"Hell resides within, looking to surprise."
No, Threads isn't going to replace Twitter as the "global town square." The end of that era of the Internet is upon us, like it or not.
This week’s soundtrack: Mutoid Man - “Call of the Void”
As you may have heard, Threads – Instagram’s/Meta’s Twitter replacement – is the fastest growing app, with more than 100 million users so far. Threads obviously has a series of advantages that a new app doesn’t have; Instagram pushed users to sign up for Threads and said sign up was very easy.
But, as has happened in a few times since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the cacophony of “will it be a Twitter replacement?” was loud. Musk himself has threatened legal action against Meta about Threads, though not much has come of it yet.
Taylor Lorenz wrote last week about TikTok overtaking Twitter as the global public sphere, which is all fine and well, except that TikTok, like the other social media networks vying for Twitter’s space as the “global town square,” isn’t Twitter. Instagram is hot people doing hot people things; news organizations have tried to get their claws into IG, but never made it work on the same scale. Mastodon is a nicer, more eurocentric (and all that comes with it) and harder to use than any of the alternatives. BlueSky is a nicer Twitter clone, built on the blockchain, but with a limited user base. News organizations have found traction on Facebook, but that network is mostly dead with younger users. Who knows about Truth Social or Gab or Parler or the other “free speech” ones? These are all not Twitter at its height or even before Musk took over.
Threads could be the Twitter substitute, but Meta is hellbent on not making it that. Threads is, like Facebook and Instagram, is interested in working with “influencers” and has yet to create the user-centric feed that Twitter had at its height (it’s forcing said influencers into timelines. Ick.). In making Threads more like Instagram, news organizations can’t compete. More than anything, Meta wants Threads to make lots of money and, as many have written, no one has figured out how to make a global town square profitable. Facebook is, though. Instagram is profitable, too. Threads is not Twitter and Meta doesn’t want it to be.
(Caitlin Dewey has more on Threads v. Twitter and I cannot recommend it enough. Same for Ed Zitron’s bit on Reddit and the “end of the honest Internet.”)
Much has been written – including by me! – about the ephemeral nature of Twitter and the charm therein. But, that day is gone. It’s especially gone for media and news organizations, who are now scrambling for ways to figure out how to somehow squeeze into an online ecosystem increasingly ruled by grifters, charlatans and other weirdos.
When I was at GovExec, I was in a lot of meetings about referral traffic and social media was always a big part of that discussion. Twitter’s conversion rate was always terrible, but it kept the news cycle going. Journalists loved Twitter and Twitter loved journalists, thus making Twitter the driver of the news cycle for years. That’s gone. It’s not coming back.
On an episode from January 2021, comedian Kath Barbadoro – she has a Substack! – on What a Time to Be Alive (my favorite podcast) boiled down something so simple and brilliant that I’ll never forget it. She was exceptionally prescient about the future by making the following lament:
"I hate the fact that there's only, like, two websites now. There used to be more websites. And they've all been centralized in this way that makes the Internet very boring."
I imagine she was more talking about the fun, early 2000s non-news Internet (and the dark parts, but mostly the fun parts), but this ports to the news industry. I sound like the oldest man in the world, but in the time between the pre-Internet age (which I barely remember, to be clear) and the social media age (when Facebook and Twitter became news sites), there was a time when people navigated around their bookmarks bars or typed in c-h-i-c-a-g-o-t-r-i-b-u-n-e-.-c-o-m or n-y-t-i-m-e-s-.-c-o-m or whatever (autofill wasn’t around then). It was a time of more than Facebook and Twitter, more than just two websites. It’s not coming back, nor is the heyday of Twitter.
Lulu Update
I am wearing a bandage on my right pinky finger because my beloved psycho dog poked a hole in my finger while we were playing with a ball outside.
We had some work done on the HVAC system here last week, which was tough for Lulu, as she had to wear her harness and leash inside. She moped and whined, as is her way, but I still love her.
A Recommendation: The Bear
Television in this era is something of a tug-of-war between “we want to like these people because they’re nice” and “these people are terrible, but we can’t stop watching.” On the former… Ted Lasso, Parks & Recreation, the American Office and similar shows are charming and lovely and fairly milquetost (one day, I’ll flesh out why I think those shows are actively destructive to the culture, but today is not that day). The latter is usually where I fall on my preferences – 30 Rock is my favorite all-time show, though Veep is not far behind – though I found myself out to lunch on Succession because no amount of beautiful, bad rich people delivering clever insults was going to make me want to watch a bunch of Wall Street jargon.
Obviously, I’ve telegraphed my preference to something in the middle by noting that 30 Rock is my favorite show; Tina Fey’s masterpiece is about lovable, often selfish losers who want to Put On a Show. There is a nihilism in it, for sure, but it is as much a part of the show as the teamwork, charm and so on.
I’m often behind on prestige TV, so it took me more than a year to finally see the Hulu series that everyone recommended to me. The Bear is not a comedy (though it has funny moments), but it has the same mix of medium-to-bad people loving one another that the best TV has. There is no ray of sunshine character to overcome minor problems each episode. Instead, the show shows adults solving problems and fucking each other up in the process, but learning and trying to be better. The writing lets characters hurt one another and solve the problems therein like adults, not like children or through deus ex machina.
Visually, it’s gorgeous. The food looks delicious, the actors are gorgeous and the show tracks around them in the kitchen in way that feels very real.
The setting, of course, speaks to me. Set in the River North neighborhood of Chicago, the accents that the actors use are spot-on and the aerial shots of the city are gorgeous. Few shows have nailed Chicago and its surrounding suburbs like The Bear has, from the passing references to where I grew up to the ways they talk about the expressways to the establishing shots of the streets to the Pequod’s reference to the flashes of Superdawg and Gene & Jude’s.
Finally, the soundtrack has me pegged. It gets a little on-the-nose with a WXRT broadcast featuring Lin Brehmer introducing Sufjan Stevens’ stripped-down version of “Chicago” to open one episode or Wilco – yes, including “Via Chicago – underscoring emotional moments. I hate that I love the cheap trick used, but I absolutely did. I hate that the soundtrack is full of white guy nonsense. But it doesn’t stop there; the show uses Otis Redding in one episode with aplomb and it underscores one episode with The Replacements.
I’m bummed that I’m through the show’s two seasons and will have to wait a while for another season. It’s terrific.