From the Editor’s Desk for Monday: We Don’t Need Another Hero (Premium)

As you may have seen, Meta last week released Threads, which is logically described as yet another Twitter replacement. But Threads is different from previous attempts to duplicate what is—or used to be—great about Twitter because it’s made by the most dominant social media company on earth and had rocketed to an incredible 70 million sign-ups in just its first two days. (It’s surpassed 100 million since then.)

Like many, I have mixed feelings about Threads. On a personal level, Twitter has always worked well for me, and until recently I’d not been subjected to the racism, hate speech, and alt-right nonsense that others complain about. But I also don’t like to see the dominant get even more dominant: I view Facebook as a stolen product and consider its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions to be nothing short of a regulatory failure. Meta’s core products have all long ago fallen prey to enshittification, just as surely as Twitter has under Elon Musk.

I also look at these products and services through a professional lens, however. And on that note, there is Twitter and then there is everything else. Twitter is by far my most important social media platform, as I have over 125,000 followers on the service, far more than all of the other services I use professionally combined. Trying to recreate that kind of following on another service is daunting, and with would-be alternatives like Mastodon still comparatively tiny, it’s probably impossible.

But the rapid rise of Threads, whose success is owed to Meta cannily leveraging its 2+ billion active Instagram users, is enticing. With the understanding that sign-ups are not the same as active users, and with the caveat that Threads is today feature-incomplete, it’s not hard to imagine this service quickly catapulting into the 100s of millions of active users range, and perhaps even into the billions. Put simply, I cannot (professionally) afford to ignore this. And so I’ve taken the first steps towards establishing what is now an empty presence on Threads, and I will auto-post article links there (as I do to Twitter and Mastodon, and other services) as soon as the service I use supports it.

The dark horse here is whether I can shift my Twitter usage to Threads. And that’s a big deal for me because my Twitter presence isn’t just about auto-posting links to articles. I’m quite active on Twitter, I tweet throughout the day, and I often mock-cover big Apple, Google, and Microsoft events in real-time on the service. For so many reasons, I can’t just pick up and move. I use Twitter as it was originally conceived, as a sort of town hall, a place to have conversations with others, most of whom (I assume) share my love of personal technology. It’s not where I go to post pictures from trips or interact with my friends and family.

No, I do those things from two Meta-owned services, Instagram and Facebook, respectively. And that, of course, is what’s troubling about Threads. Do I really want to put all of my eggs in one horrible basket? Do I even have a choice? I don’t think I do.

I’m reminded of the time when Michael Dukakis was running for U.S. president against George H. W. Bush, and the decision was often described as choosing “the lesser of two evils.” But with Threads and Twitter, there’s no such thing. Both companies, objectively, are problematic for all kinds of reasons. And while this is a bit dramatic, I absolutely think of both companies’ leaders as “evil,” in that they’re just terrible, terrible human beings doing harmful things. But just as we perhaps shouldn’t evaluate a country poorly because it has terrible leadership, nor can most of us afford to ignore personal technology companies because their leadership or founders are terrible. That’s a classic case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Think about it. Most tech leaders, most billionaires, are both terrible and lucky to be in their positions of power. That we idolize such people is one of my many pet peeves—that we idolize celebrities, many of whom are insipid and unworthy of emulation, is even worse—but it’s all too common. I think I’ve written about my theory that people who are perhaps too good at one thing—Steve Jobs is the canonical example—must be bad at just about everything else, and they’re often terrible people too. And I probably told the story of meeting basketball legend Larry Bird when I was 12 or 13 and being devastated when he swore at me. Our heroes rarely warrant our adoration.

But the culture of our male-dominated industry exacerbates this problem, I think, as does the fact that technology moves so fast that legislation and regulation can’t keep up. This is how Facebook was allowed to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, and how Google was allowed to acquire DoubleClick. These purchases should never have been approved by regulators, and they set up the advertising duopoly that impacts all of us today. Privacy invasions and tracking represent just the tip of the fallout iceberg that resulted.

Looking closer to home, no one who knows anything about Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates can offer up any argument against the fact that he was a horrible, toxic individual, despite more recent attempts to burnish his legacy by focusing on his admittedly admirable post-Microsoft philanthropy. But in the theme that people never really change, we also learned recently that his horrible behavior has continued into more recent years too. Gates stepped down from the Microsoft board in 2020, but the inappropriate behavior that triggered this change only came to light more recently. At least it helped trigger a corporate reexamination of and improvements to Microsoft’s discrimination and harassment policies. A silver lining, if you will.

The problem with most tech billionaires—and probably most billionaires in general—is that they confuse luck with skill, and over time, as their success and power grow, they become convinced of their own genius, and their almost divine right to do whatever they want. Gates, for all his problems, at least has the advantage of having failed, and I’d like to believe that triggered some introspection. But Zuckerberg and Musk are younger, and while Meta’s foray into virtual reality and the metaverse have to date amounted to nothing, their comeuppances are still to come.

Put simply, while the choices we make when it comes to personal technology are often fraught with compromise, no good can come out of idolizing the deeply flawed leaders of these companies. And we absolutely should never try to emulate them. (Paging Elizabeth Holmes.) Whether tech leaders are terrible or not, they’re just people, albeit people with enough power that the impact of their very human flaws is very much exaggerated. They don’t just harm those around them, they can harm millions, in some cases billions.

And seriously, Threads vs. Twitter? There are no winners there.

Changes are coming!

Some have noticed my hints about some big changes coming to Thurrott.com, and we will be making a formal announcement soon. There’s nothing bad happening, but we have made some structural changes to the business that I think set it up nicely for the future. For the most part, your experience using this site won’t change at all, and Laurent and I will still be toiling away each day, delivering the news and editorial content you expect. But there is one thing that will impact you. As part of the coming announcement, I’ll detail an exciting partnership that will result in changes to the newsletters you receive every day or week. There will be more details, soon, I promise, but we’ll be making the switch next week and will be moving to a new publishing schedule.

Sorry to be so vague. But the wait is almost over. And I’m excited to move into this future together.

–Paul