\n<\/p>\n
Despite its similarities, Instagram Threads is no X. At least, not yet. The text-focused social network \u2014 and Meta\u2019s answer to Elon Musk\u2019s X, formerly Twitter \u2014 missed a moment to shine on Friday when users once again turned to X to discuss the New York\/New Jersey area earthquake<\/a>. The traffic surge drove #earthquake to the top of X\u2019s Trends section, followed by other areas of impact, like \u201cEast Coast,\u201d \u201cLong Island,\u201d \u201cPhilly,\u201d \u201cManhattan\u201d and \u201cBrooklyn.\u201d Meanwhile, earthquake-related terms didn\u2019t register on Threads\u2019 trends section until closer to 2 p.m. ET, even though the earthquake had hit a little before 10:30<\/a> on Friday morning.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say people weren\u2019t discussing the earthquake on Threads \u2014 many were. In addition to conversations taking place around the earthquake, people were even tagging their discussions as EarthquakeThreads or NYC Threads, among other things, to help surface their posts to the wider Threads Community.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Post by @timothyjchambers<\/p>\n View on Threads<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Another reason the term likely wasn\u2019t trending: Unlike Twitter\/X, Threads doesn\u2019t use hashtags.<\/p>\n While this design choice makes the user interface cleaner, it also may make it less obvious how to tag trending terms. It seems obvious that discussions of the earthquake should be tagged #earthquake, (or earthquake without the hashtag, as on Threads), but people on the Meta-owned platform have started using the tagging convention of \u201c[term] Threads\u201d<\/em> \u2014 like \u201cTech Threads\u201d for people in tech talking about tech, for example.<\/p>\n This could complicate things when a big trend comes along because some will tag it \u201cearthquake,\u201d and others will tag it \u201cEarthquake Threads\u201d while others still may target their local community, like \u201cNYC Threads,\u201d which leads to none of the terms gaining the velocity and momentum needed to break into the top trends on Threads, despite all of them referencing the same event.<\/p>\n Around 1 p.m. on Friday, TechCrunch reached out to Instagram to ask why the earthquake didn\u2019t make it into Threads\u2019 top trends.<\/p>\n We were told that Threads\u2019 five top trends are based on various signals, including how many people are talking about a given topic, and how many people have engaged with posts on that same topic. Because the earthquake was a regional event, and trends are based on national conversations, it may have simply taken more time for enough people to join the conversation, Instagram said.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Post by @backlon<\/p>\n View on Threads<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Shortly after checking in with Threads, the now many-hours-old earthquake became the No. 1 trend on the platform.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for Threads, being unable to keep up with trends in real time could hamper its ability to fully compete with X. Combined with Meta\u2019s plan to distance itself from discussions of a political nature \u2014 even going so far as not to \u201crecommend\u201d political content across Instagram and Threads\u2019 platforms \u2014 Threads may never fully be able to supersede X, even if it builds many of the other same bells and whistles, like reposts, search, bookmarks and linkable tags.<\/p>\n This stands in sharp contradiction to how Twitter\u2019s founders perceived the power of their new platform to deliver real-time information \u2014 and a reason why Twitter became the home to breaking news, active topical discussions and a hub for journalists.<\/p>\n Not long after TechCrunch covered Twitter<\/a> (then called Twttr) for the first time, the San Francisco earthquake rocked the service, allowing both the founders and users alike to grasp Twttr\u2019s potential.<\/a> Later that fall, the app had grown to thousands of users.<\/p>\n Said former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, in a 2016 Harvard Business School newsroom interview<\/a>, \u201c\u2026 I was in the office on a Saturday, and my phone buzzed, and it was a tweet, and it said simply, \u2018Earthquake.\u2019 Immediately after that I actually felt the tremors in San Francisco. The phone kept buzzing, and there was, \u2018earthquake, earthquake, earthquake.’\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat was amazing about that is I was experiencing something in the world, and immediately I felt comforted because it was obvious that other people were experiencing the same thing,\u201d Dorsey said. \u201cI thought, \u2018Wow, the world is so small. You can actually \u2014 just by having that shared sensation that shared experience, you all feel like you\u2019re all in this together.’\u201d<\/p>\n Threads may have 130 million monthly active users, making it the largest player in the \u201cfediverse,\u201d\u00a0 the social network of interconnected servers and services including Mastodon<\/a>, Misskey<\/a>, Pixelfed<\/a>, PeerTube<\/a>\u00a0and others. But despite usage declines, X has remained \u201cstickier\u201d than some would have believed<\/a>, especially given the wide crop of competitors that have emerged to challenge Musk\u2019s X. In fact, according to one report by Sensor Tower, X\u2019s usage by power users remained largely unchanged as of last fall.<\/p>\n\n
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