Diffusion of Innovations Blog #7

 After skimming through the Wikipedia page about Everett Rodger's theory, Diffusion of Innovations, I immediately thought about certain technologies and how quickly or slow they spread through time. In today's day when something is popular, it spreads rapidly. Everyone wants to be a part of the latest trend. Social Media apps are a huge advance in technology, they allow news to be spread, updates on anything going on in the world, and provide a source of communication to friends and loved ones that live far away. 

Threads was a social media app that blew up instantly. This app is created by Meta, which is almost identical to Twitter, now known as X. Elon Musk became the CEO of Twitter, and rebranded the social media networking platform to X. During his time as CEO, he made many changes to the app leaving many users upset. Some of the changes he made were limiting the number of posts a user can see in a day and allowing any user to purchase a verification badge or a blue checkmark on a monthly payment basis. 

Mark Zuckerberg viewed this as a perfect time to create an app that was very similar to X, with hopes that users would transition over to his app. 30 million users signed up within the first 24 hours of the release of
Threads 

Looking through the lens diffusion of innovations theory, Threads caught on and spread rapidly due to the number of people who heard about the release of the app. People told their friends to hop on a new form of technology, and it grew. So many people became early adopters due to the past popularity of  X and gave Threads a shot due to the downfall of X thanks to Elon Musk. 

There is the "late adopters" group to Threads as well. Of course, there are people who do not want to hop on a social media app just for the sake that they are already on many of them, but, Threads had some other turn-offs that pushed people away. If you wanted to sign up for a Threads account, you would have to sign up with your already existing Instagram page. In order to delete your Threads account, people would have to delete both their Instagram and Threads accounts, leaving them with nothing. Of course, the app also had bugs and issues due to it being newlyborn. All of these examples can be downsides of the technology. 

It is hard to weigh a cost-benefit analysis with a new app like Threads. There are many positives that come along with negatives. I think the answer weighs down to each person's interest in social media, whether they are a normal social media user, or an influencer can play a big part in that decision or not.