One year back, when Meta introduced Threads, it created a lot of chatter and a lot of chaos ensued. Everyone who logged into Threads and wished to delete that account had to say goodbye to their Instagram account too. It was marketed as an alternative to Twitter (now X). So if you do tweeting on Twitter, you were supposed to do “Threading” on Threads. For the first 15 days, people were sort of active on the platform, but then eventually it started to drop down… to an extent that everyone forgot about it.
Today, a year later, Threads have almost died down, like most unattended apps on our phones. To celebrate its birthday, I asked some Twitter users why didn’t they switch to Threads. Here’s how they respond:
“I have been on Twitter for almost half a decade now. I’ve never faced issues using it and previously it’s API as well. Twitter has a bigger user base which is why it attracted my attention in the first place therefore I never felt the need to switch to Threads.
Secondly, Meta is notorious for stealing data from its users. This is why I don’t trust Meta and consequently Threads as well.
Thirdly, Threads seems like a poor imitation of Twitter created to lure people to use it while Twitter was transitioning to X. Overall the timing was in very poor taste.”
“Threads is a newer concept and felt exactly the same as Twitter. They had nothing new to offer and I felt offended by one of their policies. The one where they said that if you delete your Threads you also lose your Instagram account. It felt as if they were trying to develop a Stockholm syndrome-like situation with the app.”
Apart from that I am not a very social media savvy person, I use it on a need basis. I am a marketeer, marketing happens on Instagram and Twitter. They are great marketing platforms, have great content, and people can just be themselves. I haven’t heard about that kind of transparency on Threads.”
“Between X’s inputs, and my own browsing habits, my feed has been fine-tuned to include the content that I prefer, and I would not like to do the process all over again. Additionally, the communities that I am a part of, be it gaming, niche tech, science, or my other interests, are all active on X and I have seen minimal migration of that to Threads.”
Despite the initial buzz, Threads struggled to maintain its momentum and user base. The responses from Twitter users highlight key reasons for this: loyalty to an established user base, trust issues with Meta, and the lack of compelling features in Threads. These are some of the factors that contributed to the app’s decline.
