Rewind to the summer of 2023. After a sustained period of volatility that was then a hallmark of (and still continues to underline) Elon Musk’s era at X, there was precious little in terms of a genuine alternative social media platform for many to flock to instead. Some including BlueSky and Mastodon tried, but never really caught on. The craving for a platform, one where the feed didn’t spike your stress levels with serious and often divisive posts figuring prominently. No surprise then, that when Mark Zuckerberg flipped the switch on Meta’s Threads platform, as many as 100 users signed up within the first five days. As things stand, Threads now has 175 million monthly active users.
Though not a long way to go before it gets close to X’s last shared 245 million or so daily active users (as of September 2023; shared by CEO Linda Yaccarino publicly), there’s definite momentum on side too. That, builds on cogent thought. Many of you, as have I, may have noticed Threads trying to deprioritise often serious, potentially divisive opinion-driven posts such as news analysis or political content. Open Threads, and the feed that awaits is a compilation of comparatively more cheerful content, than X has for instance. Emily Dalton Smith, VP of Product Engineering at Meta, in an exclusive conversation with HT, believes there are two reasons why this is so noticeable.
“We have very, very strong integrity protections, and a large team across the company working to keep our platform safe and respectful. We’ve built on that. Secondly, it is our community. It’s just the nature of the people who are on there,” says Smith. In March, Threads entered the Fediverse, utilising Meta’s scalable infrastructure, to integrate with a decentralised social network for sharing posts with a much wider audience.
Smith speaks with us about what next for Threads after a successful first year, whether the mission still is to supplant X as the social media platform for millions, plans to monetize Threads, users in India driving unique usage trends and the country’s importance as a hub that helps Meta’s products such as Threads grow. Edited Excerpts.
One year later, how would you describe Threads’ journey thus far? Did you expect the big bang start, with 100 million users using the app within the first five days?
Emily Dalton Smith: We founded the app because we believe everyone has something worth sharing, and we really believe that our role can be to help connect people. The ones who have something to say, with people who want to talk to them about it. That was the genesis of the app. 100 Million people joined in the first few days, and that was incredible. But really, what’s been more challenging and rewarding is continuing to build out the app and to grow. We initially launched with a very basic product; it was missing a lot of just core functionality. While the initial reception was exciting, the thing I think has been less moment in time exciting, but more rewarding and valuable is continuing to build out the app.
We’ve improved our following feed, added columns on web, an API, trending topics in the US and live scores. That’s been very cool in India, to see people rally around cricket in particular and build up the sports community. The story of the last year is going from an exciting premise of an idea to building a full featured app that now is supporting almost 200 million people on a regular basis.
Q. Is the mission still to supplant X, or is it more about choice? More to that point, has it been easy to change muscle memory for millions of social media users globally?
EDS: Mark (Zuckerberg) has talked about this over the years, about how he thinks that someone should be able to build a billion-person public conversation app, and that we should be able to do that. Obviously, we’re directly competing with Twitter (since renamed X), but our vision is bigger than that. Everyone should be able to come to a place that is open where they can feel good about conversations, to be a low-risk edge of emerging culture where they can contribute to any conversation that drives culture and can have deep as well as meaningful social connections around shared interests.
If you think about it from that lens, that’s what we’re anchored on with Threads. That’s the value we want to deliver to our users. While we will compete with Twitter and other public discussion apps, our vision is a lot bigger on the question of choice. Honestly, everyone’s multi-platform user at this point, and we’re happy to support that. People certainly want to have choice, and we want to be the best choice. Our emphasis is on supporting people owning their interactions by building integrations with the fediverse and we’ll continue to do that over for the foreseeable future.
Q. Which countries are Threads biggest markets for now, and does India figure prominently on that list?
EDS: India is one of our top markets. The US has a lot of momentum, and then APAC as a region, has been really active and growing very steadily over the past year with Taiwan and Japan being very active. In India, we’ve seen a ton of activity around film and TV content such as Shark Tank India, Indian Idol, and House of the Dragon. People are using tags and they become the basis for conversation. Sports is huge, with lot of activity around cricket and the World Cup, as well as football and tennis. Celebrities too have been very big on Threads, and so it’s been exciting to watch that kind of bubble up around those themes.
Another couple of things have been interesting about India is that people are more likely to mention one another than is the trend globally. Secondly, Indian users on Threads tend to make use of video content in their posts, much more than the global average. Photos too are a heavily used feature on Threads. When we built the app, it was very focused on text-based conversation. It still is, but people are using media as examples, as conversation starters, to illustrate their points Someone will post a funny meme, and someone else will edit it, and then you’ll have a big chain of people editing and joking around about that.
Q. Are there plans to monetize Threads, and would the options available to Meta include in-app advertisements and subscriptions?
EDS: We follow what we call the four phases of maturity. The first is the spark of an idea. The second is to find a product market fit. The third is grow and then you monetize at the last stage. I believe we’re definitely in the growth phase, so we don’t have any near term plans around monetization.
It is in the future as for how we’ll do it, whether it is adding subscriptions, or other means, that’s a little bit far off for us right now. We’re really just focused on building features that our users want. Now we’re starting to think more about heading into year two and onwards, so what else should we be building, and how do we start to identify emerging patterns of activity that we can build for and then just continuing to grow.
Q. Do you expect the advantages of Threads’ close ties with Instagram, begin to fade at some point?
EDS: It’s going to evolve. We’re very closely connected to Instagram, including having the same usernames as on Instagram, pushing notifications about Threads in Instagram and see cross posted content from Instagram in Threads. That’s not going to change. We’re part of the family of apps, but we do expect that Threads will continue to evolve based on how the community uses the app, and growing in ways that we didn’t anticipate. That is a wonderful thing.
We think of it more as sitting alongside Instagram as it matures, as opposed to being built on top of Instagram and embedded. It’s been really neat to see how people have started to build new networks and connections, We’ve also seen a lot of interest-based communities that are more focused on discussion, that are just present on Threads, but didn’t grow on Instagram. For example, the photography community is really big. I believe we’re going to find that the apps will be very complimentary over the long term.
Q. What next for Threads, and what role will India play in building Threads?
EDS: A lot of our research and development is coming from India, and we focus on markets where the app is resonating with our community. India is one of those and it’s really lit up, particularly over the last six to nine months.
Our focus is on three fundamentals across all markets. First, to make Threads more timely. We’ve been working on that, to feed into delivering a better experience that users will appreciate for live events, cricket matches or a big cultural event. You want to see exactly what’s happening at the moment! Second, to keep Threads an open space for conversation and three, to support creators. None of those are market specific, but they’re really global priorities. I believe they’ll have a really positive impact on the experience that people in India have, and should fuel the content and engagement.
