Threads, Capaldi and Communities
Threads, Capaldi and Communities
I meant to write another in-depth story for this issue… but that one I left for the next week.
This week instead of a fully fledged story you will be receiving my musings. Will still stick to the overarching theme of the newsletter: i.e. communities, but this time instead of telling a story I will just share some observations and thoughts.
So let’s get to it!
Mini-Story #1 - Glastonbury Magic
For those of you who might not know this - every summer here in the UK we have Glastonbury Festival. It is the largest greenfield music and performing arts festival in the world.
Obviously it’s one of those “once in a lifetime” experiences and the best stars perform there. This year, one of those stars was Lewis Capaldi. He is not only an awesome songwriter/singer but he’s also very authentic and raw in his social media posts. His unique personality and sense of humour on top of his talent have grown a big army of die hard fans.
A while ago Lewis shared that he has Tourette's syndrome (a neurological disorder that may cause sudden unwanted and uncontrolled rapid and repeated movements or vocal sounds called tics).
Capaldi had cancelled all work commitments for three-week mental health break before the festival to 'rest and recover' ahead of the hotly-anticipated music festival. Unfortunately though, during performance the Tourette’s “woke up” and effected his voice and ability to perform.
In the video below you can see the heartwarming moment Lewis lost his voice and his fans took over and sang Someone You Love for him!
After the show, numerous fans expressed their admiration for Lewis on Twitter, sharing how deeply moved they were by the final song of his performance, which brought them to tears. They emphasized that Lewis had no need to apologize and showered him with compliments for his incredible show, applauding him for persevering through his difficulties and completing his set.
They did not get annoyed. They did not demand their money back.
With that touching gesture they showed that they support him unconditionally.
As you can see if you have a community of die hard fans that truly care about you they’ll always have your back.
Now THAT's what you want to achieve as a brand and founder... and you don't have to settle for less.
Mini- story #2 - Copycat?
Since yesterday all my social media timelines are filled with the news about Mark Zuckerberg (Instagram’s) new social media platform which some predict to be “Twitter killer” - Threads.
Short summary of what happened
Threads was launched and was available to everyone (no invite codes, etc.)
Threads app is linked to your Instagram profile (i.e. easier to “convert” your followers from there)
It looks exactly like Twitter and many claim that it reminds them of Twitter’s early days, so they get that nice nostalgic feeling
Within the first day it already got over 30M+ users
It collects a LOT of personal data
Many web3 enthusiasts are happy since it “kind of” introduces the high-level concept of web3 to the “masses”
Few thoughts
It’s hard to predict how things are gonna evolve. Right now it’s the FOMO phase and many are jumping to a new platform because they think it will be easier and faster to grow there if you’re early. That may be partly true - although at this point already those who have massive Instagram followers already have an advantage…
I was very reluctant to sign up to it because of all that data collection etc. - but did so for the sake of this newsletter - so I’ve tried it before writing about it.
And my personal experience so far is the following:
yes, it feels like a complete copy of Twitter but with much less features… but it also feels completely different, since it feels like the audience is mainly coming from Instagram… (and that crowd probably does not know how to deal with communicating with words vs images). If instagram crowd wanted to use something like Twitter they would probably be on it by now… so does it mean that eventually they will turn it into Instagram 2.0?…
on the other hand if its main goal was bringing people over from Twitter… then eventually this place will turn into yet another Twitter… and in that case what’s the point? How many copies of the same thing do we need? What’s the added value of this one?
Summary
If you keep your community happy they won’t look for better options.
The rumour is that Threads were supposed to be launched a bit later, but they decided to drop to the app store earlier, since they wanted to take advantage of the growing user dissatisfaction because of the newly introduces Tweet view limits as well as the limit of threads becoming max 25 tweets.
Copying a feature or a product (and in this case a whole platform) isn’t that hard and theoretically can happen any time.
This just proves the importance of the community - since it’s the only thing that can’t be copied.
I presume that Threads did not feel the same for me (even though the whole thing looked the same) - because the people were different.
To be continued…
Time will tell how things will evolve - bear in mind Threads is just a day old.
That’s all for this week rebels!
Wish you all an awesome weekend.