The social media app that I use the most is Instagram.
It's a tie between Instagram and it had been Twitter.
Had so probably TikTok. I just like that. It's like short form, It's just like quick videos that you can watch. I'll probably say TikTok. Reason being is because I'd rather post videos and the pictures sometimes.
Instagram, and I'm not into the other ones at all.
I definitely use social media less now because I have a job and I don't have as much time.
I use it less now. Quote you get carried away with it, maybe.
One hundred percent more. It's like terrible how much I use it.
They want you to be addicted.
Definitely less as I've become.
More aware of the dangers of social media, for sure.
How are you feeling about your social media habit these days? For the longest time, Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, we're growing like crazy, and everyone loved them or love to hate them, but even then still spent too many hours scrolling through those endless feeds. Bloomberg's Max Chaffkin the rights in Business Week that recently, for a lot of people, the love is gone. He says, even as Meta's new
Twitter substitute called threads is racking up users. Social media use overall is softening.
A lot of people want to go outside and see their friends and they don't want to look at their screens. But I think there's really a possibility that there's no next Twitter.
The next Twitter is nothing.
I'm west Kosova today on the Big Take borrow that old Internet cliche, touching screens versus touching grass. Max. Great to see you again, Yeah, good to see you. So why did you write this story?
Well, two reasons.
One is, for the last year or so, there's just been this constellation of things that have been happening, especially in the world of social media, but broader in the world.
Of online media.
The biggest and I think most important, being that Elon Musk bought Twitter and has proceeded to do what feels like almost everything in his power to destroy it. He's changed all these policies, he's alienated Twitter's advertisers, he's alienate a lot of the core users, he's fired most of the employees. But at the same time, right there are these challenges for Elon Musk, and I started to think about, well, what are those challenges? Why is Elon Musk struggling so bad.
Why is a guy who can send rockets into space, who almost single handedly popularize the electric car, who is doing brain implants, who seems like he can do almost anything, he can't run a social media company that should be like the easiest of those.
And it's not just Twitter. A lot of social media platforms are also facing new headwinds.
The social media platforms are struggling, and not just the social media platforms.
So you look at streaming.
A couple years ago, Netflix and all these streaming companies basically seemed like they had almost unlimited growth and it was all we were talking about, and you're suddenly seeing shrinking subscriber bases. A headline that jumped out on me a couple months ago was Apple is making its own movies now, and they announced that they were going to show those movies in movie theaters, which was kind of spun in some circles as, oh, like, Apple's just taking over the world.
But what it really is is kind of an admission of defeat.
It's that they can't market the movies without the movie theaters. A couple others, you know, Vice declaring bankruptcy. Vice I've been seen as kind of the future of media. BuzzFeed News, which was seen as the future of news, just shut down. Those two were companies that were basically drafting off of social media, in particular Facebook. So yeah, you just saw all of these companies that are all facing challenges and you look at what's happening, and the explanation is, like,
not that complicated. It's that for a long time, there was incredible growth in this market. Every single year, there were more people spending more time looking at their phones and before their phones, their computer screens, and that basically was almost like a law, and in some quarters of Silicon Valley they thought of it like as a natural law, like the law of gravity or the law of the conservation of matter or something.
And during the pandemic it became possible to sort of believe that would go on forever.
And then you come out of the pandemic and people are able to see friends, and they start pulling back, and for the first time in twenty two we saw a big drop in the amount of time people were spending on devices. There had been drops before, but this drop was way bigger. And I think a lot of these other stories bankruptcies and digital media challenges of streaming giants, challenges within social media companies.
They all kind of come back to this basic.
Reality, which is that a lot of people want to go outside and see their friends and they don't want to look at their screens.
And as you mentioned that, there had been slow downs before, and you started to see the seeds of this before the pandemic. But and then of course when everyone was stuck at home, there was this boom again.
I think it was around twenty eighteen, and you see that both in the data. So I cite this data from GWI, which is a market research company. They basically send out surveys to almost a million people, maybe more than a million people every year, basically saying like how much time are you spending on your device, what are you doing on your device? How much money are you spending? And it's in twenty eighteen when they picked up this decline. But I think you can also see it in things
that were happening at the time. So the same year, in twenty eighteen, Bloomberg did a story. It was about how people were getting a lot of pings from Facebook. There were all these intrusive notifications that users were complaining about, saying like you haven't logged into Facebook for a long time. Your friend is on Facebook. Just these kind of like almost thirsty kings from this digital media company that was going around talking about as if the growth is going
on forever. You also saw Facebook doing all these kind of wild things that were designed to get bigger audiences. There's obviously been a lot of Internet penetration, a lot of cell phone penetration in much of the world, but there were you know, parts of the world in particular, you know Sub Saharan Africa, parts of Asia where there's very poor connectivity, and Google and Facebook we're going to try to solve that in novel ways, Google by floating
these balloons. The company was called Loon and it was going to broadcast a signal. The balloons act like satellites essentially, and Facebook had basically the same plan, except with drones. These were high flying, gigantic airplanes that would sort of be way above the clouds and zipping Internet down to the furthest corners of the world. And again, like looking back, you're like, how did they plan on making money there?
Because it's not just about the audience.
You need advertising, and so I think there was just this conception that it would go on forever, and you start to see skepticism building in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, but then the pandemic happened, and the pandemic instantly everybody is stuck at home, right, we have nothing, no other way to communicate with people, So people are spending more
time online. There was a lot of inks build in twenty twenty and twenty twenty one about kind of like a new normal, how this wasn't a temporary public health crisis, this was an accelerant. In other words, we would never get off of zoom. And you see that in the statements, especially made by these tech companies that were really invested
in these services. So, like all of the tech companies were the most enthusiastic supporters of remote work because of course remote work, in addition to like keeping people from getting COVID, was a great way for them to make money.
Mark Zuckerberg relocated to Why and.
Made all these statements in twenty twenty about how half of Facebook's work force would be remote and one of the reasons Zuckerberg was saying, you know, everyone's gonna be able to work remotely is because he believed that everyone would have these headsets that they would plug into to have meetings, and it was he believed also going to
be like the center of our social interactions. The idea of the metaverse was that it was going to be this new platform like social media, but like moral compass than social media. Facebook changed its name to meta you know, with much fanfare. Zuckerberg invested and has continued to invest huge sums of money.
You had books written.
I looked, you know, there's so many business books about how to set your company up for the metaverse, how to profit from the metaverse, how the metaverse is going to change everything. And they bought a Super Bowl ad and they spend all this money, and you look, and the results are just incredibly piddling. We're also seeing Apple, another company that is trying to make the metaverse happen, announce this headset and they had a whole event, and
you're seeing the sales projections get smaller and smaller. When you look at this trend of declining interest in screen time and social media, you can see you can predict that the metaverse would not do very well because if you're dealing with a situation where consumers are like not wanting to spend as much time on Facebook and Twitter and so on, and then your pitches. I've got Facebook,
but it's strapped to your face. You can see why consumers would be like, thanks, I'll stick with what i've got. There was this feeling that there were certain parts of the pandemic that would just sort of last, maybe forever, and I think that part just has not borne out. And when you look at the increase in the time spend, it's almost not that encouraging. It was only about fifteen minutes more per day that people were spending on their devices.
And you might imagine, given that we were all stuck inside, that the number would be even higher.
But I think the thing was we were already pretty saturated.
I mean, when you're talking about seven hours a day, which is how high it got, that's almost half of a normal waking day. I think you would really have to work to spend more time than that. And I can say that as like an addict of these things. And so I think we all collectively had a problem, maybe still have a problem, and the awareness of that is creating all sorts of dislocation where you have these social media companies who are increasingly competing for a market
that is no longer growing. So this isn't to say that social media is dying. Somebody see those headlines, but it's not. It's just not growing as much and that has all sorts of knock on effects that makes the difficult for the social media companies. We basically found a saturation point, a point where we like, we can't eat any more Internet. It's seven hours and after that, you know, you start to go a little nuts.
Because I've covered.
Social media and digital media for almost twenty years, thinking about this caused me to like revisit a lot of things that I hadn't really thought about. One of the things was Read Hastings, the then CEO of Netflix, was going around saying the only competition for Netflix, the only
competition that matters is sleep. It was very pithy and memorable he said in our earnings calls and in conferences, and the idea was that you know, if you're watching Netflix and you're getting tired, but you're really into the show, you might stay up and you might skip some sleep in.
Order to watch another episode.
And like, looking back on that, it really seems weird and problematic and troubling because, first of all, there's no disrupting sleep, right, Like, everyone needs to sleep physically, it's a requirement. But it also kind of gets at the limits. There's only so much attention. And the idea that Netflix was going to like cause people to sleep a little less and that was going to allow them to make
their like quarterly numbers for the foreseeable future. You can just see that that's a little bit problematic, super memorable and funny, and he got to go around saying like, you know, we're at war with sleep and we're winning. And people at the time kind of loved it, but I think were looking back that was kind of a warning sign.
Or it should have been a warning sign.
And right around that time is when time spent online started a level off or even fall a little bit.
And so there's this parallel between the streaming companies like Netflix and Apple and Disney and all the rest of them that are trying to claim our attention and the social media companies which are also trying to claim our attention at the very same time.
Not only that, but they're competing for the same attention. And I think that's part of what happened. Like you had growth leveling off where people are sort of spending as much time as they can looking at screens. You have parts of the developing world getting online like they're already online. If you look at the World Bank, like how many cell phones are there per one hundred people,
it's one hundred and six. They're just like not that many people out there who are not already potential Netflix customers, and these companies their fates are tied together because going back ten years, social media was kind of at the core of how a lot of culture, a lot of news,
a lot of everything was being consumed by people. So you're just sort of pushing a lot of stuff into a funnel, and it's you know, the funnel's not getting any wider, and again there's going to be dislocation, or you're going to start to see companies try to pivot, which is to some extent what happened in social media. Facebook and TikTok, which sprung up, basically moved away from having people share stuff and into just serving up this
feed of algorithmic content for people to consume. And you see social media transforming itself from being more of an active experience to be more like a passive, consumptive thing.
After the break. Is Threads a Twitter killer or just another Twitter wanna be?
I enjoy Threads. I think it's a good intersection of you know, Twitter and Instagram.
It's no, Oh my god, I'm trying to stay away from threads. I don't need anything.
More to do, just with a stroke of genius to literally just take Twitter and make a new platform that it really mirrors exactly what Twitter is. Maybe a couple months from now, it's even better than Twitter ever was. It's possible.
Max. Is interesting that we're talking about people's ambivalence towards social media and spending less time on it because we're in the middle of this big promotional surge and a lot of hype around threads, which is, of course is Facebook's answer to Twitter.
And you can see why Facebook Meta is doing this. I mean they're doing it because Twitter has just been putting rakes in its path and stepping on them in.
The online space.
Metas Instagram has unveiled Threads and op designed to compete with Elon Musk's Twitter. Red's currently ranked number one among free apps on the Apple Store. But will the new platform succeed in knocking the Bluebird off of its perch.
There's a track record here.
Zuckerberg has basically, for the last ten years looked out at the universe of other apps and tried to copy them, and most of the time he's been pretty unsuccessful, but there have been a few exceptions. And as you said, the first couple of days of Threads were really amazing. It is the fastest growing app ever in the sense that in just a few days, I think five days,
they had one hundred million users. Now I think there are reasons to not get too excited about that, And when you look at the way the stock has performed, which is like it hasn't really moved very much, you can sort of see this part of it is that number one, it's a standalone product, but it's taking the Instagram algorithm and the Instagram user base and essentially pouring them over to another app. So that might kill Twitter maybe, although I'm kind of skeptical of that. But it doesn't
necessarily create a ton of new value for Facebook. It just becomes a different way to consume Instagram.
For people who aren't familiar with Threads. Tell us exactly what it is like, how it's like Twitter, how it's not like Twitter.
Threads is basically exactly like Twitter in almost every way.
But I'd say two important differences in Threads. One is there is no chronological feed in Threads right now. Threads is all algorithm. In other words, you can follow people on Threads and those people will be in your feed, but you're also going to see like a lot of influencers, celebrities, brands, kind of what you see in TikTok or if you've used Instagram in the last year, what you see on Instagram.
It's not really a way to consume content from your friends as much as a way to consume content from content creators. The other thing, and this is I think the most important thing, is unlike Twitter, which when you sign up for you give them your email and you create a password and so on, with Threads, you just go to Instagram and click a button and it basically takes your Instagram account and moves it over to this
other app. And if you look at it, and it's really just like Instagram without the pictures, for better or worse. But again, it isn't as much as standalone app as it is another version of an app you already know,
and that could be good, could be bad. It definitely creates a situation where the best case scenario is Facebook controls yet another part of the social media ecosystem, right where Facebook already has WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and then they potentially have like another one of the big apps to consume and create content.
Why do you think there's been such a huge number of people moving to threads?
Well, two things.
One is that Twitter has been really bad, especially if you've been a longtime Twitter user as I have.
I mean, you really notice it.
The bunch of decisions, some of which have to do with the technical performance of the app, which is not good.
Twitter's offices set to reopen Monday after a mass exodus of workers forced a shutdown last Week's sources also say Elon Musk is considering firing more employees, this time targeting the sales and partnership side of the business.
Turns out when you fire almost everybody, things start to break. But also Elon Musk's decision to prioritize this weirdo right wing corner of the Internet that he is obviously like a personal fan of, but it doesn't necessarily have a
much broader audience. So like you went from seeing well known actors and politicians and journalists and writers, and now you're seeing basically in your feed a lot of Elon Musk's friends and these weird right wing meme accounts, like there's one called cat Turd, which is like, if you're on Twitter, you know what it is, and if you're not, congratulations, you're doing better than me.
So Twitter has gotten worse.
And the other thing is Facebook made it really easy, and they are all of these digital enticements inside of Instagram that urge you to go in that direction, one of which is if you go into the app and you click on somebody's profile, you'll see very prominent link to look at their threads. If you didn't have threads, you start getting alerts saying so and so is on threads and posting.
And then once you're on there, once you click.
The button, even before you've done anything, you start getting all of these notifications as people follow you. And this is a really important thing because once you create a threads account, you basically are encouraged to auto follow everybody who already follow on Instagram. So you immediately basically send three hundred pings to your friends, and those create a sense of wow.
There's a lot happening here.
I kept getting alerts over the weekend that it launched from people who are following me. You click, you're like, wow, this person's on Threads. You click on it, and it's just an empty page. And they're all empty pages because a lot of people haven't actually posted anything, but they're all these alerts. Mark Zuckerberg gets a lot of criticism, but he is very good at marketing and growing a technological product. And we saw this ten years ago as
Facebook started to run into these growth challenges. So you could see Threads as a way to address some of the issues that are already going on on Instagram, where you're sort of seeing a drop off on engagement, a drop off and sharing. They're trying to compete with TikTok, but it's not quite happening. The performance of Reels, which is their TikTok like product, it just is not doing
nearly as well as TikTok itself. So I think that the game here for Instagram is to hopefully find a way to get people to re engage with this product and give them a reason to contribute to not just consume content, but also create content. It's not clear that that's happening or that that will happen.
Though there's been a lot of people writing that Threads could be the Twitter killer, and whether or not that's true. But one thing that you write is that even though a lot of people are signing up for Threads, a lot of other people just aren't looking for yet another social media platform to replace Twitter or anything else. They kind of just don't want to spend that much time on social media at all.
We've seen over the last nine months since Elon Musk took over the company, just this collection of Twitter killers that is just the last one. There's this thing called Mastodon, There's Blue Sky, There's Post, there's substack notes, discord. There have been a lot of efforts to create Twitter killers.
And some of them have done okay.
But I think there's really a possibility that there is no Twitter killer, that there's no next Twitter, the next Twitter is nothing, and that this just becomes something that slowly is phased out of people's media diets if they stop using Twitter itself, which if this trend, which is the decline in screen time or the lack of growth and screen time, continues, you're gonna need to see some apps fall by the wayside, and Twitter maybe one of them.
There is this perception among a lot of people because Twitter gets so much attention and because politicians, companies, everybody uses it, that it gets echoed in news stories in other places that even if you're not on Twitter, you wind up seeing tweets. Gives you this impression that it's really really huge. But by social media platform standards, Twitter has actually always been kind of small and niche.
It's big, but it doesn't have anywhere near the scale of Facebook. And as you said, it's always been this app that kind of over indexes in media and in news and in politics. And you can sort of see why that is. It's like a word based platform. It's a great way to broadcast an announcement or something like that. Remember, in twenty twenty one, Twitter and the other social media companies ban Donald Trump. This was after January sixth, Trump had been seen as inciting the insurrection.
There was a sense they'd kind of been itching to do it for a while. Well, all the platforms.
Banned him, including Twitter, and it was seen as this watershed moment. Politically, Trump's appeal to a lot of people was so tied up in his ability to grab the news cycle, and there was a lot of inkspilled about this is going to permanently weaken Trump, It's going to
permanently change the course of social media. And then Elon Musk bought the company and one of the first things he did was let Trump back on right and there was a whole that was a big controversy too, And a surprising thing happened, which is Donald Trump, despite having seemed totally and utterly addicted to Twitter before he had been banned, has managed not to go back since the band was lifted. But it's also surprising because Trump is
leading the Republican polls by huge margin. It turns out Trump doesn't need Twitter, and maybe no one needs Twitter in the sense of as a way to access that part of the media ecosystem. It really does feel like it no longer has the importance that it once had, partly I think because of Elon and partly because there
have been shifts in the media landscape. To be fair to Elon Musk, Twitter was in a weakening position even before Elon Musk bought it, but as part of the acquisition, they've loaded up on a bunch of debt he's alienated a bunch of key partners, and then you have this competitor with very deep pockets and competence, and so obviously it could be a big thread. I think the idea that Twitter would just go away, that's probably not going to happen.
You went to Meta and asked them about threads. What did they say?
So? Facebook didn't comment to me directly, but the head of Instagram who's overseeing threads, has been very upfront about the shortcomings of this. What they're saying is, look, it's early days. We understand like we're working on and make it better. They are very clear that this is an early product. Of course, they're very excited about the massive user growth. What they're saying is that we're not trying to be like Twitter.
And of course he also went to Twitter. Where did they have to say?
Twitter's press account sent me a picture of a poop emoji.
That was their actual response.
Twitter has set their press department, insofar as they have a press department, to respond every email with the poop emji, which I think says a lot about how they view the press and how seriously they take their position in the news ecosystem.
After the break, So what does the future of social media look like.
I used to love Twitter. I did a bunch of university projects on Twitter. It was like the reliable source of information in a lot of ways. And because it's such a controversy, I can't really trust the funnel of information as much.
How Musk has taken away jobs from people, and how he's trying to make the platform more subscription based. It is not really like something that's for the people. So I support threats as it's free.
One of the big things for me as a person of color was the fact that as soon as he took over, hate speech and things like that ticked up a lot because he's pulled back on a lot of the restrictions max.
One way that Threads is very different from Twitter is that they are explicitly trying to stay out of politics and stay out of controversy. Whereas Twitter, of course is a giant stew of.
It, Threads is doing a couple of things, one of which is the algorithmic feed which I mentioned, which steers you towards influencers, creators, brands, and so it tells you a lot about what they're trying to do. They're trying to make a place that feels safe both for people to spend time without being delused with controversial or upsetting or outrage provoking stuff, and I think, more importantly from the point of view of meta Mark Zuckerberg, it's a
platform that advertisers will feel comfortable with. And then the other thing that Threads has said, which is they are not going to prioritize news or politics.
There was a.
Time five years ago or so where Facebook was talking a lot about its place in the news ecosystem. They were like courting media companies, they were investing in journalism. They wanted Facebook to kind of be at the center of the news ecosystem. And that's all gone. They're not going to do that because that they view as fraught from a regulatory and brand perspective, and also it's controversial, and you know, they don't want to have any controversy.
They want this to be a relatively benign, almost sterile environment, which of course is great for advertising.
But it's exactly the opposite of what people were on Twitter for. So you can imagine that some number of the people who are coming over to Threads looking for a new home because they're no longer happy with Twitter, we'll look in there and say, hey, where's all the real conversation.
As somebody who has been a Twitter addict and who's also just totally aware of the shortcomings of the platform, it makes you appreciate Twitter a little bit because you go there and you see and this is my own personal experience with Threads, and you see a lot of okay jokes, a lot of posts from brands. It's a
lot like Instagram. It's like the way that people sometimes critique Instagram is this like overly manicured, not that fun, not that interesting place, and Threads is kind of like that in text form.
It definitely doesn't have the free for all quality of Twitter, which should buy design.
One thing that you mentioned was that TikTok is really the breakaway success in the middle of this era of declining overall interests in social media. Why is TikTok so successful where others are having more of a hard time.
TikTok is sort of perfectly pitched to these headwinds that we've been talking about four years. People have not been sharing as much, right, and that was a huge problem for Facebook because your feed is composed of your friends, and if your friends decide, either because they've read too many stories about camerge analytica, or that it's just TACKI or whatever, that they're not going to post every family picture, they're not going to post every vacation, they're not going
to tell you what they had for breakfast today. All of a sudden, the feed is empty and you have to do something about that. And TikTok doesn't have that problem because although you can create content in TikTok, and although there's the same kind of friend follower mechanism, the core of TikTok is the algorithm, which is it's not about your friends, it's about your interests, and it's just TikTok serving you up a steady stream of funny, amusing
videos that are tuned to your interests. In other words, it's an experience that's much closer to television than it is to social media.
And I think it's telling that the big.
Social media breakout of the last decade isn't really a social media company. And when we're seeing how Facebook, the dominant social media company, is trying to adapt, they're trying to do the exact same thing. I mean, this is how a lot of Instagram works now, and it's how Threads works. If you go on Threads and you follow people, you'll see their messages. But eventually you exhaust that and then you get back to the brand managers and the
brands and the YouTubers. Sometimes it's amusing and sometimes it's Internet drek, it's stuff on Reddit that was there three months ago or whatever.
Because they're going to feed you something. They're not going to say, salary, we're all out for.
Today, exactly.
No, there's no being all out for today because again, these platforms are dependent both in how they're structured and what they've told investors on growing. That's why we're seeing basically all of these companies move towards these algorithmic feeds that are really like less social than what we normally thought of as social media.
So Max, like you say, you've been covering this industry and watching the changes for twenty years. Now, where's this all heading? Where do you see it going?
I mean, I think we've sort of hit the high water mark of the cultural relevance of social media. That doesn't mean that social media is going away, or that there isn't room for innovation, or or that Silicon i couldn't come up with some new way of drawing us in. And I think if you ask, why is Mark Zuckerberg. Mark zacker is a really smart guy, why does he keep spending moce He's spending money on the metaverse even
though it's obviously kind of not working. I think because they're hoping that there'll be some technological breakthrough that will change the equation. And I think some of this is pinned on hardware. It's like maybe the headsets that's somewhere down the road will get good enough so that the prospect of strapping Facebook to your face as I described it,
doesn't feel so unappealing. And I don't think we should overlook the possibility that these very smart people, these very big companies, with almost unlimited amounts of money to spend on research and development, that they won't figure something out. But I think for now we're just not going to see the growth, and that creates all sorts of challenges for the companies and then for other businesses people that
depend on those companies. And we're seeing that now where news organizations are really really struggling to figure out how to attract readers, how to find an audience. Now that you don't don't have this dependable stream of social media, and you see that in entertainment.
You see that a lot of the media industry.
So I think we're still working our way through that period. It probably won't end until there's some new breakthrough or there's some sort of cultural shift.
Max. It's always great to talk to you. Thanks for coming back, thanks for having me, Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Ergolino. Our senior
producer is Catherine Fink. Rebecca Shasson is our producer. Our associate producer is Sam Gobauer. Rafael m Seely is our engineer, with additional production support from Nieli Haremio Plata, Abrea Rofin and Isabelle Webcarey. Our original music was composed by Lee Ocidron. I'm Westkasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another big take,