"Ask and you shall receive." This quote does not belong to the CEO of a large hotel chain or the waiter at your favorite cafe, but rather to Mark Zuckerberg. There's no reason to be surprised by this strong service-oriented sentiment – that's what happens when you launch a social network that reached 100 million users in five days but lost the interest of most of them in a much shorter period than that.
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Over on the other side, Elon Musk has been warming up. The owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, is not the kind of person who needs to get warmed up. After the two decided to have "a cage match", they ultimately decided – being the geeks that they are – to hold this duel by launching a new app and renaming an existing one. Now, the question is which of them will win.
X has experienced a rollercoaster since Musk joined Twitter. Canceling "censorship", bringing back blocked accounts (hey, Donald Trump), subscriptions for the blue checkmark, user abandonment, and the appointment of a new CEO instead of Musk. But if all this is not enough – advertisers are additionally no longer willing to advertise on the platform in the same scope as before.
Meta, having become the world's leading one-on-one communication powerhouse with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger, and also as a strong competitor for the Fun niche through Instagram, the prospect of taking over the public square by shaping public opinion and on the way to scoop up the advertisers disappointed with Twitter, became all the more attractive.
A few days after the unprecedented launch of Threads, the number of daily app users took a deep dive. The reason: It's boring! The algorithm seems to prioritize influencers who are (almost) all geared towards producing much "softer" content, that advertisers love. However, no one travels all the way to the town square just to eat cotton candy. Threads has tried to have it both ways, but that plan is not going so well.
The winner, paradoxically, will be the one who knows how to step back faster.
Twitter in the days before Musk knew how to provide users with the entertainment they expected to find in the town square, but was less successful in profiting from it. Zuckerberg and Musk know how to make money from a strong product. Moving forward, only the one who will be able to bring back the good old Twitter town square – one that allows for heated discussions but also knows how to set limits when necessary – will receive both the users and the advertisers.
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