Instagram’s new Twitter clone/competitor Threads could become the first social media of its type to crush the Elon Musk-owned service. However, there’s just one major problem: Threads is overwhelmingly dull to browse, and its basic lack of search features exacerbate the worst it has to offer.
On a basic level, Threads is just Twitter where you’re always stuck on the For You tab. Bringing over everyone from Instagram onto the new service, Meta’s new platform already has over 100 million users, and the number is still climbing. The issue is that great Instagram creators do not make great Threads posters, and it is painfully obvious.
Making a brand-new account on Threads means making a new Instagram account and tying the two together. This means you’ll have a blank canvas, as we’ve done with the Stealth Optional Threads account that you should follow if you want to.
Logging into a new Threads account with no followers means you’ll be instantly greeted to walls of brands doing their best “How do you do, Fellow Kids?” impression. If not that, you’ll be slapped in the face with inspirational quote after inspirational quote.
Compared to Twitter’s long-established algorithm, Threads seems slow to adapt, a weird reality following on from Instagram’s hyper-focused approach to telling you exactly what content you want to see. However, Instagtam’s basic features allow you to easily fine tune that experience, whereas Threads does not.
In its current form, Threads lack any form of search outside of finding others’ accounts. You can’t search words to find posts about your interests, you can’t use hashtags to sort content and you have to wade through miles of content dysentery to find any content worth engaging in.
To be succinct, Threads is what happens when the backbone of Instagram learns to read and write instead of posting pictures of their dinner at a local café six times a week. It’s the same vapidness that we’ve come to expect from Instagram, albeit in text form.
For as bad as Twitter has become since Elon Musk’s takeover, the backbone of Twitter is a completely different vibe. Twitter’s tongue-in-cheek audience is inventive, oftentimes funny (outside of the massive growing wave of far-right turds), and can be genuinely entertaining. It also helps that you can actually find new content simply by searching.
At the moment, Threads is the fake version of Twitter we see in movies and video games. It’s the NBA 2K games’ idea of what social media is. It’s almost impressively soulless, at least for now, but there is hope that the service could become something great in the future.
Once Threads gets its basic features up and running, it could become the only good alternative for Twitter. However, maybe social media just needs to perish for a while to become good again.
