The death of social media

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Facebook may not have been the first social media platform, but I think it’ll be the last (well, Meta).

Zuck announced last week on Threads that the platform recently surpassed 400M MAU.

Threads is the Twitter clone that Meta launched shortly after Elon bought the company and rebranded it to X. Just two years later and the 400M MAU milestone is pretty impressive given that X turns 20 next year and claims just 600M MAU.

I’ve inadvertently been spending more time on Threads myself. They recently began inter-stitching popular threads directly into users' Instagram feeds… and it works.

Here I am mindlessly scrolling through surf videos, houses I can’t afford in Malibu, and ex-hookups from college who suddenly have 3 kids… then I get hit with this.

Meta has a detailed history of every piece of content you’ve ever liked, shared, or spent an extra second looking at, dating all the way back to the first time you used Facebook in middle school. You can be sure that whatever thread they choose to serve you there has been optimized a million times over.

Of course, they only show you part of the content, so you have to click and open it in the Threads app to read or watch the full thing. This isn’t their first rodeo; there arguably isn’t a company in the world better at driving adoption and engagement than Meta.

And it’s only going to get better. Meta is investing billions into AI to serve users more relevant and engaging content. From their most recent earnings report: AI recommendations increased time spent +5% on Facebook, +6% on Instagram, and +20% YoY for Instagram video time.

Translation: Meta arguably knows more about you than you know about you, and they are going to leverage AI to keep you on platform longer than ever before.

No wonder I’ve found myself on multiple occasions aimlessly scrolling through Threads without ever having had the intention to open the app in the first place.

After Trump was de-platformed from Twitter, lots of right-leaning alternatives grew in popularity like Parler, Gab, Rumble, and Truth Social. After Elon bought Twitter, some left-leaning alternatives grew in popularity too like Bluesky and Mastodon.

None of them took off, and none of them ever will (I promise you).

Bluesky peaked in late 2024 when it hit #1 in the U.S. App Store, but has since mostly plateaued.

Even my beloved Twitter (or X or whatever) is beginning to feel like a shell of its former self. Sensor Tower reports that mobile usage is down 10% YoY, and anecdotally it feels like a lot of the highest quality content and conversations have dispersed elsewhere on the internet. What’s left is a feed of content that looks like this:

And replies that look like this:

I initially resisted Threads (and other alternatives) because I’ve been an avid Twitter user for more than a decade; that’s where I’ve built most of my online community. But I’ve recently begun to realize that Threads is inevitable.

The future of text-based social media will belong to Meta.

As will video.

Meta launched Reels in 2020 and has since neutralized the threat of being overtaken by TikTok as the dominant social platform for video. Instagram users now spend nearly two-thirds of their time watching video and Reels are shared ~1B times per day (and growing quickly).

Most creators post the same content on both platforms anyway, and it’s only a matter of time until the Reels algorithm is just as good (see above: Meta’s investments in AI). Either that or the government wakes up and decides not to have a communist adversary manipulate the narrative of American media.

Regardless of how we get there, I don’t see a world where Reels doesn’t eventually overtake TikTok and dominate short-form video.

And don’t forget about Instagram; I believe it has the greatest staying power of them all. It’s a personal CRM and the communication platform of choice for billions of people.

When I moved to LA a few years ago, I learned that people here typically ask for your Instagram instead of your phone number. Sure, a bit superficial, but I think it makes a ton of sense.

If you’re dating, wouldn’t you prefer to have a few more data points about the person you met at the bar before committing to another night out with them? Looks aside, you can typically extract a lot about someone’s interests, lifestyle, and personality from their profile.

And the real-time nature of stories unlocks a world of serendipity and continued connectivity. I’ll post a story when visiting New York and have dozens of friends reach out to meet up. I routinely rekindle with old friends or develop new ones simply by following up and responding to something they posted.

Instagram is the modern infrastructure for our evolutionary need for status. It’s the most utilitarian of all social platforms and is almost irreplaceable today from a social, career, and dating perspective.

With 2B+ MAU, Instagram regularly reaches 25% of the entire world. Meta’s broader ecosystem, inclusive of Facebook and WhatsApp, reaches more than 3.5B people daily. That’s not an app, that’s a utility.

With distribution of that scale, the company will continue to clone and dominate any new form of media that risks stealing attention and eyeballs from the mothership. Meta already owns photos, groups, communication, and status. Text and video will be theirs soon enough via Threads and Reels. The jury’s still out on the future of the metaverse, but they’ve already invested billions if that truly does become the next digital paradigm.

In the not-so-distant future, there will no longer be a social media industry. Rather, Meta and “social” will be synonymous.

Whether you like it or not, you might as well start paying your respects to our digital overlord. All Hail King Zuck.

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