🐔 So much chicken

Well, it’s no cage match but Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta dropped Threads, a rival app to Elon Musk’s Twitter. And we decided, heck, Why not give it a whirl?

Threads — not to be confused with the 1984 feel-really-bad movie of the same name — looks almost exactly like Twitter, with short text, photo, and video posts that you can like, repost, comment on, or share.

Instagram’s Adam Mosseri told The Verge that, while Twitter “pioneered the space,” Meta felt there was an opportunity to build something new “given everything that was going on.”

What’s going on?

Ever since Elon Musk’s $44B takeover of Twitter, the platform’s been different.

Recently, Musk capped the number of tweets unverified users can see, sending a deluge of new users to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s app Bluesky (which just raised $8m, btw.)

Mastodon and Spill, a Black-owned app founded by ex-Twitter employees, experienced similar surges. By press time, Threads had courted 30m+ users.

If Threads looks like a Twitter clone…

… how does it differ?

It’s linked to Instagram, so you need an Instagram account to sign up. From there, you can import your Insta bio and people you follow.

So, if you, like me, use Twitter for work/community stuff and Insta for posting your cats, it may kick off on a different vibe. Also:

• Threads’ character limit for posts is 500, versus Facebook’s 63k+ and Twitter’s 280 for nonpaid users or 10k for Twitter Blue subscribers.
• So far, there’s only one feed, consisting of posts from people you follow and recommended content.
• It doesn’t have account switching, hashtags, DMs, search, paid ads, or a desktop version… yet.
• It’s currently unavailable in the EU due to concerns surrounding privacy regulations.
• It has the same community standards as Instagram, so no NSFW stuff.

On the fence about Threads? Maybe think on it, ‘cause you can’t delete a Threads account without sacking the associated Instagram account.

In case it wasn’t clear from the chart above, America is an undeniable chick magnet.

The cows are probably happy. Heck, for nearly three decades Chick-fil-A has hired them to paint “Eat Mor Chikin” billboards, infiltrate burger boardrooms, parachute onto fields, and launch into space — all in the name of getting people to eat more bird.

But, for the cows, while some lives may be spared, paychecks probably won’t.

Chickening out

US chicken consumption per capita flew past beef in 1993 and hasn’t stopped since, per Bloomberg. This year, Americans are forecast to eat 100.9 pounds of chicken, on average, compared to 56.3 pounds of beef.

• Across the US cattle production industry, 700k+ businesses generated $85B in 2022 revenue; meatpacking accounts for another $300B annually.

As feed prices and drought drive up production costs for beef on one end, competition from chicken is ruffling feathers on the other.

Why the fowl play?

If there’s one thing today that unites Americans across every demographic, it’s chicken.

• Four of Grubhub’s 10 bestselling dishes in 2022 were chicken. One was beef.
• The average Chick-fil-A store brings in $6.8m in annual revenue, compared to McDonald’s $3.6m, and Popeyes has 3x’d sales in five years.

BTW: While cows and chickens have long had beef, they may soon share a common enemy in cleaner, greener, lab-grown meats — cultivated meat companies raised $896m in 2022, and regulators are keeping the momentum going.