When Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Threads App earlier this year with an eye to provide an alternative platform to Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), the frenzy of uptake that followed in the immediate days after launch sent shock waves across markets where rival products were operating as pundits ceaselessly branded the app a game changer.
Within days following the launch, Threads had dominated global press headlines and amassed hundreds of millions of sign-ups as users sought to unravel what new promise the platform was bringing to their social interactions.
But the fame was short-lived, or so it seems. A couple of months after the unveiling, not much is being said about it both from the users’ end and from news writers, effectively relegating it to the second-fiddle position in comparison to its peers.
As a further testament that the platform is struggling with user retention, analytics firms claim that the app’s daily active users had dropped by more than 80 percent as at the beginning of August, just a month after inception.
Multiple users who spoke to the Business Daily confirmed that they uninstalled the app from their mobile devices soon after making fleeting explorations, indicating that the platform had completely failed to capture their imaginations and excite them.
“Threads, the app that tried to weave social media into a new fabric, ended up in a bit of a tangle – turns out. People prefer stories without too many loose ends,” notes Mercy Kinyodah, the communications manager at Africa Clinical Trials Solutions (ACTS).
“For someone like myself who finds X a little bit too chaotic, I was initially happy for the new frontier. But then I realised the platform was demanding too much. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the condition that we couldn’t exit without losing our Instagram accounts completely. I felt like I was being held hostage,” she adds.
Fredrick Kadume, a graduate of communications studies from the Multimedia University of Kenya, heaps blame on the inability of the app’s developers to draw clear distinctions on how exactly Threads would compete with X, saying a majority of the features were just a replication of what the Musk-owned app was offering.
“One of the major aspects that makes X retain its user numbers is the showing of daily trends of major topics and thus most people use it as a news source. That isn’t there on Threads as it only displays content from specific feeds that the user has shown interest in. Again, Threads does not give us a search option, so I could not see any new value that it was bringing,” states Mr Kadume.
Away from the arguments regarding the app’s usage capabilities, others point to the integration with Instagram terming it a self-defeatist strategy as the nature of the content on the two platforms is distinctly different.
“If you look at what users mostly post on Instagram, it is predominantly a visual-centered setting. Trying to integrate this category of creators into a new app that is supposedly tailored for text posts was bound to bounce. There’s no way Instagram users would have adapted to doing text-based posts overnight,” observes Elizabeth Mumbi, a user.
In its grand scheme of things at the point of launch, Threads had rolled out the red carpet for Instagram users by letting them ride on their pre-existing accounts to join the new platform and excluding all those who weren’t Instagram users.
The move meant that content on Threads would be driven chiefly by those who were big on Instagram, mostly favouring influencers and celebrities who are essentially good with pictures and videos but less good with words.
This logically meant that the quality of writing on Threads would be dismally lower compared to that on X which is packed with craft specialists such as journalists and authors.
