In ‘Sizzle This,’ The Swaddle team adds to the noise around the pop culture moment of the week.
A new day, the same tech-lord announcing a new thing. When Meta launched Threads this week and enabled any Instagram user to automatically join, it created a frenzy of discourse about Twitter finally getting a worthy competitor that might kill it. Some said they would leave Twitter before it fully implodes, others are waiting for everyone else to leave in order to enjoy the quiet solitude of lesser discourse. But for a platform responsible for the term ‘terminally online’ to describe takes, will a new platform exactly like the old one really change anything about how we talk about stuff? Everyone has a stance on Threads. Here are ours.
SA: Realistically anyone who’s been on Twitter long enough to see it evolve from a space for random 3 am thoughts to a newsfeed that replaces tabloids in being a cesspool of hatred & unnecessary hot takes is not going to leave. They’d (we’d) risk missing out on its next equally thrilling stage. Some might give in to the FOMO and join Threads but the real ones (read: me) are going to keep loving Twitter with all its flaws and skip signing up to a whole new social media platform to preserve that small bit of integrity they have left.
RN: The unrelenting sameness of privately owned big tech platforms keeps us all unrelentingly same too. The discourse — whether on Twitter or on Threads — isn’t going anywhere. Long live the monotony of online existence.
SM: Once you join Threads, even if you delete your profile, they keep your data, as long as you have an Instagram account. We’re all collateral damage in this battle.
HK: My Twitter personality and Instagram personality are at two opposite ends of a spectrum, and I do NOT want them to converge into one. I do not want to subject myself to the ‘Twitter’ version of my Instagram mutuals, and will vehemently stay away from Threads. But this doomsday will at least help me reduce my screen time a little bit, making me chronically online, instead of terminally, so a huge thanks to both techlords!
AB: I don’t understand why Elon and the other Muskites are in such a tizzy — they’re fanboys of capitalism, right? Here’s capitalism in action for you: introduce competition to the market and may the best app win.
DR: I’ll have my stance on Threads once I’ve figured it out — or, at the very least, learned to tell the difference between Twitter and Threads. It’s possible, though, that by then, we’ll have another avatar of the microblogging breed of social media on our phones.
