New op-ed in Crain's about Meta's Threads

A new op-ed by me for Crain’s went live today talking about how Meta’s Threads will reshape the social landscape. Since it’s behind a paywall, here’s the heart of the issue for me:

Meta isn't aiming for what originally made Twitter special; it's jumping ahead to the product that gave us President Trump. Upon sign-up, the Threads timeline is dominated by celebrities and brands, served up by an algorithm for no clear reason. To create value as a user, one has to go around the noise, muting aggressively and digging through the blue checks to find the real people. Value is currently being created by users on Threads in spite of the product, not because of it.

The network effects from Instagram are real, and so far, Meta has capitalized on them. Between that and anti-Musk sentiment, I expect Threads to have staying power long enough for Meta to integrate it successfully into their profitable advertising suite. My clients will likely find value in Threads, and as an individual user, I'm already seeing more value from it than I have from Twitter in years. But I'm sober about its place in our public conversation, and still mourn for how we're building our social ecosystem. Meta has not proven itself capable of the moral imagination to create a global conversation that doesn't become destructive.

I wrote in my last op-ed that the biggest barrier to Twitter’s self-destruction was users not having an obvious place to land. Meta just gave us one.