I think this is pretty concerning for Twitter. I wouldn’t ordinarily have a dog in the fight, but as Twitter’s been harming Substack writers, I certainly do: Meta is unlikely to act anticompetitively towards us anytime soon and Threads will probably be a great place for Substack writers to share their work. Notes will be a place for people who want a more focused, less-Meta-ish / centralized space (or who find other particularities appealing), as it already is; we’ll keep scaling it, but the situation is less existential the more massive distribution is still possible elsewhere. This is great because it means we can develop it with less anxiety and more focus on making it work for Substack writers and readers, as opposed to defending us against a strategic threat!

I think Twitter will need to hasten its migration to subscription revenue now, because there’s basically no hope of competing for advertising revenue anymore. If their plan had been to “put TikTok in Twitter so we can serve high-margin video ads,” as it appears to have been, the fact that a huge volume of their usage, including many lucrative portions of the user base, is under threat from a competitor who already has fullscreen video products used by billions isn’t good. Maybe they can avoid shrinking, but I doubt it; in any event, it’s terrible for growth, which they need for the economics of advertising to work. Zuck can run Threads as a side-project, with a tiny team and already-existing IG / FB infrastructure; it’ll plug right into existing, and best-in-class, advertising products, too, and it’ll easily be ROI positive (even if not much of a contribution to their overall revenue, I assume). And it’s surrounded and integrated (and sure to be more integrated) with IG and all that, including Reels.

It feels like Twitter’s only hope is monetizing a very large percentage of its user base via subscriptions; I would assume this leads to it being more closed, more like a private social network like Facebook, since it’ll be really important that people who like Twitter specifically choose to pay for it. But people like Twitter because it’s public, so… not sure where they go from here, honestly!

One future state: there are dozens of sustaining, successful platforms of every kind for different constituencies; this is less about e.g. “here’s the platform for Buddhists” or “here’s the platform for gun rights advocates” and more how it works with brands in the real world today: everyone sorts in their own way, with some trendlines and patterns and a lot of chaos. Who favors McDonald’s? Who favors Wendy’s? Who favors Popeye’s? Who picks and chooses based on mood, location, brand vibes, diet, price, god-knows-what-else?!

In sum: it wouldn’t surprise me if Threads takes a lot of core / normie / celebrity / athlete usage from Twitter; it wouldn’t surprise me if more of that usage is important for other scenes —weird Twitter, black Twitter, shitposting Twitter— than people realize, and thus it wouldn’t surprise me if Threads really fucks Twitter up, especially in terms of competing for ad spend. (Substack doesn’t give a shit about ad spend, of course; like Zuck, we operate Notes “on the side” of our core business and thus don’t need to worry like Musk does about e.g. achieving a certain scale or the business doesn’t work).

AMA

I’m not sure what interests people about software design, so I thought it might be fun to solicit questions. LMK if you have any!

David Cole

is also in this “field” and might be able to handle some too!

Feel free to share them in the comments on on Notes, and thanks!!!³

1. The title is from an incredible profile of Martha Stewart from long ago.

2. Shoutout to

Chris Best

for this one.

3. I’ve talked about Threads with tons of people at work, and may be inadvertently stealing ideas from e.g.

Sachin Monga

or

Nick @ Substack

and many others here.