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As time goes on, people’s connections on social media apps get outdated.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 is no longer at Facebook, but he 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, giving 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 at one point hit the top 10. 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 as 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?

MS: Instagram introduced the little ring icon around a user’s profile picture that people click to open a story. That was totally new on Facebook’s behalf. Instagram also let people upload from their camera roll, which Snapchat wasn’t doing yet. As a result, people had more content to share in Stories.  I know it sounds small, but these kinds of subtle product differences make the new version better than the original.

I see Zuckerberg’s approach as surprisingly similar to Apple. Apple watches while its competitors create these cool new features. It lets them do their thing, and it studies what worked well and what didn’t. Then once they understand it enough they go and build their own version and blow everyone else away. It’s a wait-and-see. 

CD: I heard that Zuckerberg asked you to teach him how to use Snapchat and critique his Snaps?

MS: That was crazy. What kind of powerful billionaire would ask a 19-year-old to teach him anything? But Zuckerberg was always open to hearing opinions. He understood he didn’t know it all. 

CD: What were his Snaps like?

MS: He’d give me awkward Snapchats at first. He’d post a thing where you could still hear the audio but no one said anything—there’s just weird room noise. It’s a subtle thing, but if you’re taking [a] video with your friends and no one is saying anything, it’s weird. I’d tell him to mute videos if no one is saying anything.

CD: Were you nervous to critique his Snaps? 

MS: No, because I was a bratty teenager, so I didn’t know any better.

CD: Let’s jump ahead to Threads. Twitter has been around for a long time, and it hasn’t proven to be much of a business threat to Meta the way Snapchat did. I know you’re not at Facebook anymore, but what would you hypothesize is the impetus for Threads? 

MS: I don’t think the motivation is actually all that different from the Stories moment. Meta is struggling with the same challenge as they were before. Over time people’s social graph gets outdated and they don’t want to be associated with who they were before. 

So Threads is a different approach. It’s a big reset of the social graph. You get to start over—using your Instagram following lists to decide who comes with you. It’s not that different from Instagram—you can post videos, photos, or text. The same stuff.

They created a Twitter-looking Instagram to increase engagement of Instagram users; they didn’t really make a Twitter competitor. But it’s not as sexy to say, “We’re trying to revive our inactive users.”

CD: But there’s no denying that Threads is different then Instagram—it’s very text-forward. In an era where everything has been moving to video, that is a little surprising. 

MS: Just like with Stories, they’re looking for a new way to lower the bar for posting, so people lounging at home can still engage with the conversation online. Lockdowns through the pandemic weren’t suited for photos and videos. How many shots of yourself in loungewear on a bed watching Netflix can you post? 

The rise of influencers also made it more intimidating to post. There’s a lot more competition for attention. When people tap the Instagram app the goal is no longer, “I’m going to share.” It’s: “I’m going to watch.” When my mom opens Instagram, most of what she watches isn’t her friends… because they’re boring. 

The issue with people not sharing what they’re up to anymore is that it makes Meta’s social graph—its super power—useless. With Reels and a recommended feed like TikTok’s FYP, they’re becoming a media company and competing with TikTok on who has the most interesting videos. That’s a hard fight to win. 

But text is a lot easier to create than video or photo. If you give people the opportunity to easily share their thoughts about content and the Internet in words, you now have a differentiator from TikTok. Instagram becomes more like TikTok, Threads becomes more for friends. 

CD: Did Instagram just invent itself back into being Facebook? After all, that’s what Facebook was known for. 

MS: Yes, but people need the option to start over with their social graph. That’s essentially what I think they’ve done and will have to do a number of times over, whenever the social graph gets stale. 

CD: Do you think text-based apps will get “average Joes” sharing again?

MS: Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has talked about this. These days, “sharing” is less about sharing what you’re up to and more about reacting to what’s happening online—whether privately with friends and family over iMessage and WhatsApp or publicly in places like Discord or TikTok comments. That’s where the majority of people go to connect with others. 

The selfie era is over, so what does a social network look like in a world where that’s the case? There was such a strong desire to share text in Instagram Stories that people hacked together ways to do so when there wasn’t a feature for it. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if Meta tracked stats internally that showed the number of Stories with a bunch of text on top of a blurred image or screenshot rose dramatically since the pandemic. They’re basically accommodating an ever-growing population of people who don’t feel comfortable posting their own faces or videos and photos about their life.

CD: So what happens next?

MS: I’m not sure. I’d guess that if Threads is successful, social media apps will come in two forms—one that focuses on creating the things that we see, and the other which is us reacting to the things we see. 

I’m pretty sure Zuck has been seeing this for a few years, and I also think Elon understands this and that’s why he acquired Twitter—even if he didn’t know how to handle a social media product. The two biggest billionaires in the world wouldn’t be fighting over creating a text-based app if they didn’t think that kind of thing is going to be of value in the future.