Instagram Threads Misses Opportunity to Shine During East Coast Earthquake
Threads’ Delayed Reaction to Trending Topics
On Friday, when an earthquake shook the New York/New Jersey area, users flocked to X (formerly Twitter) to discuss the event. Earthquake-related terms quickly dominated X’s Trends section, with hashtags like #earthquake, “East Coast,” “Long Island,” “Philly,” “Manhattan,” and “Brooklyn” rising to the top. However, on Instagram’s text-focused social network, Threads, these terms didn’t register on the trends section until nearly four hours after the earthquake struck at 10:30 a.m. ET.
Threads’ Unique Tagging Convention
While people were indeed discussing the earthquake on Threads, the platform’s lack of hashtags may have contributed to the delay in trending topics. Instead of using the obvious #earthquake tag, Threads users have adopted a tagging convention of “[term] Threads,” such as “Tech Threads” or “NYC Threads.” This fragmentation of tags could prevent a single term from gaining the necessary momentum to break into the top trends, even when referencing the same event.
Threads’ Trending Algorithm
According to Instagram, Threads’ top five trends are determined by various signals, including the number of people talking about a topic and the engagement with related posts. As the earthquake was a regional event, it may have taken more time for enough people to join the conversation and push the topic to the top of the national trends.
The Importance of Real-Time Information
Threads’ inability to keep up with trends in real-time could hinder its ability to compete with X. In contrast, Twitter’s founders quickly recognized the platform’s potential to deliver real-time information, as evidenced by the San Francisco earthquake that rocked the service in its early days. As co-founder Jack Dorsey recalled:
“… I was in the office on a Saturday, and my phone buzzed, and it was a tweet, and it said simply, ‘Earthquake.’ Immediately after that I actually felt the tremors in San Francisco. The phone kept buzzing, and there was, ‘earthquake, earthquake, earthquake.'”
This shared experience helped users feel connected and comforted, highlighting the power of real-time information on the platform.
Threads’ Challenges in Becoming a True X Alternative
Despite boasting 130 million monthly active users, making it the largest player in the “fediverse” of interconnected social networks like Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and PeerTube, Threads faces several challenges in becoming a true X alternative. These include its plan to distance itself from political discussions, its failure to deliver a true X-like experience with timely trends and relevant content, and the randomness of posts that fill users’ “For You” feeds.
As Max Read described in a March newsletter:
“Threads is the gas-leak social network. Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage. … Who are these people? What are they talking about? Are they responding to something that I missed? Why am I reading this? How did it get into my feed? How am I supposed to react?”
If Threads can’t capitalize on real-time information, keep its trends current, and provide a coherent user experience, its ability to be a viable X alternative could suffer. While people may use it due to their dissatisfaction with X’s new direction or Elon Musk, they may never have a true X-like experience on the platform.
5 Comments
Earthquake in NYC/NJ and Twitter’s got no chill? Must’ve been one heck of a silent tremor.
Seriously, are we now speed-ranking natural disasters for social media clout?
Seems like the real shake-up was in people’s priorities if an earthquake can’t even trend!
Honestly, was everyone just too busy brunching to tweet about the earth shaking?
Guess our feeds were too clogged with cat videos to notice the earth moving, huh?