Casey Newton: Five Reasons Threads Could Still Go the Distance

The company has released well over a dozen social apps over the past decade, many of them springing from a standalone division of the company devoted to that purpose. But few of them, if any, acquired millions of downloads. Even when it was attempting to copy the success of others, as it did with now-forgotten Snapchat clones like Poke and Slingshot, Meta mostly couldn’t get them off the ground.

I've seen more than a few people go on about how Threads of course was successful at launch because Meta has a large network of users and any new social networking product they make is going to do big numbers. Yes, of course they have an advantage here, but it's foolish to suggest they are automatically successful in new networks because of that alone.

It's also very unclear if Threads will be successful in the long run. I do think it has a better chance than most, but it's not a slam dunk by any means. As Meta execs themselves have said over and over, getting 100+ millionb signups in a week is amazing, but getting people to stick around is a whole other story. Time will tell how they do, but this narrative that they automatically win needs to be tossed in the bin.