At the moment I write this, the social era of the internet is in chaos. Twitter has locked tweets behind a login, Instagram is known as a sales front rather than a social hub, Reddit has infuriated and driven away the moderators who keep it from descending into Lord of the Flies, TikTok might get literally banned, and Facebook’s reputation is that it’s where people use their real names and photos to say the cruellest things.
Upstarts that aim to replace these sites have been springing up all over, but that’s exactly their problem – no individual has the mass of people or interest needed to be a replacement for a truly social site. Maybe Meta’s new Threads service will (it had just launched as we went to press), but given how negatively people think of Instagram and Facebook, Threads’ potential success certainly hangs by a… well, you get it. I mean, people still use Facebook and Instagram in their droves today, but that’s because they have momentum – how many of us would sign up today, with full knowledge of what those platforms are like now?
