Special Episode: Meta’s Twitter Rival Arrives, with Adam Mosseri

Instagram is no stranger to taking product ideas from other companies and turning them into their own successes. Just ask Snapchat about Instagram Stories or TikTok about Instagram Reels. This time, the company is coming for Twitter with Instagram Threads. Today, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, on why the company now wants to take on Twitter.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:35Casey Newton?

  You know, pretty soon I'll be posting threats, which is what I'm calling thread posts. And we'll see if people like those, too.

• 0:40Kevin Roose?

  Somehow I don't think that that thing is going to catch on. Threats is not what I would have called it. Let's think of some other words. What should it be called?

• 0:47Casey Newton?

  Wait, I'm loading up thesaurus.com. Hold on. So we have attires, costumes, duds.

• 0:55Kevin Roose?

  Duds, I like duds.

• 0:58Kevin Roose?

  Hey, did you see my new dud?

• 1:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it was, your dud was a flop, unfortunately.

• 1:03Kevin Roose?

  I can't believe you didn't re-dud it.

• 1:05Casey Newton?

  Cool duds, man.

• 1:12Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Russett, head columnist at The New York Times.

• 1:14Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 1:16Kevin Roose?

  And you're listening to a special edition of Hard Fork.

• 1:19Casey Newton?

  That's right, Kevin. Because this week, Instagram head Adam Misari stops by to talk to us about the launch of the company's new Twitter competitor, Threads.

• 1:38Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, as we said on the show last week, we are officially on vacation this week. This is not an episode that we saw coming or expected to make. And I was actually literally on the beach with my family when I got the ping on my Apple Watch from you telling me that we had a very special opportunity this week to interview Adam Misari, who is the head of Instagram, about this new app called Threads. So tell me, what is it about this story and this new app that made you think, you know what? Kevin doesn't need to be on vacation this week.

• 2:11Casey Newton?

  Well, first of all, I never think you should be on vacation. I always think you should be with me, helping to enjoy that week's news. And look, in America, we do believe in vacation, but we also believe that taking vacation is a moral failure. So I think it's only appropriate that on this 4th of July week, we celebrate our nation's heritage by coming in on our days off to have what turns out to be, I think, a really interesting conversation. But you know, Kevin, one of the big stories that we've been tracking since we started this show was the sea change in social networks, right? A world that felt very stable, ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, has felt very unsettled. And the one shoe left to drop was would Meta, the biggest player in the space, would they

• 2:50Casey Newton?

  try to seize this opportunity and see if they could finally get rid of this competitor that has just annoyed them for over a decade? And, you know, to be candid with you, I messaged Adam Mosseri in December and said, would you please just build a working Twitter clone? I was kind of in a desperate state. I didn't care who built, I just wanted something that I knew would work and that would be managed in a really straightforward way. And so when I found out it was actually going to happen, and that we had an opportunity to talk to Adam Mosseri, who's been at Instagram for a long time and who has overseen this project for Meta, I thought, we just gotta hop on the mics and hear all about it.

• 3:32Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's not every day that a new social network comes out, especially not one by Meta, which is sort of the king of social networks. And, you know, this is something that has been rumored for months, that Instagram was kind of working on an app like Twitter to sort of take advantage of perceived weakness at Twitter. But this is really the first time that we've been able to ask them directly how it will be similar to Twitter and how it will be different. And it seems like one of the big differences is decentralization. So unlike Twitter, and also unlike Facebook and Instagram, Threads is going to be decentralized. So Casey, what does that mean?

• 4:09Casey Newton?

  Well, it means that eventually it is going to work with other social networks. So Mastodon is the big one. Both Mastodon and Threads are built on something called Activity Pub, and that is a protocol that anyone can build on. And so in the future, it will be possible for you to look at Mastodon posts on Threads and look at Thread posts on Mastodon. That will also be true of whatever else might get built on Activity Pub. So why does that matter? Well, it just means that Meta, for the first time in its history, is giving up a lot of control. It's saying, you know, we're going to open up our doors. We're eventually going to even let you take your entire following off of Threads to some other social network if you would like to. So as reporters who've been covering this company for a long time,

• 4:53Casey Newton?

  it's hard to overstate what a sea change that is philosophically for them.

• 4:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I think it could actually work. I mean, one thing that has always kept me from wanting to join a new Twitter clone like Blue Sky or Mastodon, even though I am on both of those, is that you have to start from zero, right? No matter who you are, no matter how many followers you have spent years and years amassing, you join a new platform, that counter goes right back to zero. With Instagram Threads, that is not a problem because you can take your followers, as I understand it, over from Instagram to Threads. It's going to be very easy for people to just sort of connect their accounts and follow all the same people on Threads that they do on Instagram. And so I think if you are a celebrity or an elite journalist or someone else who has a lot of followers on Instagram,

• 5:41Kevin Roose?

  you are going to be very excited about not having to start totally from scratch.

• 5:45Casey Newton?

  Well, now, Kevin, here's where I actually do have a confession for you. Because do you know what happened to me about an hour ago?

• 5:52Kevin Roose?

  What happened?

• 5:52Casey Newton?

  I got access to the Threads app.

• 5:56Kevin Roose?

  Lucky you. How is it?

• 5:57Casey Newton?

  Well, I've been having a pretty good time out there, hanging out with all my Thread heads. That's what I'm calling them. It's pretty wild to just be able to view however many posts you want to look at on a social network without being rate limited. You know, some people said that infinite posts were a zero-interest rates phenomenon, but on Threads, it's like we're back in 2020, baby.

• 6:17Kevin Roose?

  But how is Cat Turd 2 doing on Threads? Has he made an appearance yet? Has he reached 100,000 followers?

• 6:25Casey Newton?

  I have not seen Cat Turd 2 over on the Threads app. In fact, so far, particularly when I got on, it really was just kind of a handpicked crew of mostly just celebrities and very famous Instagram users. And also some brands. So it was, you know, like Netflix was on there telling jokes. And, you know, The Hollywood Reporter was posting some stories. Mark Cuban was talking about what a, what a nice community it seemed like Threads have. Of course, it's easy to have a nice community when there's only maybe 2,500 people on the entire app. But, you know, look, when you open this thing, you're going to say like, yeah, that looks like kind of a beta version of Twitter with maybe some slightly nicer user interfaces. But Kevin, here's the key difference. What if it turns out that this is the only difference

• 7:10Casey Newton?

  you need to take an app no one has heard of before today and turn it into a success? Maybe the only thing you need is for it to not be run by Elon Musk. And that is actually the test that we're about to go through.

• 7:20Kevin Roose?

  You know, they should just make that the tagline in the App Store. Like, like if Twitter was not run by Elon. So it's been reported that among the people that Instagram has been trying to get over onto Threads are Oprah and the Dalai Lama. And I would just like to say that I think our posts would be better than either Oprah's or the Dalai Lama's. And so I'm a little offended that they didn't try to get us in there first.

• 7:44Casey Newton?

  Well, now, Kevin, we're trying to get both Oprah and the Dalai Lama to come on Hard Fork. So don't say anything too critical of them, okay? Because we still want them to return the email. But, um, look, they've successfully recruited me over there. That was a huge win for them. And then, you know, maybe they'll be able to get you too. And then we'll be in good shape.

• 8:02Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, our conversation with Instagram's Adam Misery.

• 8:15Speaker 00

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• 9:57Casey Newton?

  Adam Mosseri, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 10:00Casey Newton?

  So, Adam, you know, several months ago, when things started to go awry on Twitter, I sent you a message and I said, please, please, please, would you consider just building a place where I could type my little sentences and have a good time? And fast forward to today, and it seems like you've actually done that. So I guess the first thing I need to say is, um, thank you for that.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, you get credit. You get 100% of the credit, Casey.

• 10:26Casey Newton?

  Now, obviously, lots of people were asking you to do this, but I think at the time you said, look, I'm torn. Like, there are reasons to do this, there are reasons not to do this. So like, what, what were you sort of weighing at the time? And what kicked you over into like, okay, yeah, let's make threads?

• 10:40Speaker 04

  I will answer that question, but I actually do want to give you a little bit of credit. Lots of people have pushed, but you pushed earlier and more consistently than anybody. So you do, you do get more credit than you give yourself.

• 10:49Casey Newton?

  Newton gets results. Yes.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  He does, he does. Look, I think that whenever you're launching a new app, it's a big risk, right? Every new app is much less likely to succeed than to succeed. And we know that, and so we want to go in eyes wide open whenever we're doing anything like this. But just given how much demand there seemed to be for alternatives, and given how vibrant and really amazing the creator community specifically is on Instagram, we thought there might be an opportunity to do something in the space of public conversations, of public discourse, more focused on the communities that use and love Instagram. And we debated, you know, just building text into Instagram feed. We debated having a separate tab inside the Instagram app.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  And then obviously the option of having a separate app entirely. And we settled on the most risky of the three, but you gotta take some swings. And I'm excited about it. We'll see how it goes.

• 11:49Kevin Roose?

  Now, what, what does it look like, actually? When you opened the app, how similar is it to the existing interface of Twitter, or Blue Sky, or Mastodon, or any of these other text-based social networks? What will users actually see when they open up Threads for the first time?

• 12:06Speaker 04

  It's similar. One of the funny things is in these few days of testing with a limited number of people, people have been really hesitant to say the name Twitter in the app. And I keep replying to people, like, you can say. Twitter, it's okay. Like, they, all the credit to where it's due. I mean, they pioneered the format. But there are a lot of people playing in the space now, which made us think that there was sort of demand for alternatives. It's similar. The main tab is a feed, the next tab is search, the third tab is like Instagram, it's the composer, it's where you actually write or start a thread, then your activity, and then your profile.

• 12:40Kevin Roose?

  One thing that we know is when you start a new text-based social network, you have to come up with some silly sounding word for a post, like on Mastodon, I think it's a toot, and on Blue Sky, it's a skeet. So what is a Threads post called?

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Just a thread, just a thread.

• 12:55Casey Newton?

  I think in sort of keeping with like the toot, the tweet, the skeet, a thread post should be called threats. So that's my vote.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Stitches has been the most popular one that has bubbled up. There's a lot of puns right now in the app. The punage is like way over the top. But Stitch is the most popular one I've seen so far.

• 13:13Casey Newton?

  So when you log into Threads, you use your Instagram handle and you can import anyone you're following on Instagram that is on Threads, you can sort of automatically follow them. But like, what would you say is the relationship between these two things, both today and maybe how you see it in a year or two from now?

• 13:29Speaker 04

  My hope is that they're complementary. I think that there are going to be communities of people on Instagram for whom Instagram is absolutely sufficient, right? You know, that you don't need any more features. We've got a lot of features in Instagram right now. But there are going to be then other communities who really want to engage in, you know, public discourse, right? You're going to debate what's going on in the playoffs. You want to talk about Pharrell's, you know, debut show as the men's director of Louis Vuitton, whatever it is. And if you want to be engaging in those types of public conversations or be part of the audience for those, Threads is going to be fundamentally a better place. The post and comment model, which is how, you know, YouTube works and Facebook works

• 14:14Speaker 04

  and Instagram works, is great, but it really does not support public discourse nearly as well as the sort of tweet and reply model. Elevating the reply to essentially the same level as the initial post allows for much more sort of robust, diverse discourse, which is part of the reasons why we didn't try to just shove this thing into either feed on Instagram or a separate tab.

• 14:39Casey Newton?

  So I think one of the most surprising things about Threads is that it is decentralized. This stuff gets pretty confusing, but it's also maybe the most unusual thing about this. So Adam, what does it mean that Threads is decentralized?

• 14:55Speaker 04

  The technical meaning is that it's built on the Activity Pub Protocol, which is a technology that's behind all of the Mastodon servers and apps. What that means is there are a bunch of different apps or social networks that can all integrate. And so you'll be able to actually follow people who don't even use Threads, but use these other apps from Threads. And you'll be able to actually follow people and their content from Threads without even using that app and using other apps like Mastodon. And I do think that decentralization, but more specifically or more broadly, more open systems are where the industry is getting pulled and it's going to go over time.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  And for us, a new app offers us an opportunity to meaningfully participate in that space in the way it would be very difficult for us to port an incredibly large app like Instagram over. And so to lean into where the industry is going to learn. It's been very humbling speaking to a bunch of people in the community who look at us unsurprisingly with a lot of skepticism. But I do think it's going to be fundamentally good. And I do think it's going to translate into not philosophical, but meaningful things for creators over the long run. Like, you should be able to take your audience, if you build up an audience on Threads, and if you decide to leave Threads, take your audience with you. And theoretically, over time, we should be able to support use cases like that

• 16:22Speaker 04

  that really empower creators and I think lean into what creators are going to demand and expect over time.

• 16:29Casey Newton?

  Sure. Well, so you're telling me what I want to hear, right? As like, you know, arguably a creator. Yeah, I would love to have my audience be portable. I think I'm still struggling to understand why it's good for you, right? Instagram is a centralized social network and it makes a lot of money. You have a lot of control. You can sort of just build it exactly to your liking. Now you're sort of opening up the doors and saying, "We're tying ourselves to a protocol that, you know, might not always evolve in the direction that we want it to." So where did this idea come from to decentralize? And how are you thinking about those trade-offs?

• 17:02Speaker 04

  There definitely are trade offs. You're giving up some control, but there are benefits. I do think over time, it's going to be a more compelling value proposition that other apps aren't going to offer. And I think that should attract more creative talent over the long run. Obviously, I don't think a large percentage of creators are interested in this, specifically decentralized technology today, but more and more are. And they're definitely interested in things like owning their audience. We also get some benefits. If there are other apps that are really large that use the same protocol, you'll be able to follow content from those servers in our app. And so, you know, it is a give and take. But yeah, you are giving up some control. It's not absolute control. So for instance, you can build other things into the app that the Activity Pub protocol does not support,

• 17:47Speaker 04

  and they'll just be limited to the app. So you don't have to limit the things you build to things that the protocol has already designed for. But obviously, you won't benefit from all, any of the decentralized opportunities if you do that.

• 18:00Kevin Roose?

  Do you think the decentralization piece of this is actually critical to making it work or not? And I ask that because I've spent a lot of time on, you know, Blue Sky, which is the sort of the social alternative to Twitter right now, the sort of leader in that space. And one thing that a lot of people on Blue Sky talk about is the fact that they don't really care about any of this decentralization stuff. They just want a place to go that works like Twitter, but is not owned by Elon Musk. So do you think that the decentralization piece of this actually will result in a better user experience? Or is it just kind of like a bone to maybe throw the company's critics, people who say, I don't want to use another app owned by Meta. I'm wary of what they're going to do with my data, or I'm worried about some of the sort of privacy considerations there. Like, is the decentralization piece

• 18:43Kevin Roose?

  actually going to move the needle for adoption on threads?

• 18:46Speaker 04

  I don't think it's going to move the adoption in the short term, but I do think it's going to move the adoption in the long term. I sure hope so, because it's a ton of work. And if it doesn't, then it certainly was time poorly spent. Supporting a decentralized protocol, you know, with all the different things that we do, you know, reporting flows, classifying things, ranking content, is actually a ton of work. It's one of the reasons why it's taken much longer than I wanted to get this thing out the door. And we're still actually supporting Activity Pub protocol at launch. Hopefully, we're fast following with that. So yeah, I believe it'll move the needle over the long run. But I think You know, in the immediate future, this week, there's going to be a bunch of attention because it's Instagram and it's a competitive space. You know, the headlines are easy to

• 19:31Speaker 04

  write and we're going to have a bunch of users and then a bunch of them are going to leave because that's how this always goes. And then we're going to have to slowly build ourselves back up. And to me, this is in the column of things that are, I think, going to be meaningful over the next two years or three years or four years. I don't think it's going to meaningfully change what usage of the app looks like over the next two or three months.

• 19:54Casey Newton?

  I want to understand how you're going to make money from threads over the long term. Is it as simple as you just put ads in the feed?

• 20:01Speaker 04

  That's the most likely direction, but honestly, we're not focused on it at all right now. That would be such a champagne problem to have that we had so many users and they were using the app so much that the revenue opportunity was something that, you know, we would have to focus on. Right now, I just want to make something that people love and they use. It's not nearly as hard to get a bunch of people to try something as it is to build something that a bunch of people want to keep using over time. So that's really the focus of the team. I don't want to mislead anyone. We believe in ads. We think they are a way to offer free service worldwide. We think it's a good thing, but right now it's just not the focus at all for the app. I think that would be the definition of a champagne problem.

• 20:43Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of getting a lot of people to use the app, it looks like Threads isn't going to launch in the EU right away. What's going on with that?

• 20:51Speaker 04

  There are complexities with complying to laws coming out in 2024. And we want to make sure not only that are we complying with the laws that are coming out, but that we can also credibly explain how we are complying in ways that meet our standards of documentation and testing. And that's just going to take a while, unfortunately. And I'm particularly frustrated on this point because I've been living outside of the US for a year now. I've been on a total kick with my teams about stop launching things only in a couple of countries and not in other countries. I meet creators who ask me things like, do I need to move to the US to get access to such and such feature? And it breaks my heart. But in this case,

• 21:32Speaker 04

  It was either wait on the EU or delay the launch by many, many, many months. And I was worried that our window would close because timing is important.

• 21:43Kevin Roose?

  And the specific rub there, as I understand it, right, is that the EU's regulations require some sort of fine-grained disclosures about data sharing between apps and like how much threads data can be shared back with Instagram and with Meta. Is that roughly right or what is the specific holdup there?

• 22:01Speaker 04

  It's not just disclosures and consent. It's also verifying that there's no data leakage. You have to put in place processes and technology that all but guarantee that anything you say, you can verify in usually multiple ways. And so you have to design that system. You have to build that system. You have to build the testing of that system and you have to figure out how to communicate that system. And we're just under an immense amount of scrutiny. And you know, anytime we make a mistake, even if it was innocuous, even if there's no one harmed, but if we said something and we didn't deliver on it, we get hit hard either by the media or by regulators with fines. And so it's just the liability is too great.

• 22:45Kevin Roose?

  Adam, I want to take a step back and just talk about sort of the overall arch of Meta's efforts in social media over the past few years. It seems like at a corporate level, you all have been trying to get away from sort of hard news and political controversy. You know, this is the type of content that has been sort of demoted in, for example, the Facebook news feed. It's much harder to find sort of divisive political content there. Instagram was never really sort of the first place that people went to have their political arguments and rants, but it has that, some of that content there too. But it really seems like the company has been trying to shift away from hard news and politics and into sort of lighter entertainment fare. This seems like a step in the other direction.

• 23:29Kevin Roose?

  Twitter is sort of famously a battleground for fractious political debate and controversy. Why would you want to bring more of that onto your platform and your company's products?

• 23:40Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't, I don't want to be really clear. And I want to recognize that the irony of saying this to reporters while being recorded. But no, I don't want to lean into hard news at all. I don't. Think that there's much that we can or should do to discourage it on Instagram or in Threads, but I don't think we'll do anything to encourage it. Obviously, there's news on Instagram, there's news on Facebook. I think there's more news on Facebook and more news on Twitter than there's on Instagram as a percentage is my guess, but we are less designed for that. Threads, by being, I think, more supportive of public discourse, I think is going to be appealing to some people in that world and in that industry and in that vertical, and that's inevitable. But no, that's not at all the hope.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  The hope is to focus on the verticals that are already strong on Instagram. Things like sports and music and fashion and beauty and design and art. Actually, one of the interesting things I've found, I had so much photographers in the app right now, and they're really excited. And I was trying to be really nice about this, but I was like, why? Like, I'm excited you're here too, but like, really, seriously, like, why? And they're like, almost all of said the same thing, which is like, look, we're not here to like, share a photography. We're here to talk to other photographers about photography. We also want to have conversations about what we do. So my hope is that's where our strength is, but I recognize that we cannot control who

• 25:09Speaker 04

  uses the app and we will end up with hard news and political reporters too.

• 25:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and I mean, I think if it succeeds, it's going to be in part because news junkies love it, right? Like, this is the reason why myself and other people wanted you to build this, was like, the news junkies are just desperate for a place to write their little sentences, so.

• 25:27Kevin Roose?

  Adam, you can't see this on the podcast, but Adam is furiously waving his hands in like a stop motion.

• 25:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and I miss having an aneurysm right now.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  There's room for multiple text-based social networks in the industry. Twitter is an amazing product with a long history of supporting that use case phenomenally well.

• 25:44Casey Newton?

  The headline, the title for this episode is going to be Twitter is an amazing product. So, actually, though, speaking of, speaking of the news and links, Adam, let's talk about the content moderation. And this gets back to the decentralization piece, right? Because one of the fears of a decentralized social network is it just becomes harder to police what's on it, right? Like, if eventually Threads is interoperable with Mastodon or something else that's built on Activity Pub, maybe people are putting stuff there that you would never permit under the Instagram community guidelines. So, I guess my, like, sort of two questions there. One is just like, how is content moderated on Threads in general? Like, does it fall under Instagram's guidelines? And then, how is that going to evolve once you start plugging this thing into other apps?

• 26:23Speaker 04

  So the community guidelines are the same for threads as they are for Instagram. There's an immense amount of benefit there because we can bring the systems that we've already built and extend them to a new app. And that allows us to keep a lot of people much safer, much more easily than having to spin up a whole bunch of new policies and implementations and enforcement. It will also apply to content that you can pull in from other servers. But it's important to note that the Activity Pub Protocol sort of leaves space for this. They are very clear, and if you talk to the community, that different servers should have different policies and different guidelines and should be allowed to enforce those. And so, yes, you can pull content from another server into your app, but then you can also

• 27:06Speaker 04

  decide not to show it or to block it in your app if it violates your policies without blocking that content on the server from which it originated.

• 27:16Casey Newton?

  So how many posts are people going to be able to look at per day for free on threads?

• 27:21Speaker 04

  We have no limits, no limits in the number of posts per day, for free.

• 27:26Casey Newton?

  Wait, wait, I could read 700, 800 posts. You're not going to have one word to say about it.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  I mean, thank you. I'll send you a nice thank you emoji. I use the thank you emoji a lot.

• 27:35Kevin Roose?

  Adam, I have not played around with threads yet. I am not in the sort of beta testers group that already has access to the app. So I just want to know, like, to what degree is this going to look exactly like Twitter if I open it up? Are there multiple content formats supported? What is the character limit? Like, what does this thing do that Twitter does not? And what does Twitter support that threads does not right now? What are the big differences?

• 27:58Casey Newton?

  I love this nerd. What's the character limit, Adam?

• 28:00Speaker 04

  500. Next question.

• 28:02Casey Newton?

  Okay, there we go.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  It feels like a... It's simpler than Twitter. I mean, Twitter's evolved over the years. I actually think that's good. I was actually really excited when they started to place some bets and take some swings with some new features over the last couple of years. But right now, it's just a very simple, clean app. It loads very quickly on Android and on iOS. There are text posts. You can attach what you'd expect to be able to attach, photos or videos. It does not have an inbox, so it does not have spaces. It does not have a communities tab. It doesn't have, you know, a bunch of new features that the Twitter app has. It's just your feed of text first, then media attached, search, which only supports username search. You can't even search posts content yet.

• 28:49Speaker 04

  The composer itself, we love the idea of creativity being at the center of the app. We think that what we try to do at Instagram is inspire creativity that brings people together. And that's true for threads too. It's just about conversation specifically. So it's the center of the app, you know, activity or notifications, depending on what name you prefer. And then your profile, it's really light, really simple, really clean.

• 29:12Casey Newton?

  I feel like these apps sort of live and die in part based on like, what is the vibe? Like something I've observed is on Mastodon, the vibe is very, very serious. On Blue Sky, the vibe is very silly. I don't think there's one technical feature of either app that explains either of those things. But I much prefer spending time on Blue Sky because it seems like people are having fun there. Do you feel like you have any levers that you can pull to try to make threads a fun place to hang out?

• 29:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, our hope is to create a friendly place to hang out. There's a number of different things. We're bringing over a bunch of good tools we already have on Instagram, trying to raise more awareness of them. Hidden words and restrict are incredibly powerful if you use them properly. And they're unique to us in a lot of different ways. Obviously, we have other standard controls like mention and reply controls. I mean, this beta period right now is really trying to seed the experience with a bunch of people who are excited about the idea. And I'm hoping that they can help set the tone for the larger community. We'll see how that goes. Obviously, we can't control the larger community, but right now it's, it's just very friendly in there. Now we'll see what it looks like when the gates blow open and anyone and everyone can, can join. But the vibes are good in there right now.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  So we will see if we can maintain that over time.

• 30:25Kevin Roose?

  Adam, I have sort of a meta question for you, no pun intended. And it's about this strategy that Facebook and Instagram have of kind of cloning or borrowing either entire competitor apps or features from competitors' apps. Some of these cloning attempts have been successful. I'm thinking about Instagram reels and stories, but there are also a lot of attempts that have not worked. Some examples that come to mind, including these attempted clones of Nextdoor and Cameo and a bunch of different dating apps. Those have not worked out and become sort of huge standalone apps. So when you all are thinking about whether or not to clone a competitor's app or a feature within an app.

• 31:05Kevin Roose?

  What is the probability that you need to be confident in that it will actually succeed? Does it like have to be 50% likely to work in your mind to make it worth the effort of going through with cloning it?

• 31:18Speaker 04

  I do think there's two different ideas in that question. There is, you know, what does it mean when you borrow the ideas of others? And then there's also, how do you feel about risk taking and the likelihood of success when you place any bet? Whether it's borrowing from others or not. So I'll try to speak to both. I do think it's important to be able to give credit where it's due and to incorporate lessons that others have learned into what you do. Ideally, most of the time, that doesn't look like a clone. That looks like, okay, what are the things that we've learned from what they do? What, why they succeeded? How does apply to what we do? And then how should we evolve forward?

• 32:04Speaker 04

  But sometimes the best way to do that is just to be like, look, stories is clearly a format that everyone is more comfortable sharing in, or most people are more comfortable sharing in than feed. And so we're going to have to support that. And that just, look, Snapchat gets the credit for popularizing that format, but it's everywhere. I mean, it's in Pinterest. It's, you know, I think it was in Twitter for a while, YouTube, like it's just everywhere. It's like saying, you know, feeds, you know, it's like, well, was it Facebook that popularized it first? Was it FriendFeed? Like, you know, we can all debate it, but at this point, like feeds are everywhere. And so for me, Twitter, the thing that I think is really remarkably strong about the design of the experience is this, is the reply model. A lot of the other parts of what make Twitter, Twitter exists in other apps, you know, the following model, text first or text only simplicity,

• 32:49Speaker 04

  short character counts, there's all different versions of these ideas. That reply model, I think, has really, really been something that they should get a ton of credit for. And to me, I tried to figure out a way to squeeze that into the Instagram app. We did as a team and it just didn't work. It was just too confusing.

• 33:03Kevin Roose?

  By reply model, you mean the fact that you can either reply to someone's tweet or quote tweet them? And so their original tweet is sort of included in with yours. Is that?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  No, no, by reply model, I mean that the reply is the same canonical unit as the initial post. It is not subordinate or, you know, secondary in any way. When you comment on something on YouTube or on Facebook, the comment is like this, a secondary piece of content, and the post is the main piece of content. And so the conversation is relegated into the secondary position, into this less prominent place in the app or space, whereas on Twitter and on Mastodon and on Blue Sky, it is the content. The conversation is the content. And that is just a flatter model. And I think it's really good for public discourse. And so we tried to figure out a way to support

• 33:57Speaker 04

  that, to take that lesson, incorporate it into feed. And it just didn't work because we have comments. And you know, you couldn't just like, oh, this is making everything a comment, just didn't make any sense. So it ended up making more sense to build a separate space. And in terms of risk, look, I don't think you think about it on a per project basis. Teams do, obviously, because they usually work on one project. But if you're managing a large team, a large organization, you need to think about, okay, how much stuff do we have that is almost definitely going to work, but the value is probably marginal? How much stuff do we have that is sort of like, medium risk, medium value? And then what are a couple of moonshots? And you kind of think about it as a portfolio. And you want to make sure you're intentional about how you distribute your energy. You don't

• 34:42Speaker 04

  want to have everything be super high beta, and then there'd be a really high chance that everything just goes terribly, and the whole team is demoralized, and you've made no progress this year. But if everything is a sure thing, but probably a small or quick win, you're probably not going to innovate fast enough to keep up with the world as it changes around you. So I think of this quite squarely in the bucket of like, really high risk, but if it succeeds, incredibly valuable and important type of project. It's a small team, a few dozen people. Instagram isn't that big, by the way, but it's, this is still, you know, for us, you know, a smallish team. But if it works, what an amazing thing to be part of. So, you know, let's, let's, let's take a swing and see how it goes.

• 35:26Casey Newton?

  Well, I was gonna ask, you know, you've been at Instagram for a while now. And I wonder sort of like, where would you rank this in terms of swings that you have taken? Does this feel like sort of the longest limb you've ever crawled out on? Or have there been other things that felt just as unlikely when you launched them?

• 35:41Speaker 04

  This is probably, this probably feels like the longest limb.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  I do think the work on Reels always felt very tough. On one hand, like, to be clear, short form video was a huge part of Instagram long before I joined Instagram. And Reels is, I think, just an evolved version of short form video. But TikTok is just such a phenomenally intense while-executing competitor. Just even trying to play in their space at all felt a lot like putting your neck out there. And we had some pretty big misses. We lost nine months because we tried to build it on top of Stories instead of building it into Feed because we didn't want to complicate the app any further. But it turned out most Stories people don't actually view, you know,

• 36:30Speaker 04

  because there's so many more Stories than there's time to view for most people. They view like 10, 15, 20%, whatever it is. And so it wasn't a foundation that was sufficiently strong to build, you know, a really compelling short form video product on top of. But we lost nine months, maybe a year. What does the world look like if we had launched a year earlier and had a really compelling short form video product before COVID-19 hit in March of 2020? I don't know. But yeah, that one also felt, Reels has always felt a little bit like a lot of scrutiny internally as well as externally.

• 37:04Kevin Roose?

  I can imagine.

• 37:07Kevin Roose?

  You're here to talk about Threads and we've talked a lot about that. I want to ask you one question about Twitter because you, I think, are one of the meta/ Facebook/Instagram executives who has most used Twitter. You've been in there for years, mixing it up, and I think are somewhat rare in that regard. What do you make of Twitter since Elon Musk took over? Are you sad? Are you mad? Are you energized? As a longtime user of Twitter, maybe taking off your Instagram hat for a second, what do you think about the changes on the platform in the past year?

• 37:46Speaker 04

  Look, I like Twitter a lot. The things that I don't like about Twitter are 100% of my own making. I decided to try to engage with our biggest critics on Twitter 10 years ago. And so I followed all of them. And so the fact that it was a difficult, dark place for me was 100% a result of the decisions I made about who to follow. But I always enjoyed it.

• 38:07Casey Newton?

  Including me and Kevin.

• 38:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. Oh, yeah, definitely.

• 38:10Kevin Roose?

  Always a mistake to follow us.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd be lying if I never questioned some of my previous decisions on followers. But, but look, I thought it was great. It was so clearly a vibrant community. Well, actually, a couple of different communities lay on top of each other. And one of them is the community of journalists who spend a ton of time there talking about whatever it is that they're passionate about. And it felt right to show up in a space that was really not my territory, but was really, you know, journalist's territory, to talk to journalists about what we were doing at Facebook at the time. And so I always really appreciated that. And, you know, new ownership, new way of operating, there's risks with that, and there's also opportunity with that. You know, you can shake things up. You can break through local maximum.

• 38:55Speaker 04

  You can consider, you know, new ideas that you always should have, that you, for some reason, never did. But then you can also make mistakes. And so, I don't know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't count them out at all. I think there's a lot going in their favor. And history has shown us that network effects are incredibly strong, not only for social networks, but for everything, for like cities, you know, how people work, any groups of people. But I'll be excited to see how they evolve over the next couple of years. I would bet that it looks pretty different in two years than it looks now. What it looks like, I do not know.

• 39:22Casey Newton?

  Last question, Adam, I promise it's really quick. We know that Elon Musk is mad that y'all are launching this app. Should it come to it, are you prepared to fight him in a cage?

• 39:32Speaker 04

  I'm gonna leave that to those guys. That's, that's, that's between those guys. I'm gonna focus on, this is why I really gotta go. I'm gonna focus on getting this thing out the door, making sure that it's fast and works really well. And I'll let them engage on the rest.

• 39:51Casey Newton?

  That sounds good. Adam, thanks so much for coming on Hard Work.

• 39:54Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, thanks, Adam.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  Thank you. Appreciate your time.

• 40:15Speaker 00

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• 42:00Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Land. We're edited by Jen Poyant. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell and Rowan Nemus-Doe. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Quiwing Tam, Naga Logli, Kate LaPresty, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at [email protected].

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