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The Emergence of Threads: The Birth of a New Social Network

Peixian Zhang, Yupeng He, Ehsan-Ul Haq, Jiahui He, Gareth Tyson

TL;DR

This paper presents the first large-scale, cross-platform characterization of Threads in relation to Instagram, leveraging the parent-child platform relationship to study early adopter behavior. It combines time-level and content-level analyses, including a BERTopic-based topical map and intra-/inter-platform topic-consistency metrics, to compare posting frequency, diurnal patterns, and topical focuses. Key findings show Threads engages more with political and AI topics, while Instagram emphasizes lifestyle and fashion, and that Instagram generally leads Threads by about one hour in activity. The study also reveals nuanced results on topic-consistency and engagement, suggesting that users who maintain topic continuity may receive different feedback dynamics across platforms. These insights contribute to understanding platform evolution, user migration patterns, and the design of cross-platform discourse models, while acknowledging data-limitation caveats and proposing directions for extended longitudinal analysis.

Abstract

Threads, a new microblogging platform from Meta, was launched in July 2023. In contrast to prior new platforms, Threads was borne out of an existing parent platform, Instagram, for which all users must already possess an account. This offers a unique opportunity to study platform evolution, to understand how one existing platform can support the "birth" of another. With this in mind, this paper provides an initial exploration of Threads, contrasting it with its parent, Instagram. We compare user behaviour within and across the two social media platforms, focusing on posting frequency, content preferences, and engagement patterns. Utilising a temporal analysis framework, we identify consistent daily posting trends on the parent platform and uncover contrasting behaviours when comparing intra-platform and cross-platform activities. Our findings reveal that Threads engages more with political and AI-related topics, compared to Instagram which focuses more on lifestyle and fashion topics. Our analysis also shows that user activities align more closely on weekends across both platforms. Engagement analysis suggests that users prefer to post about topics that garner more likes and that topic consistency is maintained when users transition from Instagram to Threads. Our research provides insights into user behaviour and offers a basis for future studies on Threads.

The Emergence of Threads: The Birth of a New Social Network

TL;DR

This paper presents the first large-scale, cross-platform characterization of Threads in relation to Instagram, leveraging the parent-child platform relationship to study early adopter behavior. It combines time-level and content-level analyses, including a BERTopic-based topical map and intra-/inter-platform topic-consistency metrics, to compare posting frequency, diurnal patterns, and topical focuses. Key findings show Threads engages more with political and AI topics, while Instagram emphasizes lifestyle and fashion, and that Instagram generally leads Threads by about one hour in activity. The study also reveals nuanced results on topic-consistency and engagement, suggesting that users who maintain topic continuity may receive different feedback dynamics across platforms. These insights contribute to understanding platform evolution, user migration patterns, and the design of cross-platform discourse models, while acknowledging data-limitation caveats and proposing directions for extended longitudinal analysis.

Abstract

Threads, a new microblogging platform from Meta, was launched in July 2023. In contrast to prior new platforms, Threads was borne out of an existing parent platform, Instagram, for which all users must already possess an account. This offers a unique opportunity to study platform evolution, to understand how one existing platform can support the "birth" of another. With this in mind, this paper provides an initial exploration of Threads, contrasting it with its parent, Instagram. We compare user behaviour within and across the two social media platforms, focusing on posting frequency, content preferences, and engagement patterns. Utilising a temporal analysis framework, we identify consistent daily posting trends on the parent platform and uncover contrasting behaviours when comparing intra-platform and cross-platform activities. Our findings reveal that Threads engages more with political and AI-related topics, compared to Instagram which focuses more on lifestyle and fashion topics. Our analysis also shows that user activities align more closely on weekends across both platforms. Engagement analysis suggests that users prefer to post about topics that garner more likes and that topic consistency is maintained when users transition from Instagram to Threads. Our research provides insights into user behaviour and offers a basis for future studies on Threads.
Paper Structure (18 sections, 9 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 18 sections, 9 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Dataset
  4. Threads
  5. Instagram
  6. RQ1: Time-level analysis
  7. Overview of Timeline
  8. Diurnal Post Activity
  9. RQ2: Content-level analysis
  10. Topical Discussions
  11. RQ3: Topic-consistency exploration
  12. Topic-consistency and feedback
  13. Intra-platform topic-consistency
  14. Inter-platform topic-consistency
  15. Feedback
  16. ...and 3 more sections

Figures (9)

  • Figure 1: (a) Daily volume of posts on Instagram and Threads (b) Daily average of posts per users
  • Figure 2: Autocorrelation for daily post counts: (a) Instagram (May 4th to Sept 9th.) (b) Threads (July 5th to Sept 9th.)
  • Figure 3: Compared Instagram before and after Threads launch: (a) and (b) show the percentage of accumulated posts in each hour on weekdays and weekends, respectively. (c) and (d) show the percentage of accumulated active users in each hour on weekdays and weekends, respectively. Times are converted to EDT zone.
  • Figure 4: Compared Threads and Instagram after Threads launch: (a) and (b) show the percentage of accumulated posts in each hour on weekdays and weekends, respectively. (c) and (d) show the accumulated active users in each hour on weekdays and weekends, respectively. Times are converted to EDT time zone.
  • Figure 5: Posts count for the top-30 topics (left-y) and normalised posts per user(right-y). (a) Instagram before Threads launch. (b) Instagram after Threads launch. (c) Threads. The x-axis is ranked based on the number of posts on Instagram before Threads launch.
  • ...and 4 more figures