Flash Floods Show Twitter is Still a Tool, Meta's Threads a Trifle

SO YOU may have heard about the celebrity deathmatch between Elon Musk’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads. Folks have pointed to the massive signup on Threads in recent days (including me).

Find me on Threads

But it’s no contest unless numbers are all you care about.

Twitter still rules - IF your goal is using such platforms to address the world’s intertwined challenges by sharing and sifting for timely information and building globe-spanning communities.

A flash-flood test of Threads

Here’s a simple test of the current state of Threads and Twitter. The world is wrapped in heat domes and flash floods. Put relevant terms in the search box on Twitter and Threads - and of course on Threads you can only do so from your phone. When I did this using the phrase “flash flood,” the results clearly showed Twitter is a tool and Threads is a trifle.

Let me know what you find! Of course Threads has been rolled out hurriedly - call it a preemie. But even looking ahead, I see low odds of significance.

As with Mastodon (my take) and other supposed Twitter competitors, it’d take years and huge investments of time and staffing for Meta to turn Threads into a realtime, searchable multimedia-friendly idea and information exchange. Learn more in my Sustain What conversation last year with Jim Moffitt, the (now former) Twitter engineer who made it so useful in unfolding disasters.

Given that it took just over a year for Meta to kill off Bulletin, the promising alternative to Substack that I was recruited to help test drive, I have scant confidence Meta and Instagram will have the gumption and patience to make Threads more than a trifle.

I remain a fan of Twitter, despite the toxicity and dysfunctionality following Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform.

If you missed my previous posts laying out how to make the most of Twitter, click the links below.

The experience of mastering Twitter - diving through the pond scum - reminds me of a great moment in Miguel de Cervantes’s 400-year-old novel The History of Don Quixote, describing a knight fearfully regarding a noxious pool of bubbling pitch, but diving in regardless. Like anything worthwhile in life, it takes work.

Crow versus eagle - Threads versus Twitter

On Monday evening, I grew frustrated with deeply flawed media coverage of the flooding, particularly stories pointing only to the role of climate change in intensifying some hazards, as if there isn’t a big body of research showing how normal it is for the hills of the U.S. Northeast to be scoured by extreme floods. You can find my take on this on, yes, Twitter.

After tweeting, I calmed down by kayaking out across the misty Skillings inlet in Downeast Maine with my wife. We witnessed a fascinating, and hilarious, interaction between a crow and a bald eagle. Click to see how it relates to this Threads vs. Twitter “battle.”

Here are some posts on Twitter’s problems and ways to use it without being abused by it: