Here’s How Twitter Could Become Irrelevant

livemint.com:

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen. The latter is what it felt like for Elon Musk’s Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s newest experiment, the Twitter clone Threads, after its launch. The early success of Threads, and the way that success appears to have come at least partly at the expense of Musk’s app, has brought into focus a prospect that seemed highly unlikely not long ago: that Twitter could descend into irrelevance.

There have been many copies of Twitter before, none of which have been able to make much of a dent in the usage or cultural importance of the bird site. But Threads, which reached 100 million users within the first five days of going live, threatens to do what none of those other Twitter clones could. This isn’t a prophecy of imminent doom for Musk’s $44 billion gamble.

Much would have to go right for Zuckerberberg, and wrong for his rival, for Twitter to fade from the scene. If they persist, though, the trends driving Threads’s success—a mix of network effects, Musk’s self-inflicted wounds, and the potential allure of a platform with a different vibe—could coalesce into a diminished future for the 17-year-old microblogging service. For starters, Threads seems to have solved the handful of key issues that prevented other would-be Twitter replacements from taking off.

Threads just works, right out of the box. There are none of the limits on sign-ups of Jack Dorsey-affiliated Bluesky. Thanks in part to the fact that it is an offshoot of the already popular Instagram app, Threads is much simpler to join and use than the open-source Twitter alternative Mastodon.