Who performed better in Thursday night’s presidential debate, X or Threads? Although it’s not the biggest concern among social media users, it’s one of the questions people ask themselves after watching a video Catastrophic discussion Playable across both platforms.
Meta, which nearly a year ago launched Threads as a competitor to the app formerly known as Twitter, has distanced itself from politics, saying it will not proactively recommend political content to users unless they enable a new setting. Meanwhile, X served as a second screen for real-time events, providing people with a place to chat, interact, and benefit from the collective opinions of others. But under Elon Musk’s ownership, The platform began to tilt more to the right, At least one study suggests that this makes it less attractive to some of its former users.
So which platform handled the discussion better? That depends on who you ask. There were clear differences between how the two platforms handled the discussion last night, with some saying X was more lively, while others asserted that Threads proved that X was no longer necessary.
In terms of pure numbers, X is still the largest social network, with Musk Recently claimed The service now has 600 million monthly active users, about half of whom use the platform daily. While it didn’t clarify whether bots or spam bots are included in those numbers, X is still larger than Threads, which had at least 150 million monthly active users as of Meta’s last public earnings call in April. (However, Third party statistics (Threads have shown that it has now surpassed that number.)
The size of X’s user base lends credence to the argument that the Musk-owned platform felt more active, because there were simply more people posting. Other text-focused social networks, including those from startups like Bluesky and open-source efforts like Mastodon, don’t have nearly enough numbers to rival X or Threads on nights like these.
However, not everyone agrees that size was the only deciding factor here.
In a Threads post that received nearly 800 likes, user Matthew Facciani said books“Threads was a very useful social media platform for following the presidential debate. My timeline was filled with political discussions and real-time updates. I didn’t miss Twitter/X at all.”
The same sentiment can be found throughout Threads, some even New users They said they found Threads to be an “engaging” and “smart” social networking site. One called the thread feed during discussions “electrical“Some have pointed out that the threads appear to have fewer “Trolls“To deal with it, compared to X. and others emphatically Announce Topics was the winner last night.
Others pointed to technical issues with X, which led to the exclusion of high-profile users including Lincoln Project Co-Founder Rick WilsonJournalist and political commentator Molly Jung FastAnd Othersjust before the debate aired.
Despite these positive reviews, there is still some concern about Threads’ ability to keep up with the real-time news environment. Threads user and tech expert Chris Messina noted that Topic trends did not immediately include a topic Which focused on the presidential debate as a whole.
Instead, Threads would highlight topics that came up during the discussion, such as economics or… Age difference Between Trump and Biden. But many of them don’t appear until an hour or so after the discussion starts — in other words, closer to the time it ends — which limits Threads’ use as a real-time news network.
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This isn’t the first time Threads has faced this issue.
When the New York/New Jersey area was hit by an earthquake earlier this year, the event didn’t start spreading on Threads until later in the day. At the time, Meta said that because the earthquake was a regional event and trends depended on national conversations, it might take longer for enough people to join the conversation. This explanation doesn’t hold up when it comes to Threads’ difficulties keeping up with the presidential debate — arguably a national conversation if there ever was one.
Meanwhile, the debate on X had its own hashtag (#Debates2024), which helped people discover who was posting about the event. Similar to the Meta app, it had tags focused on different side topics or people, such as Biden.
Topics, on the other hand, do not contain hashtags. Instead, its user interface ignores the hashtag symbol (#), and adds hyperlinks to words that are typed after using the symbol. This can make it more difficult to detect topics, as there is often no single underlying tag that gains enough traction to start a trend, compared to
There is also confusion about which tag to use in topics, as users often create topics in the “[Topic] “Threads.” For example, Tech Threads is where you’ll find tech community discussions. This tradition has led to political discussions being divided between a wide variety of tags, with some people using a more straightforward tag such as “presidential debate” (with or without a space or the year), while others have used the “presidential debate” format.Discussion topics”
Critics of the topic have also pointed out that X still has appeal, in terms of being referred to by the media. For example, One user noted They haven’t seen a website, podcast, or YouTube video mention Threads in the context of the presidential debate yet. And that’s just a passing news story, of course.
Additionally, X’s ability to support long posts as well as short posts made it a place where people could share more sophisticated and articulate thoughts about what they saw on TV. For example, technology investor Mark Cuban wrote effectively Blog post on X With his point of view in the discussion.
The topics, however, have 500 character limit On her posts.
While Threads had a good showing last night, the fact that it still can’t keep up with trends and topics in real time still hinders its ability to compete with X as a news platform. Coupled with Meta’s desire to distance itself from discussions of a political nature, Threads may never be able to fully replace X.
Until this problem is solved, we’ll have to call Threads just a decent “alternative” to X, but not a replacement for it yet.