🐫 The eye of the needle

How should we make sense of Threads?

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It will probably be the fastest-growing consumer service to 100m users in history, faster even than ChatGPT, securing 30m signups in just two days.

Twitter is broken. I’ve used it for 16 years, I built a company on it. And for years I used it as a source of professional information, often supplemented by third-party tools like Prismatic, RightRelevance and Nuzzle. In its early years (till about 2013), Twitter really suffered from noise pollution: scams, tweet circles, retweet to win, and the rest. It was one reason why PeerIndex existed, and why, in 2011, we launched a bot-or-not detector for Twitter.

Twitter’s investment in trust, safety and community health dealt with much of that. What it couldn’t handle was the culture war, Trump and Brexit. In the period after 2016, the social and algorithmic filters I had set up over years become largely useless.

The second breaking of Twitter has been Musk. I’m Justice Potter Stewart in evaluating why Twitter…