With the first Sunday of the NFL season only a few days away, it’s worth taking a moment to examine where things stand with Sports Twitter. Is Sports Twitter still a reasonable outlet to follow the NFL schedule? Is Sports Twitter even really a thing anymore, given that Twitter officially changed its name to X a few weeks back? And what about Threads and Bluesky? Do those apps even matter or have they fallen into the pit of once-interesting-but-now-irrelevant Twitter clones that never need to be mentioned again, like Hive or Mastodon?
For all the turmoil that’s surrounded Twitter (which for the sake of familiarity I’m still going to refer to as “Twitter,” even though that’s not its name anymore), no one has been able to wrestle the crown away from it as the best place to follow sports live. It’s gotten much more inconvenient to log onto it, of course. Ads are so abundant that you can’t go more than four or five posts sometimes without seeing one, and they’re often of such low quality that they’re either for products that don’t appear to actually exist or are outright promoting hate speech. Last week, a promoted post that many people saw came from a user urging that we must “secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.” Incredibly, that ad stayed up for an entire week before it was taken down.
That’s just not the sort of thing that happens on a functional website. The guardrails are off at Twitter and people are itching to move on from it, hence why Threads became the most-downloaded app of all time when it launched a few weeks ago. The desire for a “Twitter but not out of control” is overwhelming, and had Threads managed to meet users’ demands, Twitter/X might already be a thing of the past and Sports Twitter might already have transferred over. However, that famously didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen for a very specific reason: Threads was awful.
When I first wrote about Threads, I wrote with utmost confidence that it was going to be the next Twitter and that it would all but banish Bluesky to the Mastodon zone. I was, to put it lightly, very wrong. Not a little wrong, but laughably, comically wrong – as wrong as you can possibly be about anything. And I was wrong (not that it matters, but in my meager defense…) because when I first saw Threads, I made the very naïve assumption that what I was looking at was just a fill-in template and that that wasn’t actually what the app would be like – that it was SO obvious what their app needed to be and that what they needed to be was SO easily-accomplishable that it honestly never occurred to me that Meta, the overlords of American social media, wouldn’t be able to figure it out. I looked at Threads like a restaurant from a famous chef on their grand opening that was out of ingredients and low on staff and overcooked all their food. “Sure, this is bad,” I thought, “but this will really be something once it shows me what it’s really like.”
The reality is that Threads never meaningfully improved. It took a whopping three weeks for them to implement a chronological following feed, and even when they did, they made the catastrophic decision to do it alongside a “For You” feed that retained the brand posts that initially clouded everyone’s timelines and that users pretty uniformly agreed was unbearable. And what’s worse, they then hid the button to select the following feed behind their logo on it, an unintuitive placement that all but secures that the brand posts that everyone hates are now synonymous with them. Threads, in other words, has doomed themselves, because as much as people may hate what Twitter’s become, they also don’t see the point of fleeing to a place that’s just going to inundate them with a different variety of content they hate – even if it mostly comes with all the same bells and whistles as the old place. To the extent that people on Twitter want a new home, it’s because they want one that’s more palatable. All Threads had to do was offer a blank canvass in chronological order and without insufferable brand posts and they’d have probably already won the Twitter wars by default; instead, it’s hard to see them ever winning them in a million years.
The one advantage Threads has is that because it’s open to the public and because it already has videos and gifs, it is definitely better positioned to inherit the Sports Twitter audience than Bluesky is in the event that Twitter were to become malfunctional or implode or something in the near future. That said, Threads’ improbable, historic bag-fumble keeps Bluesky’s prospects of one day becoming The Next Twitter alive, which is great because it’s a thoroughly pleasant, chill app to be on, and one without annoying blue-checks or sketchy advertisers or an owner pushing dangerous, toxic conspiracy theories. Bluesky remains the only upstart competitor to Twitter that’s managed to capture how Twitter used to feel, and in the event that it were to ever go public, I still believe that it would have an excellent chance of overtaking Twitter one day.
At the same time, that’s the rub. Bluesky remains almost impossible to project because it’s still in beta and has shown so few improvements in the months since it launched as an invite-only platform that it’s hard to envision how long it’ll take for it to actually go public, if it’s even going to happen at all. Bluesky feels more theoretical than anything, like a pitching prospect who’s always a year or two away. It’s an encouraging platform and it has all the potential in the world to usurp Twitter, and yet it doesn’t seem like the people behind it are actually aiming for it to be The Next Twitter, and that it being reminiscent of old Twitter is nothing more than an unintended coincidence. The funny thing about the Twitter wars is that between Twitter, Threads and Bluesky, none of them feel like they’re run by people who understand that literally all users want is an app that’s exactly like Twitter was before Elon Musk came along and ruined it. That’s truly it, and yet so far, none of them have shown that they’re capable of providing that.
What that means is that unless something seismic happens, unless Bluesky either goes public or something weird or catastrophic happens to Twitter that makes it vanish, you can pretty much pencil in the status quo to stay the same for the upcoming NFL season. Twitter will remain sketchy, glitchy, and increasingly dominated by people you wouldn’t want anything to do with in real life, and yet for all its faults, it’s still going to be the most fun, convenient place to follow each and every touchdown with the online people you’ve become familiar with. It will be the guiltiest of guilty pleasures – objectively speaking, none of us should be on Twitter anymore. But so long as it’s the best of a bunch of meh options, it’s still the place to be to follow sports live, for better or (almost certainly) worse.