Threads stands the biggest chance of defeating Twitter

Meta describes Threads as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app” – and it’s pretty clear that Threads is situating itself as an app that does, well, exactly what Twitter does.

All of this arrived last week in a landscape dominated by Elon Musk, who appears to many to be working tirelessly to set Twitter on fire (more on this here), and it definitely seems like he’s always finding new ways to alienate his user base in a race to the bottom against… himself. 

The latest fiasco is the infamous Rate Limit – where no-one can see a tweet unless logged in, non-paying users were capped at 600 tweets per day, and verified accounts at 6,000 posts per day. After that, users will get a message that says, "rate limit exceeded", and nothing new will load. There are varying reports about its implementation, with some claiming to remain unaffected, but Twitter have officially owned up to the limitations at the time of writing.

The reason behind this, Musk claims, is that the limits help tackle the ‘scraping of vast amounts of data from Twitter by almost everyone’ – with culprits named as ‘AI companies and start-ups to tech companies’. 

Not only did this new restrictive feature come with a lot of criticism from users – including news and weather organisations that rely on browsing thousands of tweets a day in order to function and give us credible updates on things as they happen – it’s also caused a breakage with Google, effectively stopping tweets from showing up in search results. In one fell swoop, 50% of links to Twitter dropped off the search engine. Which is… a lot. 

We can only assume this strategy is about making the Twitter experience so bad that people feel forced to pay the Twitter Blue subscription fee to continue using the app functionally, and in a landscape where platforms are desperately vying for eyeballs and attention to keep people browsing, Twitter’s changes have overnight made Twitter less scrollable, less searchable and less on-the-pulse.

It’s no wonder then, that rival platforms smelled all of that blood, and now the sharks are circling.

We’ve seen it before!

Threads as a concept isn’t new. We’ve had Truth Social, Mastodon, and BlueSky (run by ex-CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey) all precede Threads as Twitter dupes. 

In fact, some of those apps saw nice boosts to their numbers directly after Elon’s Rate Limit announcement a few days ago – with reports that Bluesky saw "record high traffic" on Saturday and that it was temporarily pausing new sign-ups as a result. Mastodon also saw its active user base swell by 110,000 on that day, according to a statement by its CEO.

However, lost in amongst the swell is the fact that no one really believed any of these new apps could replace Twitter. Until now, of course.

Is Threads Twitter’s biggest rival yet?

There’s no argument that Threads is Twitter’s most credible challenger to date, not only because Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg has a real talent for taking other social platform ideas and making them work on his own – the biggest proof being Meta’s TikTok copy, Reels – but also because it’s not been drawn up on the back of a napkin for political reasons, as the others Twitter wannabes seem to have been.  

Threads is serious stuff.

Meta undoubtedly has the resources to compete with Twitter, especially in the Musk era, combined with a network of existing users to hit the ground running with. Threads is part of the Instagram platform, connected to hundreds of millions of accounts from day one, and that makes a real difference to the make or break of an app like this. 

Meta aims to capture Twitter users as they flock from the app in their droves. And while no-one knows exactly how it’s going to play out – for personal users and for brands – it’s certainly not going to be welcome news to an already struggling Twitter.

Shauna Madden is head of social and paid media at ilk Agency. This is an excerpt of a post published on ilk Agency's website. Read the original post.