The obvious way Meta can attempt to escape this bargain is by moving Threads away from retransmission-based curation and toward algorithmic ranking. This will give the company more control over which discussions are amplified, but, in doing so, they will also lose the human-powered selectivity that makes Twitter so engaging. Algorithms are good at finding content that matches the carefully established interests of individual users but have proved incapable of predicting in advance the Zeitgeisty conversations most likely to capture the attention of the Internet masses at the moment. A more purely algorithmic conversation platform will behave like a shared Instagram feed without the pictures—a steady stream of earnest text about vaguely interesting topics. Is there a demand for this experience? Recent reports of a significant drop in user engagement on Threads after its launch indicate that the answer to this question might be “not really.” In developing Threads, Meta will likely succeed with its goal of offering advertisers a more sanely run platform, but the price will be a more boring experience.

If we look past this narrow discussion of Threads’ challenges, however, a broader question arises: Why is it so important to create a better version of Twitter in the first place?

[What constitutes “better”? If you don’t like the more toxic interactions on Twitter, you can curate to avoid them. Sometimes they leak into my notifications anyway, but there are tools to deal with that too. (‘Leave Conversation’ is particularly useful, one of their best upgrades ever.) I’d rather that the platform gives me tools to curate my own experience than create ‘algorithms’ to curate it for me — and eventually spoon-feed only that which its operators prefer. Twitter has its problems, but its newest iteration at least trusts its users to use its tools properly. Mostly, anyway. — Ed]