Who performed better in Thursday night’s presidential debate, X or Threads? Although it is not the main concern among social media users, it is one of the questions that people ask themselves after watching the debate. disastrous debate will be developed on both platforms.
Meta, which launched Threads nearly a year ago as a rival to the app formerly known as Twitter, has distanced itself from politics, saying it won’t proactively recommend political content to users unless they enable a new setting. Meanwhile, X has historically served as a second screen for real-time events, offering people a place to chat, react and tap into the collective opinions of others. But under Elon Musk’s ownership, the The platform has begun to lean more to the right, At least one study indicates that this makes it less attractive to some of its former users.
So which platform handled the debate best? That depends on who you ask. There were clear differences between how the two platforms handled last night, with some saying that X felt more alive and others claiming that Threads proved that X is no longer necessary.
In terms of numbers, X remains the largest social network, with Musk recently claiming The service now reaches 600 million monthly active users, of which about half use the platform daily. While it did not clarify whether automated accounts or spambots were included in those numbers, X is still larger than Threads, which has at least 150 million monthly active users, according to Meta’s last public earnings announcement in April. (However, third party statistics (The number of threads displayed has now far exceeded that figure.)
The size of X’s user base lends credence to the argument that the Musk-owned platform felt more active, as 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 enough numbers to rival X or Threads on nights like this.
Still, not everyone agrees that volume was the only deciding factor here.
In a Threads post with nearly 800 likes, user Matthew Facciani wrote“Threads was a very useful social media platform to follow this presidential debate. My timeline was filled with political debates and real-time updates. I didn’t miss Twitter/X at all.”
That same feeling can be found in all the threads, since even some newer users They said they found Threads to be considered an “attractive” and “smart” social media site. One of them called the Threads feed during the debates “electric.” Some pointed out that it seemed like Threads had less “trolls” to treat, compared to X. Others simply declared Threads was the winner last night.
Others pointed to technical issues in X, which blocked high-profile users, including Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Projectjournalist and political commentator Molly Jong Fastand othersjust before the debate was broadcast.
Despite these positive reviews, there was still some concern about Threads’ ability to keep up in a real-time news environment. Threads user and technologist Chris Messina noted that Thread trends did not include a topic immediately which focused on the presidential debate as a whole.
Instead, Threads was surfacing issues that came up during the debate, such as economics or age difference between Trump and Biden. But many of them didn’t appear until an hour after the debate began (in other words, closer to its end), limiting Threads’ use as a real-time news network.
This is not the first time Threads has faced this problem.
When the New York and New Jersey area was hit by an earthquake earlier this year, the event didn’t start trending on Threads until later that day. At the time, Meta said that because the earthquake was a regional event and trends are based on national conversations, it may have taken longer for enough people to join the conversation. That explanation doesn’t hold water when it comes to Threads’ struggles to keep up with the presidential debate, arguably a national conversation if there ever was one.
Meanwhile, on X, the debate had its own hashtag (#Debates2024), which helped people figure out who was posting about the event. And, like the Meta app, it had tags focused on various secondary topics or people, like Biden.
Threads, on the other hand, do not have hashtags. Instead, their user interface ignores the hashtag symbol (#) and adds hyperlinks to words that are typed after using the symbol. This can make it harder to discover topics, as there is often no main tag that gains enough traction to start trending, compared to X. The lack of discoverability of Threads tags can also lead to lower usage.
There is also confusion about which tag to use in Threads, since its users often create topics with the format “[Topic] Threads.” For example, “Tech Threads” is where you’ll find discussions from the tech community. That convention led to political discussions being divided among a wide variety of tags, as some people used a more obvious tag like “presidential debate.” ” (with or without a space or the year), while others used the format “Discussion threads.”
Critics of Threads also noted that X still has steam, in terms of being mentioned by the media. For example, One user pointed out So far, I haven’t seen any websites, podcasts or YouTube videos mentioning Threads in the context of the presidential debate. Of course, this is just an anecdote.
Additionally, Technology investor Mark Cuban, for example, effectively wrote A blog post about X with his vision of the debate.
However, Threads has a 500 character limit in their publications.
While Threads performed well last night, the fact that it still can’t keep up with trends and topics in real time continues to hamper its ability to compete with X as a news platform. Combined with Meta’s desire to distance itself from discussions of a political nature, Threads may never be able to fully replace X.
Until this is resolved, we’ll have to call Threads simply a decent “alternative” to X, but not yet its replacement.
