In 2017, Twitter launched a feature called threads that let users stitch together multiple short tweets into longer, deeper stories.

It was one of the platform’s bigger product enhancements and along with the retweet, @ mention and hashtag it became a crucial tool for super users.

Two points about that moment help explain the seriousness of the threat the company is now facing from Instagram’s new Twitter-like product, which Meta cheekily named Threads.

First, there was the need for faster innovation. It took Twitter three years to launch threads after users began artificially creating them in 2014 by repeatedly replying to previous tweets.

Twitter had Vine before TikTok and a live streaming service called Periscope that withered. Twitter allowed Snapchat to beat them to the idea of disappearing posts.

The second was Twitter’s failure to do much with threads, which constituted some of its best content. There was no way, for example, to search for threads by a person or about a topic.

Twitter threads tended to be higher quality because they required more time, effort and planning than a short post. Threads were written by people who invest most in the platform.

Social media platforms rely on user-generated content. The more valuable and unique the content the more valuable the platform. Twitter was slow to innovate, but more crucially failed to elevate and promote its best-quality posts.

LinkedIn appears to have learned this lesson having recently tweaked it’s algorithm to encourage and reward higher-quality posts.

Despite those shortcomings, Twitter built what seemed like an insurmountable moat in the form of a large, active community. There really wasn’t another option.

Elon Musk’s decision to dismantle and defund the teams and tools that limited hate speech, his decision to fire three quarters of the staff and his general embrace of a more hostile tone changed the game.

It gave Instagram an opening to launch Threads and attract sign ups. Many of those people may cross post on both platforms, but it’s hard not to see this as catastrophic for Twitter. That will likely be true whether Threads kills Twitter or merely wounds it.

Twitter is poorly positioned to respond with product enhancements. It fired the engineers it now needs. It alienated the advertisers who will find Instagram more receptive and reliable.

It’s head spinning how fast the landscape changed. This will be a Harvard Business School case study for the ages, akin to Myspace vs Facebook or Yahoo vs Google.

Musk argued that Twitter could thrive with:

a) Vastly fewer engineers and investment.

b) Few rules or content moderation.

c) Limited or no customer support, PR, IR or mid-level managers.

Those all seem like huge vulnerabilities now.

Ultimately, however, success or failure for Twitter or Threads will hinge on the choice made by a relatively small number of content creators of where to post.