"Apologies to my Instagram friends who don't know the Twitter version of me"
THREADS, lazy girls, cozy content, AI astrology and friend-making apps
Twitter is for news. For politics. For “your own views.” For job updates and hot takes and unpopular opinions. Twitter is for aging poorly and rage-baiting and living rent free in one’s head. Twitter is for stans and brands. For sports and shitposters. For budding comics. For harassment. For hashtag activists.
Instagram, on the other hand, is for Ikea hacks. For hot dog legs and gradient shelves. It’s for recipes and make-up tips and straight-backed, bikinied women sitting inexplicably in some picturesque shallows. Instagram is for airplane wings and bio-ed links. For unfreed nipples and short poems. For thirst traps and tourist traps and “sexy baby tigers” and the same damn Canva templates ad infinitum.
So … what the hell is Threads for, exactly? And more importantly: Who are we supposed to be on it? Meta’s new “Twitter killer” — already the fastest-growing app of all time — shunts users’ Instagram friends and follows into a Twitter-like text service.
But many users maintain distinct social networks on Twitter and Instagram and behave differently in those spaces1… which apparently means no one has any idea how to act in this new, quasi-hybrid space that combines the infrastructure of one platform with another’s audience.
Is this Instagram, but words? Is it Twitter with different people? Will entirely new norms evolve? Will those norms blur boundaries we’d rather preserve — or will they just merge different audiences?
“Apologies in advance,” one (Twitter) influencer wrote last week, “to my instagram friends who don’t know the twitter version of me.” (Like most people in my Threads feed, I don’t follow this dude — the ~magic of the algorithm~ delivered him to me.)
“What I really need is a Twitter following import feature … not IG,” another user wrote. “Different platforms, different uses, different follows.”
I do suspect an import hack or feature of some kind is inevitable, alongside the updates Meta itself has promised — including, for instance, a means to more easily find and follow people outside the Instagram social graph. Some questions of posting behavior and style will also die down as Threads’ culture emerges.
Until then, I’m enjoying the chaos: I’m at @cedewey and would love to know who you are or plan to be on Threads. Unless you’re forsaking it all together, which is … also valid!
If you read anything this weekend
“Loneliness is Taking Friend-Making Apps Mainstream” and “Meeting Friends Online is Normal. Here’s How to Do It,” by Tatum Hunter for The Washington Post. I’m delighted that BumbleBFF works for someone, since I only get matched with live-laugh-love girls from Buffalo’s moneyed outer suburbs.2 Even they are apparently turning to apps like Bumble and Discord to make new friends: Blame Covid, long work hours, changing social mores and the wider loneliness epidemic.
“Beware the ‘Beige-fluencers’, Cheerleaders for a Life of No Surprises,” by Sarah Manavis for The Guardian. This essay is a truly unfortunate piece of internet writing, imho, in that it took the kernel of a good idea (perhaps there’s a relationship between coziness content and rising social precarity!) and then bad-faith-interpreted its evidence to the point of parody. And yet … I still share it. As a cautionary tale. And also because that first kernel was good. Would legit love to know what life Sarah leads that makes her so contemptuous of cute PJs and candles.
“TikTok is Confusing by Design,” by Sara Morrison for Vox. One chief complaint about Threads thus far involves the make-up of its main feed: so many people you don’t follow; so many randoms and celebrities. But app design might be trending in that direction, courtesy Gen Z and TikTok. A lot of younger users prefer apps that tell them who to follow and what to watch.
“How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube,” by Max Read for The New York Times Magazine. This story came out almost a month ago, during a Links summer hiatus 😶, and I was delighted to hear its author on “The Daily” this week because that gave me a second chance to share it (!). Just a classically great profile of the larger-than-life phenomenon that is Jimmy Donaldson and the YouTube economy that allowed him to become ubiquitous.
“On ‘Cancel Culture,’ Accountability, and Being in the Writers' Room with Miranda Sings,” by April Korto Quioh for You Owe Me An Apology. If you’re in any way invested in the scandal surrounding Colleen Ballinger, a.k.a. disgraced children’s YouTuber Miranda Sings, I highly recommend this behind-the-scenes look from a former assistant on her Netflix show, which … should not have been made!, truly. If you’re not invested but want to be, read this Vulture explainer first. Otherwise scroll on, my friend — life is short.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this feature on the drama among online doll collectors.
Thanks for being one of my 15,000 hypothetical Gchat friends.
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Postscripts
Sriracha scalping. Tween girl summer. America’s first water sommelier. Why Reddit will allow some AI porn and how food companies cater to Gen Z tastes. ChatGPT: still not taking my job. But also: def still helping kids cheat. “You can go a long way with a reasonably consistent, one-dimensional identity.”
Inside the Netflix stunt restaurant. Outside the Co-Star stunt AI machine. Lazy girl jobs. “Explanatory depth.” T Swift was almost a crypto crash casualty. The bad Supreme Court decision you have not heard about. The old-but-newly-viral dating books you have. Last but not least: The “typical” home in every state, per Stable Diffusion. (The architecture nerd in me loves this, can’t help it.)
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin
By “many users,” I basically mean people who aren’t public figures. Some academics who study Instagram argue that the platform historically offered a form of “networked intimacy” (your audience = your friends) where other platforms promised a “networked public” (your audience = an amorphous crowd of “followers” you may not individually know/interact with). In cultivating public personas on Instagram, influencers began shifting the platform from one pole to the other. But I’d argue that a lot of people — MANY USERS, in fact — still see Instagram as a slightly more personal platform. Lord knows you will never see me in a bathing suit on Twitter.
Yeah, I know, that means I swiped right on them too. I have admittedly treated BumbleBFF less as a sincere friend-making tool and more as like … an idle anthropological study of mid-30s women in my area. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯