| Hi everyone, it's Ellen in San Francisco. The social media business is turbulent because of human nature. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Medicare patients' records were breached in the MOVEit hack
• Bank of America said an AI stock bubble is unlikely to pop just yet
• Toshiba said its $15 billion takeover offer will start in August When Threads arrived in early July, people created 100 million accounts almost immediately, funneled there by Instagram. But if they're anything like me, they were probably sighing to themselves: Another one? Why can't we just have a permanent, stable social network? Short answer: Blame human nature. Your social graph — the list of people you follow and those who follow you back — is constantly shifting and decaying, which means the apps meant to monetize those graphs always have to refresh. Get used to it, because you'll never have a permanent social network. Take it from someone who knows: Nathan Sharp is a former product leader at Instagram who has spent lots of time trying to understand the life cycle of social graphs. Just a couple weeks ago, he and another Instagram alum, Ryan Olson, released Retro, an app that's trying to recapture the now-fading online habit of sharing photos with friends. "Every five years or so, your friend graph becomes outdated," Sharp said. Think of the way your Facebook friends list started to get bogged down with random people you met at a party in 2012. My Instagram follows contain a lot of "who are they again?" people — friends' long-ago former girlfriends, for example, who I once followed in a bid of cordialness. People hate removing someone from their social graph, Sharp said: "It's a very dramatic act." Instead, it's much easier for people to begin again, free of baggage. Threads, seen one way, is a bid from Meta Platforms Inc. to have users refresh their social graphs — seeding it from Instagram's but encouraging people to add and remove accounts — while keeping control of that graph within Meta. This approach has flaws. Social graphs depend on context. On Twitter, I follow loads of journalists and news sources. On Instagram, I favor friends and visual creators — dancers, textile artists and illustrators. Threads tried to make a Twitter replacement out of my Instagram social graph, and personally, it's falling flat. Fancy footwork on Instagram doesn't often translate to pithy one-liners or important news flashes on Threads. In its first few days of life, Threads cashed in on Instagram's scale — but its troves of initial users aren't sticking around. Daily users, once at 49 million, dropped in a week to 24 million, according to estimates from the research firm Similarweb. Meta has said it's taking steps to improve Threads and give people incentives to come back. But the situation has echoes of another time a tech giant tried to build a social network off of a huge but mismatched set of users — remember Google+?—Ellen Huet Tech companies in the US are talking less about recession and more about AI this earnings season, signaling that companies are increasingly optimistic about a soft economic landing. This year's rebound in cryptocurrencies is turning messaging platform Telegram into an unlikely marketplace for small traders fearful of missing out on the rally. Dell Co-Chief Operating Officer Chuck Whitten is resigning next month as the hardware giant grapples with a historic slowdown in computer demand. Elon Musk's vision of an everything app that includes banking capabilities may not be what Americans are looking for, said Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal with Musk. Charter is raising the price of its broadband service by $5 starting in August, the second such increase in nine months as the cable giant posted virtually no revenue growth in the second quarter. | 
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