Despite its similarities, Instagram Threads is not X. At least, not yet. The text-centric social network — and Meta’s answer to Elon Musk, formerly of Twitter, X — missed a moment to shine Friday when users turned to X again to discuss the New York/New Jersey area earthquake . The surge in traffic drove #earthquake to the top of X’s Trending section, followed by other areas of impact including “East Coast,” “Long Island,” “Philly,” “Manhattan,” and “Brooklyn.” Meanwhile, earthquake-related terms were not listed in Threads’ trending section until 2 p.m. ET, even though the earthquake it had rung just before 10:30 on Friday morning.
That’s not to say that people weren’t discussing the earthquake in Threads — many were. In addition to conversations happening around the earthquake, people were even tagging their threads as EarthquakeThreads or NYC Threads, among others, to help get their posts seen in the larger Threads Community.
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Another reason the term probably wasn’t trending: 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 popular terms. It seems obvious that earthquake discussions should be tagged with #earthquake, (or earthquake without the hashtag, as in Threads), but people on the Meta-owned platform have started using the tagging convention of “[term] Threads” — like “Tech Threads” for tech people talking about tech, for example.
This could make things complicated when a big trend comes up because some will tag it “earthquake” and others will tag it “Earthquake Threads” while others may target their local community like “NYC Threads” which it doesn’t lead to any of the terms gaining the speed and momentum needed to get into the top trends in Threads, even though they all refer to the same event.
Around 1 p.m. on Friday, TechCrunch reached out to Instagram to ask why the earthquake didn’t make Threads’ top trends.
We’re told Threads’ top five trends are based on a variety of cues, including how many people are talking about a particular topic and how many people have interacted 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 checking in with Threads, the now hour-long earthquake became the #1 trend on the platform.
Unfortunately for Threads, not being able to keep up with real-time trends could hinder its ability to fully compete with X. Coupled with Meta’s plan to distance itself from discussions of a political nature — even to the point of not “recommends” political content on Instagram and Threads platforms — Threads may never be able to fully replace X, even if it creates many of the same bells and whistles, like reposts, search, bookmarks, and linkable tags.
This stands in stark contrast to how Twitter’s founders saw the power of their new platform to deliver real-time information—and one reason why Twitter became the home for breaking news, active topical debate, and a hub for the journalists.
Not long after TechCrunch covered Twitter (then called Twttr) for the first time, the San Francisco earthquake rocked the service, allowing both founders and users to understand the possibilities of Twttr. Later that fall, the app had grown to thousands of users.
Said former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, in a Harvard Business School 2016 newsroom interview, “… I was in the office one Saturday, and my phone rang, and it was a tweet, and it just said, ‘Earthquake.’ Right after that I really felt the vibes in San Francisco. The phone kept buzzing, and it went, “earthquake, earthquake, earthquake.”
“What was amazing about it is that I was experiencing something in the world, and immediately I 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 can really — just having that shared feeling that 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, Miski, Pixelfed, PeerTube and others. However, despite the usage declines, the X has remained “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, X’s power user usage has remained largely unchanged since last fall.
There are already signs that Threads is failing to deliver a true X-like experience Max Read described it in a March newsletter, “Threads is the gas leak social network,” referring to the randomness of posts that filled users’ For You feeds.
“Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering from some sort of minor 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 get into my feed? How should I react?”
If Threads can’t leverage real-time information like an earthquake or a current political debate. if his feed is bubbling very old posts; and if its trends remain hours behind, 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 in particular — they’ll never have a true X-like experience.
