Threads: no work and all play?

Will Meta's new social media space be a place for self-promotion or self-preservation?

Photo by Bozhin Karaivanov on Unsplash

Coming in hot with a bonus weekend edition of The Hot Desk this morning! This issue will be free for all subscribers but if you fancy getting more regular updates from me on all things work, rest and play, then why not upgrade your subscription? For £5 a month you’ll get a weekly newsletter straight to your inbox (or Substack reader), plus interviews and more personal writing from me. You’ll also get first dibs on upcoming The Hot Desk events and newness, as well as access to archive articles from the last year.

Today I wanted to write a quick missive about Threads and how, when it comes to work vs play, it’s already dividing opinion (albeit in a polite and lighthearted way)…

Since it launched three days ago, Threads has become one of the fastest growing social media apps of all time. In the first 24 hours, over 30 million of us downloaded the newest online platform from Meta (for comparison, it took TikTok two whole years to reach those numbers - and that was when we were all bored in the house in the house bored during lockdown). With the gradual and angry demise of Twitter and the increasingly sales-y feel of Instagram, it’s clear that we’re all looking for an online space that feels like a breath of fresh air. Or at least something akin to the social media of a decade ago.

Enter Threads, the new app “for sharing text updates and joining conversations”. Billed as an internet “safe space” and the app that could be the final nail in Twitter’s proverbial coffin, Threads is basically Instagram for those of us who want something more words-focused than image and video-focused. 48 hours in, I am really enjoying it. It’s not without its teething problems (and actual problems) but so far it’s very much the ‘no thoughts, just vibes’ space that a lot of us are looking for online. That said, the first thought I did have (after the dopamine hit of being the 14,464,668th person to join wore off) was ‘what am I going to use this for?’.

When it comes to careers, social media has played a huge part in shaping the way we find and do our work. Of course, there are dedicated platforms for professional networking, with LinkedIn being among the most widely used. For a budding young writer joining Twitter in 2009, I knew it as the place where journalists and editors were starting to gravitate. Instead of trawling shonky early-00s magazine websites looking for editorial contacts, anyone commissioning had their details in their Twitter bio. Even better, you could just straight-up slide into their DMs and pitch right there. Full disclosure: 18-year-old me was waaay too shy to actually do these things. But I knew that you could.

While Instagram started out as a space to share blurry, heavily filtered snaps of friends, food and pets, for some it’s morphed into something much more streamlined and considered. For creatives and small business owners (not to mention the many, many Insta ‘coaches’ who have sprung up over the last few years), Instagram is a digital shop-front. More agile than a website, less corporate than LinkedIn, with access to a potential audience of millions, Instagram has become a business playground. It’s how I’ve used it, as well as for sort-of documenting everyday life and sharing stupid memes.

So what about Threads? On the day that it launched, I was seeing lots of “hello, it’s me and this is what I do!” posts and also did one myself. I went in work-first, giving a shout out to The Hot Desk and my other projects. Okay, it wasn’t the hard sell but it wasn’t very personal either. Lots of pals from Instagram did the same. It feels natural when a lot of your work happens online to see social media as another outlet to promote yourself, however gently. At the same time, I saw lots of folk who I know use Instagram as one of their main marketing tools push back on the idea of posting anything work-related in this new space. The message seems to be that Threads isn’t the place for strategy or marketing (despite the Threads ‘gurus’ that have already popped up…). Similarly, I’ve seen a number of people saying that they won’t be following any celebrities and instead will be focusing on ‘real’ connections. Threads will be a place to chat and connect, share photos and recapture some of the simplicity (and dare I say, innocence) of early social media.

Threads is just a few days old, so it makes total sense that we’re all still figuring out a) if it’s for us at all and b) how we want to use it if we do stick with it. For me, like any social media, I think it’s going to be a bit of a mishmash. In the Venn diagram of my hobbies, interests and work, the overlap in the middle is pretty huge, plus I don’t really have a separate ‘work personality’, so it makes sense for me that everything can sit happily together online. I like the short-form nature of it (Threads has a 500 character limit for posts) and the (current) lack of bots and trolls is obviously appealing too. I know that my work isn’t actually social media (unless anyone wants to hire me to write some social copy then, hi!) but I can use it to find and share work, if I choose to.

More than anything though, it’s just not that deep. Platforms evolve all the time and we don’t need to be on everything. Threads will not be the last new thing. I have never made a TikTok and my career is chugging along just fine. Instagram is whatever Instagram is at the moment. LinkedIn is still kind of cringe. Twitter is…well, Twitter. Threads isn’t going to be a place for ‘hard news’ and politics, according to Adam Mosseri, so maybe there will still be a place for Elon’s bird app. If he doesn’t run it into the ground, that is. Or loses it to Zuckerberg in a cage fight. It sometimes feels like being online is basically choosing which billionaire you hate the least and getting on with it, which is a pretty depressing note to end this newsletter on. At least I’ve got the lighthearted good vibes of Threads to turn to for a distraction now. Every cloud and all that…

If you’re not yet on Threads, here are a few things you should know:

• Your Threads account is directly linked to your existing Instagram account. This means that you can automatically follow all the same people you do on Instagram (good) but it also means that you can’t delete your Threads account without deleting your Instagram account too (terrible).

• Accessible features are on the way, apparently. There’s currently no way to add alt-text or captions to posts, so it’s not ideal for anyone using a screen reader or similar.

• The app is currently ad free. There seems to be a something of a weary consensus that our old friend Capitalism may change that in time, Threads (for now) is a no-sales zone.

• The algorithm is…not great. I’m getting my fair share of dad joke accounts and bitcoin enthusiasts, but at least I’m not getting constant DMs from ‘Sexy Singles’ bots like on Instagram, so swings and roundabouts.

If you’re already using Threads, what are your thoughts so far? Are you going to be using it for work in any way? Or are you using it as an escape from the other social media you’re already using? The comments are open, I’d love to know what you think!

I hope you enjoyed this extra edition of The Hot Desk! See you next time!

Rebecca x