Threads Isn’t About Twitter. It’s About Resetting Instagram’s Social Graph

As time goes on, people’s connections on social media apps get outdated. They don’t want to be associated with who they were before, and they don’t feel comfortable sharing as often. The increase in influencers and content creators has only exacerbated the trend. That’s a problem for Meta, because its social graph is its superpower. It’s what makes its apps sticky. 

So how does Meta reset its social graph? It’s had different answers over the last decade. First it bought Instagram, making it easy for people to start over by hand-picking people from their Facebook friends list. When the Instagram graph grew stale, it dipped its toes into ephemerality by adding Stories, riding the Snapchat wave. 

Now, it’s turning to Threads. Or so thinks Michael Sayman, the person responsible for getting Facebook to add a Stories feature (when he was only 18 years old, no less! More on that in a bit). Sayman thinks people are missing the point with Threads, sucked in as they are to the juicy narrative of Musk vs. Zuckerberg. Meta’s real threat isn’t Twitter—it’s the fading relevance of its social graph. 

It’s become a deeply existential issue for the company with the rise of TikTok-style recommendation engines. Unless it wants to relinquish the power of its social graph altogether, Meta needs to figure out a new way to entice people back into sharing with their network. Threads is a crystal ball of sorts—it gives us a hint about where Meta thinks the “social” part of social media will go (regardless of whether it’s right). 

We spoke with Sayman at length on the topic, and he had a lot of product insights and observations drawn from his time at Meta. Read on for behind-the-scenes details on how he got hired at Facebook at such a young age, why Zuckerberg finally decided to add Stories (against the Instagram founders’ wishes), and what Sayman thinks Meta hopes to accomplish with Threads.

Michael Sayman: 15-year-old wunderkind

Sayman’s life was far from ordinary, even before Facebook came into the picture. Born in Miami to Peruvian immigrant parents, he started building and releasing his own mobile gaming apps at age 13. When the 2008 recession hit, Sayman supported his family through the economic downturn after they lost the chicken restaurant that was their livelihood. 

At 15, he built an app that went viral thanks to some clever marketing tactics—it climbed the app store rankings and hit the top 10 at one point. To keep his operating costs low, he’d figured out a loophole to access the free tier of a Facebook-owned mobile development tool called Parse. Disgruntled at being taken advantage of, Parse employees reached out and were shocked to learn Sayman was only a sophomore in high school. Zuckerberg got wind of the story and flew Sayman out to attend Facebook’s F8 conference. 

Facebook kept tabs on Sayman in the years that followed, and during his senior year recruited him first as a paid intern and then a full-time engineer after graduation.

After finishing new hire orientation, Sayman made the bold move of pitching the creation of a new team focused on teenagers. The idea was sent up the ranks and eventually greenlit by executives Chris Cox, Adam Mosseri, and Zuckerberg himself. At 18, Sayman found himself in the unlikely position of overseeing data scientists, engineers, and designers who were years older than him on this “teens team.”

It didn’t take long for Sayman to bring the resident Gen-Z perspective to the company. He kept a close eye on Instagram’s retention and usage metrics among teens, and he spoke often about what the data was showing. He used the teenage audience as a predictor, hypothesizing that Gen Z behavior represented a wave that would eventually hit everyone else. 

Zuckerberg agreed, and decided it was worth facing the ire of Instagram’s founders to implement the company’s own take on a Stories feature. It worked, and within two years, Instagram had reached double the amount of Snapchat’s daily active users. 

The recent launch of Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor, harkens back to that Stories moment. 

Q&A with Michael

CD: Before we dive into Threads, why don’t you give us some background on the big moment Instagram decided to add Stories. How did you help champion that controversial move? 

MS: My first talk at the company was on how everyone in my age group hadn’t posted on Instagram in more than two months. I’d pull up the profiles of my friends and prove it. At the time, people at Facebook thought Instagram was the shit, so they’d look at me with horror in their eyes.

There was a certain point where the metrics were so dire that the sentiment in the company changed. People went from [being] reluctant about implementing Stories to being convinced that we needed to do it. 

CD: What do you think Instagram got right about copying Stories?

MS: The conversation was never about whether to “copy” it. It was: “Why are people using this, why is it valuable, and how do we translate this set of features to our own audience?”

Zuck wasn’t hasty about copying Stories—he was methodical. He really tried to understand why people used it and why Snapchat set their app up the way they did. For example, the format required views—it would not have worked with likes or other elements that Instagram had. That would’ve put too much pressure on the content to be “likeable,” which defeats the point.

Instagram succeeded at copying Stories when other apps, like YouTube and Twitter, tried to do the same thing and failed. We adapted it carefully. And Snapchat wound up copying Facebook on those kinds of design details afterward. 

CD: What are some examples of those details?