Here’s the conclusion, for those who want the headline and then would rather move on with their lives.

Traffic to Twitter appears to be declining over time. Threads seems to be responsible for a little of that decline, when it first launched. But really, what’s happening is a story of long-term decline in engagement with Twitter. 2/

Another conclusion:

Much has been made of the surge and sudden drop in usage of Threads.

If you’ve never looked at the chart of the usage of a service when it goes supersonic, you might naively think this means Threads is already in trouble.

But a saw-tooth pattern where adoption is followed by a decline in usage – and then subsequent waves of re-engagement – is normal.

3/

Remember, this is just *week 1* plus 2 days for Threads. Fastest-growing app in history is probably going to do some weird things in the first months of its life.

And anyone who is a veteran of the endless cycles of "oh Mastodon saw a surge / oh now everyone is leaving" knows that this is how adoption of a service works.

As Eugene Wei told me, we’re going to know a lot more in a month, 6 months, a year. All conclusions at this point are premature.

4/

So now I want to point you to others who are being smart about this and who have explained Twitter’s long-term decline.

First, there’s this piece by @taylorlorenz which points out what should be blindingly obvious: Twitter’s real competition isn’t Threads, it’s TikTok.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/07/twitter-dead-musk-tiktok-public-square/

5/

And here’s a conclusion that @profgalloway and I both reached: Twitter’s problem isn’t threads, it’s Elon Musk’s leadership. By driving away users, mostly through changes to its algorithm and secondarily through his editorial decisions, he’s the real disruptor here.

“The misperception about disruption is that it’s a function of innovation or excellence. In fact, disruption is driven by stasis and the incompetence of incumbents.”

https://www.profgalloway.com/threadzilla/

6/