I don’t know if Twitter will win. I don’t know if Threads will win.
But I do know that most social media companies fail. And I also know why. (Actually - Eugene Wei knows why).
If there’s one article you should read this week, let it be THIS one.
Okay.
TikTok isn’t Vine.
You don’t have to follow anyone for its algorithm to know what you’re interested in, and that’s why it’s so popular. Its engineers built an interest graph without building a social graph.
Think of how most other social networks have scaled. The usual path is organic. Users are encouraged to follow and friend each other to assemble their own graph one connection at a time. The challenge with that is that it’s almost always a really slow build, and you have to provide some reason for people to hang around and build that graph.
What if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?
Okay.
I haven’t actually downloaded Threads.
But I do know that if Zuck wants to win the Twitter wars, he has to solve the problems Twitter never did. Problems around execution!!!!
Even if you achieve hockey stick growth among your target audience, how do you maintain DAUs?
That’s the issue Threads is having.
And TikTok had that issue too. (Before Bytedance bought it, rebranded it from Musical.ly to TikTok, and increased ad spend to reach more than just teenage girls and lip syncers).
Okay.
There’s a graveyard of apps that had hockey stick growth among their target audience, then stopped working. Threads hit 100 million users in only 5 days, but how will it keep users there?
Eugene Wei thinks a lot about social media companies. He’s helped build a lot of them too. I’ve attached his Substack below :) And make sure you read THIS article!!!
And that’s the skinny.
