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Despite its similarities, Instagram Threads isn’t X. At least not yet. The text-focused social network — and Meta’s answer to Elon Musk’s X, formerly of Twitter — missed a moment to shine Friday when users once again turned to X to discuss the earthquake in the New York/New Jersey area. The increase in traffic pushed #earthquake to the top of X’s trending section, followed by other areas of impact such as East Coast, Long Island, Philly, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Meanwhile, earthquake-related terms didn’t register in Threads’ trending section until closer to 2:00 PM ET, even though the earthquake struck just before 10:30 Friday morning.
That’s not to say people didn’t discuss the earthquake in Threads—a lot did. In addition to conversations around the earthquake, people even tagged their discussions as EarthquakeThreads or NYC Threads, among other things, to help show their posts to the wider Threads community.
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Another reason the term is probably out of date: Unlike Twitter/X, Threads doesn’t use hashtags.
While this design choice makes the user interface cleaner, it can also make it less obvious how to tag trending terms. It seems obvious that discussions about the earthquake should be tagged with #earthquake (or earthquake without the hashtag, as in Threads), but people on the Meta-owned platform started using the tagging convention of “[term] topics” — like Tech Threads for people in tech talking about tech, for example.
This can complicate things when a big trend occurs because some will tag it as “earthquake” and others will tag it as “Earthquake Threads” while others may still target their local community as “Threads in New York,” which doesn’t lead to any of the terms picking up the speed and momentum needed to break into the top trends in Threads, even though they all refer to the same event.
Around 1 p.m. Friday, TechCrunch contacted Instagram to ask why the earthquake hadn’t made it into Threads’ top trends.
We’re told Threads’ top five trends are based on a variety of signals, including how many people are talking about a topic and how many people have engaged with posts on the same topic. Because the earthquake was a regional event and trends are based on national conversations, it may simply have taken longer for enough people to join the conversation, Instagram said.
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Shortly after we signed up with Threads, the hour-long earthquake became the #1 trend on the platform.
Unfortunately for Threads, the inability to keep up with real-time trends may hinder its ability to fully compete with X. Combined with Meta’s plan to distance itself from discussions of a political nature – even going so far as to doesn’t “recommend” political content on the Instagram and Threads platforms – Threads may never be able to fully replace X, even if it builds in many of the other same benefits, such as reposts, search, bookmarks, and link tags.
That’s in stark contrast to how Twitter’s founders see the power of their new platform to deliver information in real time — and the reason Twitter has become a home for breaking news, active topical discussion and a hub for journalists.
Shortly after TechCrunch covered Twitter (then called Twttr) for the first time, the San Francisco earthquake rocked the service, allowing founders and users alike to understand Twttr’s potential. Later that fall, the app grew to thousands of users.
Said former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey in a 2016 Harvard Business School Newsroom interview, “… I was in the office on Saturday and my phone rang and it was a tweet and it just said, ‘Earthquake.’ Right after that I really felt the tremors in San Francisco. The phone continued to buzz and “earthquake, earthquake, earthquake” was heard.
“The amazing thing about it is that I experienced something in the world and immediately felt comforted because it was obvious that other people were experiencing the same thing,” Dorsey said. “I thought, ‘Wow, the world is so small.’ You actually can — just by having that shared feeling, shared experience, you all feel like you’re all in this together.”
Threads may have 130 million monthly active users, making it the largest player in the “fediverse,” the social network of interconnected servers and services including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and others. But despite the decline in usage, X remains “stickier” than some would have you believe, especially given the wide crop of competitors that have emerged to challenge Musk’s X. In fact, according to a Sensor Tower report, power user X usage has remained largely unchanged since last fall.
There are already signs that Threads is failing to deliver a true X-like experience. As Max Reed described it in a March newsletter, “Threads is the social network for gas leaks,” given the randomness of the posts that fill users’ feeds of For You.
“Everyone on the platform, including you, appears to be suffering from some sort of mild brain damage,” Read wrote. “… Who are these people? What are they talking about? Are they responding to something I missed? Why am I reading this? How did it end up in my feed? How should I respond?”
If threads cannot take advantage of real-time information, such as an earthquake or an ongoing political discussion; if his feed blows up a lot of old posts; and if its trends remain delayed for hours, Threads’ ability to be a viable alternative to Twitter could suffer. While people might use it — because they don’t like X’s new direction, or Elon Musk specifically — they’ll never have a true X-like experience.
