[HN Gopher] Threads users down by more than a half
___________________________________________________________________
Threads users down by more than a half
Author : KingOfCoders
Score : 101 points
Date : 2023-07-28 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| It's still fine, they created an escape outlet for journalists
| and public figures in various communities to escape to if they
| finally get pushed out of Twitter. A lot of them haven't left yet
| because they're attached to their current following, but if it
| starts becoming unbearable or they start to lose reach they may
| pull over enough communities that it can supplant the role in the
| culture Twitter used to have. As far as I know the reasons people
| use twitter are different, there's tech twitter, and art twitter,
| and media twitter, and corporate twitter and people engage with
| them for different reasons. Threads would need to replace those
| reasons.
| ghaff wrote:
| I suspect that the "Burn it all down" crowd view Twitter
| through the outrage content lens whereas there are a lot of
| different communities.
| laserbeam wrote:
| > Meta has since added new features, such as separate "following"
| and "for you"' feeds
|
| I haven't used Threads, but it's 2023. People have years of
| experience and expectations using social media, also probably
| shorter attention spans. I'm fairly sure that an launch ready MVP
| in 2023 should be WAY more feature full than 5-10 years ago.
|
| I know there are other factors at play here as well regarding
| retention, but I don't think one can easily recover from a highly
| popular lauch with uncompetitive features.
| mkl95 wrote:
| This is a relatively common phenomenon in multiplayer games. The
| most famous (infamous?) recent case is probably New World, which
| peaked at 900k+ concurrent users and lately peaks at ~20k every
| day [1]
|
| [1] https://steamcharts.com/app/1063730
| AlexandrB wrote:
| To be fair New World shipped with dupes and other game-breaking
| bugs. Threads at least works as a microblogging website.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Maybe it'd have done better if it launched worldwide. I still
| haven't seen the app and I do use twitter. A lot of people I
| follow are from Europe so threads won't have most of the content
| I'd want anyway.
| tschellenbach wrote:
| ok but this is very normal for social apps. doesn't really tell
| you anything. long term retention matters
| us0r wrote:
| I followed people who post yet when I open the app my first 2
| posts (the only posts visible) are from accounts I'd never follow
| (right now Paris Hilton and ESPN) and could care less about. I
| don't want to scroll through their suggested bullshit trying to
| get to what I actually want to read. Maybe this works when you
| are following no one.
| mh- wrote:
| This is what killed it for me. There was also no obvious way
| for me to "train" their recommendations, even if I was willing
| to tolerate an algorithmic-only feed.
| voisin wrote:
| Meta has no ability to not try to control your attention and
| divert it toward ads. They are institutionally incapable of
| anything other than control and divert. It is why I didn't sign
| up for Threads and wouldn't use Oculus if I were given one for
| free. The only Meta product I have access to is Facebook
| because my community is obsessed with FB Marketplace and
| posting upcoming IRL events on FB rather than email. I hate how
| Meta infiltrated our lives and now cannot be excised.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Oculus has no ads though. It has a store with recommended
| apps, which is no different to Steam.
| coding123 wrote:
| So people think Threads is a failure if it grows 100M in 3 days
| and over 23 days goes down to 50M.
|
| You know for a fact that it it slowly grew from 0 to 50M over 6
| months it would have been considered a smashing success.
| [deleted]
| trashface wrote:
| To me it seemed like it was mostly a new front end (of sorts) for
| the existing instagram userbase.
| seydor wrote:
| An easy fix , just let the users fight
| Pixie_Dust wrote:
| Is there a metric for how fast your new account gets banned from:
| Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Reddit, Threads and Twitter. I'm
| asking for a friend /s
| etchalon wrote:
| It is incredibly frustrating that people seem to be operating and
| commenting from a place of:
|
| 1. Twitter is going to fail quickly. 2. Threads is going to
| succeed quickly.
|
| Neither is true, and constantly re-checking the narrative against
| those binary outcomes (complete failure! Unmistakable success!)
| is ludicrous and distracting.
| mgdev wrote:
| Facebook has done enough feature launches that they train their
| teams to look for and expect a huge initial engagement peak as
| people explore the product. It's Deltoid 101.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I don't work there anymore, but gods I miss Deltoid. It was a
| fantastic tool. Google's experimentation UX is like a decade
| behind.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The best thing about (maybe this didn't make it to deltoid)
| was that they counted degrees of freedom for the t stats
| based on the number of days the experiment was running, which
| was incredibly effective in stopping people launching broken
| crap.
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| With all the money Meta has (even more if they didn't blew so
| much on Metaverse) they should have built some kind of
| monetization opportunities for the users from the get go.
| Something like Twitter is doing now.
|
| Nothing attracts people more than money. Give 1/10/100 USD per
| month to super active users that attract views and engagement.
| docflabby wrote:
| The real question is which is dying quicker Facebook or Twitter?
| rglullis wrote:
| Reading at the comments here, I'm baffled to see all the people
| trying to find a reasonable justification for why they are not
| using it. (They didn't launch a web app, they didn't launch in
| Europe, they didn't do X, they should've done Y)
|
| It should be a lot simpler. We should all have learned by now
| that any and every product from Facebook is radioactive waste.
|
| Hopefully Threads is indeed DOA. Anyway, we should have been
| asking ourselves why is it that 100M people even managed to sign
| up in the first place and how to make sure they don't even try
| again.
| mikece wrote:
| Only by half? I thought traffic on Threads was off by 90% a week
| after the launch when "one hundred million people joined"... then
| again they probably joined just to see what it was, were
| unimpressed, and went back to Mastodon or Twitter.
| TheCaptain4815 wrote:
| Their focus on brands over features at launch might be
| 'backfiring' as the platform itself seems so fake.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| I'm rooting for Bluesky, they've been loosening up their invites
| and I've got most of my twitter friends on there and active.
| romesc wrote:
| I'm very curious about Bluesky, still. If anyone's got an
| invite to kick around, romescpro@gmail.com =].
|
| I am earnestly trying to go all in on ActivityPub these days.
| gdulli wrote:
| The email in my bio would love to get started there if you
| happen to have any invites left.
| vehemenz wrote:
| There's Bluesky the platform, and then there are Bluesky's
| users. The platform itself still looks promising, but
| bsky.social is captured by some of the worst people on the
| Internet. At the end of the day, I don't think it's realistic
| for normal people to bring their own network.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Some of the worst huh? I think I've heard the same about
| twitter often.
| justapassenger wrote:
| It's super funny to see people framing that as Threads failing.
|
| They totally may fail. But even after that initial drop (which is
| expected, for something that managed to get so much hype) they're
| likely still the biggest app in the history in terms of DAU in
| few weeks after the launch.
|
| And if there's one thing Meta knows how to do is to copy
| successful idea and slowly grind the growth till it dominates
| market.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > And if there's one thing Meta knows how to do is to copy
| successful idea and slowly grind the growth till it dominates
| market.
|
| How many years/decades of grinding growth will it take to get
| back to the initial DAU numbers?
| sdsd wrote:
| I mean, their main product started out as a cooler MySpace. So
| I think you're right, this is their core competency
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| First of all, I doubt the premise of this entirely, e.g.
| Pokemon Go almost certainly had higher DAU weeks after it
| launched (and it was _growing_ rather than shrinking).
|
| But secondly, I'm skeptical that it's even fair to talk about
| Threads stats using the same measurements as any "new" app,
| since it's really an extension of Instagram. You don't make a
| new account for Threads, you just use your Instagram account.
| They are one and the same, the only difference being which app
| you use to access which features. It's most closely analogous
| to Facebook and the Messenger app - do you count the users of
| each of those separately?
| markdown wrote:
| Yes, this was a massive miss-step IMO, and will be their
| unthreading.
|
| I and half the people I know on Twitter are not owners of
| Instagram accounts. It's absurd to require Insta to login to
| Threads.
| jyxent wrote:
| Pokemon Go had a similar peak and decline after initial
| launch: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37176782
| charcircuit wrote:
| >You don't make a new account for Threads, you just use your
| Instagram account.
|
| If I implement Google oauth into my app, it doesn't make my
| app an extention of Google. It just reduces the friction of
| people making a new account for my app.
| lxgr wrote:
| Google login does not give you a social graph.
| gpm wrote:
| Does instagram give you _the right_ social graph for a
| twitter replacement though? It seems to me that you want
| to follow pretty different kinds of people on different
| forms of social media.
| lxgr wrote:
| It sure beats having to bootstrap one, would be my hunch.
|
| Even just having a few people automatically followed can
| make a difference, even if most people diverge quickly
| after joining.
| justusthane wrote:
| Hmm, not for me. I'm a pretty casual IG user, but I am
| following 500+ accounts, all of which I enjoy. My first
| experience with Threads (despite importing my IG profile)
| was a feed full of accounts I had never heard of before,
| and almost nothing from the accounts I follow. Granted,
| that's probably because the accounts I follow weren't
| posting Threads yet, but but even now things haven't
| changed much in that regard.
|
| Additionally, 90+% of my Threads feed is photos, so,
| like, what's the point?
|
| I've opened it a couple of times and scrolled for maybe
| 30 seconds and lost interest.
|
| I'm sure if I put a little effort into it I could find
| more interesting accounts to follow, but at least in my
| experience the "bootstrapping" hasn't really worked.
| monetus wrote:
| > _I'm sure if I put a little effort into it I could find
| more interesting accounts to follow_
|
| Plenty of good developer-focused content now, and they
| implemented a following-only feed. Worth having, for me
| so far.
| tosrn wrote:
| Curious about this: any developers focused account you'd
| recommend?
| jjav wrote:
| > still the biggest app in the history in terms of DAU in few
| weeks
|
| It's not very reasonable to consider it a new app when it's in
| many ways just a shell on top of instagram.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Absolutely this is failure.
|
| Twitter/threads is (or should be) a highly viral application.
|
| New users should find themselves compelled to use the product
| and compelled to encourage others to use it.
|
| With a 100 million user head start, if they were succeeding
| this shoukd have immediately resulted in the viral loop being
| triggered into explosive growth.
|
| It's a huge failure.
|
| Not necessarily unrecoverable, but absolutely a gargantuan
| fail.
|
| 100,000,000 signups should ignite your viral engine and blast
| into orbit. Enough functionality to be viral was the MV part of
| "Minimum Viable" for Threads.
| peter422 wrote:
| By this logic Twitter should also be growing, as it's even
| better than threads in terms of content.
|
| Yet not only is Twitter not growing but it's shrinking.
|
| I think your expectations for success in this vertical are
| off.
| dahfizz wrote:
| > Yet not only is Twitter not growing but it's shrinking.
|
| Source? Musk just tweeted about a new all-time monthly user
| record. It's not impossible that he would lie, but my
| impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
|
| There's a whole lot of _discussion_ about Twitter shrinking
| and high profile people leaving, but they don 't. Stephen
| king comes to mind as a big critic that threatened over and
| over to leave, but he hasn't.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684978651857596429
| threeseed wrote:
| > new all-time monthly user record
|
| I have been using Twitter almost since the beginning.
|
| Never have I ever seen this many bots and fake accounts
| on the platform.
|
| So I would be highly dubious of that user record count.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Musk just tweeted about a new all-time monthly user
| record. It's not impossible that he would lie
|
| On the rare occasion he makes non-trivial, falsifiable
| claims, its pretty common that they turn out to be other-
| than-accurate, yes.
|
| > but my impression is not at all that Twitter is
| shrinking.
|
| My impression is that the set of advertisers (not regular
| Blue users, though they are a different kind of
| advertiser paying for reach) are narrowing and moving
| downmarket in a way which would take truly enormous
| numbers of Blue users to compensate for.
|
| Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the
| point.
| dahfizz wrote:
| It wouldn't surprise me if Twitter revenue is down. It
| also wouldn't surprise me if Twitter revenue is up.
| Unfortunately, with it being private I don't think we'll
| ever know.
|
| > Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the
| point.
|
| In a thread entirely about Twitter/threads user count,
| whether it's shrinking is the entire point.
| rpgbr wrote:
| Half a billion users? Is Elon counting everyone who sees
| an embed tweet as a user?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Google says "Twitter has approximately 450 million monthly
| active users as of 2022".
|
| I'd say that's probably broadly the number of potential
| Twitter users.
|
| If you think user growth should be exponential to all
| people in the planet, then that is false.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| in my world of twitter/x I see no signs of shrinking...
| monetus wrote:
| I clicked through from the sibling link to Elon's
| profile, and only see posts from last April and older?
| The reach of the site is.. not reaching. It is pulling
| back.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I honestly think this is a very silly take. I don't think any
| of this is how any of this works.
|
| Threads attracted two kinds of people: 1. People coming
| mostly from instagram / tiktok who had never considered using
| Twitter because it had an established reputation and they
| knew it wasn't the kind of product for them, and 2. People
| switching from Twitter because they love Twitter-the-idea but
| can no longer stand Twitter-the-actual-product-today.
|
| Most of people from group #1 tried it and concluded that yep,
| it wasn't for them. There is zero surprising about that, and
| it's where the giant initial numbers came from. But if _any_
| of those people stuck around, that 's pure bonus.
|
| The more interesting question is what's going on with group
| #2. Certainly lots of them decided there were too many
| missing features at launch and kept using Twitter mostly. But
| that is not a "they'll never check back", those people are
| still in play for any of Twitter to keep or its competitors
| to win eventually. But the current DAUs wouldn't be where
| they are if a significant portion of this group hadn't
| decided to actually stick around. And that's pretty
| surprising.
|
| For years the conventional wisdom has been that you can't
| actually _convert_ users from one social network to another
| in the exact same niche. You can cut off growth - like
| instagram adding stories corresponding to Snapchat 's growth
| plateau - but people stay where their existing networks are.
|
| But not this time!
| somethoughts wrote:
| I think a key strategic weapon that Meta has that no other
| social media will be able to match is its existing userbase
| on FB and Insta (i.e. basically all of the 7B+ human
| population). This can indefinitely be tapped as an audience
| for Thread content creators and advertisers.
|
| Whereas most social media apps have the cold start problem
| (the stars need to align such that creators and users show
| up at the exact same time), Zuckerberg has solved it for
| Meta.
|
| Threads doesn't need to be a hit on day 1 or even 100
| because it has the existing Meta user base that counted on
| to consume Thread content (whether they like it or not).
|
| For example, I have a FB account but am too lazy/old to
| sign up for Instagram but I did/do see a lot of Instagram
| reels that are converted into FB reels - particularly as
| Instagram reels was starting to take off. I am sure when it
| is monetizing those views for content creators and
| advertisers the converted reels get counted.
|
| So while the power Instagram/Thread creaters will likely
| only push/consume the content in the corresponding app,
| Meta has the unique platform level ability to push the
| content to users of all 3 apps (i.e. FB/Insta/Threads).
| ipaddr wrote:
| That second group includes people who post to both and most
| fall into this group. To someone selling a product this is
| just another market. To others now is the time to get
| followers.
|
| What percentage have left twitter for threads? Unknown.
| yafbum wrote:
| It's dumb to pass this kind of judgement so quickly. Nobody
| should expect massive habit changes from one day to the next.
| All that a viral product needs is some foothold to grow from,
| and by that measure threads still has a fantastic foothold.
| paganel wrote:
| People in here are emotionally invested in seeing Musk fail,
| no amount of reasoning can make them see the forrest from the
| trees.
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Oh no no, in my reading of the sentiments they emotionally
| invested in seeing both the whole xthreads things crash and
| burn. I'm buying popcorn.
|
| For all it's faults I quite enjoying pre-musky Twitter but
| I completely abandoned the shitshow even before the insane
| rename. I was an early FB user but left that many years ago
| around the time of the CA scandal.
|
| Mastrodon is too quirky and challenging to go mainstream
| which is why I think it will remain great and I'm loving it
| there.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Got it. Unless they had everyone on earth signed up by now,
| it's a huge failure.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Facebook had to contain the growth.
|
| People were battering down the door for access.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Can you remind me how they got 100M users in the first
| week?
|
| You seriously compare growth at the planet scale with a
| growth at few universities?
| csallen wrote:
| It's common startup knowledge at this point that a splashy
| launch will always lead to subsequent declines in usage,
| because huge numbers of non-ideal users are attracted by the
| initial press event.
|
| The viral growth you're talking about pretty much never
| occurs after a huge launch event like this, and is reserved
| for more methodical releases and/or lower initial starting
| user counts, e.g. Instagram testing Stories, Facebook growing
| from college to college.
| mise_en_place wrote:
| It's a failure but I think it leads to a better outcome, both
| for threads and Twitter. Even if it's #2, that will put
| pressure on Twitter to improve and vice versa.
| Dirak wrote:
| Building products and slowly grinding away at improving DAU
| is Meta's bread and butter. This has been the case with IG
| Stories vs Snap, now IG Reels vs Tiktok (IG Reels rev set to
| exceed tiktok as early as 2024 https://www.mbi-
| deepdives.com/meta2q23/). Meta is setting up the exact same
| playbook for Threads, and given their track record, I
| wouldn't bet against them.
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| What is one thing Meta succeeded in copying and beat the
| original?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Well, MySpace for starters.
|
| Facebook Marketplace seems to have _totally_ replaced
| Craiglist as well, where I live, for buying /selling.
| Facebook Messenger took over e.g. MSN for a lot of people,
| the News Feed replaced a dedicated news site for a lot of
| people, and so forth. Events replaced Evite I think (or
| similar?), FB Photos basically replaced Flickr back in the
| day...
| mkl wrote:
| MySpace? Most of the other pre-Facebook social media sites
| too. It's not about being an exact copy, but sharing enough
| features that it can subsume those roles.
| justapassenger wrote:
| 2 most recent - stories basically destroyed Snaps growth
| potential and Reels are on track to overshadow TikTok.
| gundmc wrote:
| There seems to be a desire to watch Meta fail, and that's
| reflected in the media coverage around Threads. This is broadly
| true of many large tech companies, but particularly
| Meta/Facebook.
| lancesells wrote:
| Well yeah. The honeymoon is over and we've seen how morally
| bankrupt these companies are. Twitter has someone who posted
| child abuse images (as a warning or something) but doesn't
| ban them because they create engagement. Meta bought a VPN
| company and paid people (I think in some cases kids/teens) to
| use it so they can slurp up their entire internet browsing.
| Amazon has people pissing into water bottles so the founder
| can ride a giant dick into space.
|
| These are awful companies (not all awful employees) with
| awful leadership.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Twitter has someone who posted child abuse images
|
| Can you say more on this?
| [deleted]
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| [dead]
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _There seems to be a desire to watch Meta fail_
|
| around here the only desire that exceeded the desire to watch
| Meta fail was the desire to see Threads kill Twitter first on
| its way down
| steve76 wrote:
| [dead]
| dbg31415 wrote:
| It pushed a bunch of sponsored ad content that wasn't targeted
| correctly, and never really showed me anything from my friends.
| It got annoying fast, so it got deleted.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| I mean it's fairly simple, I don't know why so much news is being
| generated by this the past few days and discussions too?
|
| They shoehorned a new service/app ontop of there existing user
| base, a huge amount of people went to check it out because it was
| forced down their throats and then a reasonable amount decided it
| was a waste of time and a few people are still playing with it,
| likely a lot of wannabe influences seeing it as a chance to get
| an early lead on a new platform.
|
| It will likely die further, except facebook and social media
| being as toxic as they are and as this interview suggests,
| facebook are going to add more 'hooks' to get people addicted or
| dark patterns etc to drive usage.
|
| Everything here is what you would expect, so who cares?
| tennisflyi wrote:
| I just want a good night. I'm around one million
| davidw wrote:
| It seems to have enough people that it has some legs. I am really
| looking forward to a web version of it, but otherwise enjoy it,
| despite some growing pains.
|
| _Edit_ I 'm here: https://www.threads.net/@davidnwelton
|
| _Edit2_ If I think about it some, the biggest drawback about
| Threads for me is swapping one egocentric billionaire who is
| rapidly going off the rails for another who is, for the moment,
| more stable, but has still accumulated a godawful amount of
| wealth and power. Mastodon seems like the alternative if you
| really hate that kind of setup, but... it doesn 't seem to have
| much traction.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Mastodon seems like the alternative if you really hate that
| kind of setup, but... it doesn't seem to have much traction.
|
| People keep saying this as if the only "success" mastadon can
| have is by being in everyone's pocket. It's not an SV unicorn
| startup, it's not trying to buy out some investors. It's doing
| exactly what it is designed to do: be a user owned platform.
| Not everyone will want that all the time, and some people will
| never want that, and that's fine, not everyone spent 24/7 on
| the forums of the old web either.
|
| We could stop considering "Everyone is using it all the time"
| as the desired end goal maybe?
| vikramkr wrote:
| for social media though that's a pretty important end goal.
| If the people I want to follow aren't using it, then I don't
| want to use it either. It's like with messenger apps - the
| one that everyone else is using is the one that wins. And if
| they aren't using it and I am, then part of my use of the
| platform becomes trying to get the people I want to talk to
| onto the platform. It's not a silicon valley thing - it's a
| communications thing. "everyone is using it all the time" was
| an important end goal for the post office too, and highways
| and other shared infrastructure with network effects.
| MildRant wrote:
| I would be awestruck if they made a web version. Instagram goes
| through great pains to screw web users. Apps have more control
| and collect more data after all.
| standardUser wrote:
| Embeddable Tweets are a fundamental part of what made Twitter
| an integral part of our lives. There will be embeddable
| Threads.
| elicash wrote:
| They have already said it's in the works.
| bena wrote:
| I think the lack of a web client is a big reason. Also, I'm not
| sure if there's an API for it. If there isn't, that would need
| to be implemented.
| yangikan wrote:
| Also, one can only login through instagram login id.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I kind of doubt it will get an API. Seems like Reddit and
| Twitter have come to regret how much power an API gives to
| users to sidesteps or whatever they don't like about the
| platform.
| pityJuke wrote:
| > It seems to have enough people that it has some legs.
|
| My view too. Not the best service ever offered, but allows me
| to continue distancing myself from Twitter.
|
| Would I much prefer it if Twitter was a public company and/or
| ran by anyone else? Sure, but that isn't happening, so, I'll
| take Mastodon and any other reasonable alternative. We'll see
| how the market pans out.
|
| An aspect of me wants Mastodon to win... but there's a deep
| cynicism in it ever working at Twitter scale (which may be the
| point, in the end).
| user6723 wrote:
| Why post somewhere where you'll get shadowbanned when you're not
| even doing anything wrong.
|
| Threads is like a fake internet.
| gochi wrote:
| Not sure Threads even has the ability to be shadowbanned yet
| lol. Maybe you just mean banned.
| dhosek wrote:
| I don't use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that's
| where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers)
| are. It's becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn't going
| to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but
| what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen.
| Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out
| with algorithmic feed only and the algorithmic feed on Twitter
| made a lot of people skeptical of that. Throw in the phone-app-
| only interface and it's not where my people want to be. It's a
| chicken and egg problem to be sure, and I don't know where the
| new writer bar is going to be. It might end up being Threads
| ultimately, but the big challenge is for whatever new platform to
| get the movement happening.
| milsorgen wrote:
| The feed could be somewhat overlooked, at least for the time
| being, if hashtags and searching were properly implemented. If
| no interesting conversations appear in my feed then there's no
| way for me to spend more time on Threads. Open, Look, Close.
| Repeat that a few times and give up. I gave it a chance but
| there's just so little to do.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| He didn't kill threads but he definitely killed it's
| profitability. Let's see how he recovers from that
| Tao3300 wrote:
| What's a Twitter? We're supposed to be xing and rexing our xs
| on x now.
| nerdawson wrote:
| > It's becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn't going
| to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk,
| but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen.
|
| First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
|
| Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the
| death knell for Twitter. It wasn't.
|
| My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that
| comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly
| revert back to their familiar network that they know and like
| (regardless of how much they claim not to).
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
|
| Just about all the people whose opinions I'm interested in
| hearing are on Mastodon now. I don't really care if anyone
| else shows up. Maybe it's better that they don't.
| boneitis wrote:
| Right. Hell, I wasn't among those saying Mastodon was going
| to be the "new place" or that Twitter was otherwise on its
| way out. Even with my proximity to tech circles, Mastodon
| seemed to me hardly a blip on most people's radars.
|
| I only finally checked it out during all the Reddit
| protests and am thoroughly amazed to simply see content
| without all the cruft.
|
| It is only now that I don't feel as sure; Twitter still has
| its login wall today. I reactivate my facebook account only
| when, say, I absolutely need to interact with a particular
| small page/business. I don't use Instagram. I have only
| since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following
| list and make a first pass at building my Fedifeed by
| seeing who's moved over (incidentally, most of the people I
| follow that are still active). This time, I might actually
| check my feed regularly while logged in, since I'm not
| seeing a sponsored submission or ad every other post.
| fivre wrote:
| you're here, and your old blog is about tech stuff, so
| there's a decent chance you follow a lot of tech people.
| there are plenty of _those_ on mastodon, because tech
| people will suffer through bad UX if the product has
| certain qualities that that community values (federation
| being the big one in this case)
|
| that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want
| to think about internet application protocols (most people)
| throw up their hands and leave at the first notion of
| needing to choose an instance or needing a JS bookmarklet
| to follow someone not on your instance
|
| plenty of those people are experts in their field and write
| interesting content i wouldn't otherwise encounter, but
| they aren't migrating to mastodon because of that, and
| there's a decent chance they won't migrate anywhere and
| will return to sharing their work in niche walled garden
| academic journals and conferences
|
| sure, mastodon maybe keeps out the garbage
| firstnamelastname9023285023 accounts that do nothing but
| send low-content replies and retweet inane celebrity(s'
| social media managers') posts, but it's keeping them out
| because only a very specific population will bother to get
| in, which is a bad filter
| _jal wrote:
| Yeah, same here. For my purposes, Mastodon is superior to
| what Twitter was at its peak.
|
| I only look at Xitter for Ukraine news - that community
| hasn't migrated elsewhere. But that's mostly on third-party
| pages, I don't log in anymore, so the site itself is
| useless to me.
| hooverd wrote:
| Mastodon isn't going to be /the/ new place. Hopefully it will
| become part of many new places.
| nerdawson wrote:
| Last year Mastodon went through a hype cycle. Everyone was
| declaring Twitter over. You had people stating they were
| leaving for good, dual-posting, etc. Funnily enough many of
| those same people are back on Twitter today with little
| mention of Mastodon.
|
| It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people
| leave, the value of the network goes down so even more
| people leave.
|
| Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but
| the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in
| a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be
| the most avid hardcore fans.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| The Mastodon "hype cycle" was jam packed with people
| saying "this isn't it"[1]. The choice of server, account
| migration issues (partly resolved), and just some
| aesthetic reasons made it obvious it wasn't going to be
| the thing. There was a strong, I would say majority
| sentiment that everyone was waiting for some more
| Twitter-like competitor.
|
| "Everyone was declaring Twitter over."
|
| I mean...Twitter is very much over. References to
| Twitter, or Twitter being the canonical source, has
| utterly disappeared. Whole media spheres have made
| Twitter just another place, not the place. Whole fields
| have dried up on Twitter.
|
| If you're hardcore into culture wars, Twitter is probably
| your place. Probably feels as alive as ever. In virtually
| any other field (sports, media, tech), while some people
| with big accounts are still trying to hang on -- for
| obvious reasons as other platforms just set them back --
| engagement and "the crowd" has absolutely dissolved.
| Governments, agencies and groups used Twitter as a public
| space, and not only have many pulled back, I cannot
| fathom anyone making that choice today.
|
| And that doesn't mean one needs to cite where someone
| replaced their "Twitter-like" activity. Many people just
| took it as an opportunity to assess the joy that sort of
| site was bringing them and decoupled. In the same way
| that the decline of blogger didn't mean that other sites
| grew the same amount...many people just stopped blogging.
|
| [1] isn't it for a "general public, all topics" solution.
| Mastodon absolutely is a technical solution for niche
| spaces and groups and is absolutely flourishing in those
| realms.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > It (mastodon) peaked in November. Musk's antics might
| prop it (Mastodon) up every once in a while but the long
| term trend doesn't look good.
|
| At least that's what I think you mean. Lots of ambiguous
| "it" in the text above.
|
| Not accurate according to
| https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/ or my
| subjective experience. mastodon is fine. mastodon is
| growing. Mastodon is fundamentally not a business that
| needs to "get big fast or die trying" so that VCs can
| make their big ROI back. Slow, steady improvement is
| fine. Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in
| decline. (1)
|
| I'd say - to write the above in a clearer way: "Twitter
| peaked in November 2022 and then went into decline.
| Musk's antics might prop twitter up every once in a while
| but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction
| is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users of
| twitter will be the most avid hardcore fans."
|
| 1) https://doctorow.medium.com/of-course-mastodon-lost-
| users-c4...
| burkaman wrote:
| It did peak in December last year, but then it "declined"
| and stabilized at more than double the active users it
| had before Elon bought Twitter: https://mastodon-
| analytics.com/
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| That chart is missing the big late-june/early-july burst
| that came when Twitter locked out non-registered users
| and put a cap on read tweets. Big bump in new
| registrations and since then activity has been up a bunch
| as well. Not as big as December, but mostly because it
| was short lived.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| It's so funny to me watching everyone debate about what
| is or isn't going to be the next ultimate single massive
| platform.
|
| I, and many Fediverse people, are on the Fedi explicitly
| hoping it isn't in that list. Mastodon is a success to me
| because of the thousands of people on it and that I
| interact with, and that it is precisely not containing
| the masses.
|
| So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter.
| Many of us however are looking for exactly something not
| Reddit or Twitter.
|
| Mastodon and Lemmy/etc are a smash success to me. They
| have more traffic, users and activity than the other
| comparable options combined (citation needed). And most
| importantly, they did it without becoming the next big
| thing.
|
| Plus if, god forbid, it does become the next big thing -
| It can still isolate and be a small forum. That alone is
| lovely to me.
| notpachet wrote:
| Whenever someone points out that Mastodon has failed to
| become the new Twitter, I just nod and smile, nod and
| smile.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...As people leave, the value of the network goes down
| so even more people leave...
|
| But, i would posit that there is a rhetorical currency
| exchange at play here. The "value" that one might assign
| to a silo like Facebook or Threads is not the same
| "value" one might assign to various software stacks
| and/or networks on the Fediverse. Like, its not enough
| for me to state that they're different/like comparing
| apples vs oranges. I mean, for example, if I only have a
| single kid/offspring, does that mean that i have not
| grown the "value" of my family, because i have not
| maximized my partner's reproductive capabilities, or
| resorted to adoption to extend that, etc.? That's sill of
| course. Well, i assure you, the intent of networks on the
| Fediverse is NOT the same as the goals and intent of
| silos like Facebook, twitter, threads, etc.
|
| I think @unshavedyak stated it great with their comments,
| but this is my favorite of theirs: "...So many people
| think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us
| however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or
| Twitter..."
| rglullis wrote:
| > It peaked in November and then went into decline.
|
| https://fedidb.org/software/Mastodon
| nemo8551 wrote:
| For me mastodon is where I get my cybersecurity and infosec
| chat from now. HN is my generic techy stuff Reddit
| replacement, insta for mountain biking and twitter is for
| lower league Scottish football- it's very well setup on
| there.
|
| I'm not sure where threads sat for me, it was all the same
| folk who I follow on instagram but only posting text, now
| they post pics on thread and their reels on insta.
|
| I'm not fully up on all the fedoverse stuff but I think
| that's just due to a lack of effort so far.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Meanwhile, Twitter keeps its slow death.
|
| People are certainly going somewhere (outside?), what isn't
| happening is for all of them going to the same place. IMO,
| that's a very good thing, but it does break any ambition of
| social world domination large companies may have.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| Last numbers I saw, Twitter DAUs have held pretty steady.
| What evidence do you have of a "slow death"?
| _jal wrote:
| Xitter has moved from offering 50% off ad purchases of
| $250k a couple months ago to threatening removal of "gold
| checks" from companies that don't spend $1k.
|
| That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven
| company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure. Tesla lowered prices and the press
| made the same kinds of predictions. Come earning season
| Tesla clobbered its competitors.
| afavour wrote:
| > that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim
| not to).
|
| I assure you I genuinely do not like what Twitter has become.
| The lack of viable alternative doesn't change that fact.
| rglullis wrote:
| Mastodon (actually, the Fediverse as a whole) is still
| growing in a very healthy, organic rate. Threads just tried
| to buy its way into a bootstrapped network.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Maybe give threads more than _3 weeks_ before declaring it
| hasn 't dethroned Twitter.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I feel like this is a battle that will be measured in years
| at this point.
| lesuorac wrote:
| What replaced AIM? Facebook messenger? Discord? Twitter?
| Whatsapp?
|
| Twitter can go away without being replaced by a singular
| entity.
| gochi wrote:
| MSN Messenger replaced AIM globally.
| sebastianavina wrote:
| and ICQ
| bhauer wrote:
| Is this sarcasm?
|
| If not, maybe wait more than 3 weeks before declaring it
| Twitter's successor.
| scythe wrote:
| VC money is tight right now, and Twitter was never
| profitable. If I were an investor, you'd have to have some
| kind of revenue story if you were selling me a Twitter
| killer.
|
| Mastodon works for the people who are willing to "pay" (in
| social labor or hosting money) the startup costs. Threads
| very likely has the limitations it has because that's what
| Meta thinks will generate useful advertising data -- their
| bread and butter.
|
| For tech people, I think the most likely way to get a Twitter
| killer in the near-medium term would be to convince Microsoft
| to add that feature to Github. As usual, you're the product.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
|
| Mastodon is chugging along, still growing steadily,
| unglamorously. I don't see a boom and bust there. It is
| unbacked by VC "get big or die trying" money, not buoyed by
| big tech or media hype. Don't write it off in a week or a
| month.
| analognoise wrote:
| Mastodon has been really cool recently. It was bare at first,
| but I've been back since November and there's a critical mass
| of awesome shit and cool people imo.
| danpalmer wrote:
| I completely agree that Mastodon isn't the new place, and I
| am increasingly thinking Threads may not be either (at least
| not to Twitter level, or not for a few years), however I'm
| very convinced that _Twitter_ is no longer the place either.
|
| The technology is crumbling (see rate limiting, interaction
| counts), the product is moving further away from what people
| want not towards it (see Zuck's tweets about Threads to see
| what popular product direction looks like, even if it's not
| perfect), the ad quality has dropped very noticeably
| suggesting they've lost good top paying advertisers, the new
| ad payout program suggests that their ad inventory is low
| anyway (see also interaction numbers here too), and the
| culture has gone from pretty bad to openly hostile to large
| swathes of the population, at least among English speakers
| (see anti-trans trending topics, rise of hate speech).
|
| I'd agree that reversion to the mean and people going back to
| what they know is the most likely course of action in most
| circumstances, but these are not most circumstances. Twitter
| can't recover from this, at least not without a change of
| leadership and many years to rebuild.
| LexiMax wrote:
| Mastodon was really never going to be that place where most
| of the internet moved. It would've been nice in a perfect
| world, but it's simply not set up as an advertiser-friendly
| social networking site that would attract celebrities and
| brands, and quite frankly I think the vast majority of its
| userbase considers that a feature and not a bug.
|
| Still, I believe that BlueSky and Threads remain a looming
| existential threat to Twitter. One important role that
| Twitter filled was being the de-facto centralized RSS feed.
| It is by far the thing that I see that Twitter is still used
| for, even by ex-Twitter users and people like me who never
| used the site in the first place.
|
| To be the centralized RSS feed, you need a web-facing
| interface, so you can pass links around over the clearnet.
| Threads doesn't have one. BlueSky isn't even open to the
| greater public yet. But either one of those could change
| overnight.
| panic wrote:
| It's also possible there will be no successor place.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I think you can now disable algorithmic feed, which was my main
| gripe as well. But the lack of website is still a show-stopper
| for me.
| dhosek wrote:
| If I had to guess what the indicator of where the new writer
| bar ends up, it will be wherever Joyce Carol Oates goes. Not
| because people like her or her tweets necessarily, but that
| she's kind of like the black hole at the center of a galaxy,
| you don't want to get too close (she's the queen of the bizarre
| takes, not to mention her post with a rather disturbing picture
| of her feet), and yet everything kind of ineluctably ends up
| orbiting around her anyway.
| numboreal wrote:
| She once posted a picture of her keyboard that haunts me.
| davidw wrote:
| > Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out
| with algorithmic feed
|
| That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for
| people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in
| and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people
| "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting
| with people you care more about.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The empty timeline problem is a completely different problem
| of an algorithmic timeline of not people you follow.
|
| Hell, it required an Instagram account to sign up. You
| _already_ have their follow graph.
| snarkyturtle wrote:
| Agree, they rolled out the "Following" tab and it's a ghost
| town. Shipping it with the algorithmic feed at least made it
| look like a lively, if somehwat chaotic place.
| anonymousab wrote:
| A common complaint with Threads was that, no after who you
| blocked or muted, it's near impossible to get away from a
| feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip
| nonsense. That seems to be part of the ongoing design intent
| - not just an aspect of how they wanted to bootstrap the
| service.
| spansoa wrote:
| > a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity
| gossip
|
| And marketers. Remember: marketers ruin everything. They
| early adopt every up-and-coming platform and fill it with
| grifty posts.
| davidw wrote:
| A few days ago they introduced a 'following' feed. They
| seem pretty intent on iterating quickly on it.
|
| And even without that, the influencers mostly went away for
| me when I followed people I found more interesting.
| rglullis wrote:
| > I don't use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because
| that's where the people that I like to interact with (mostly
| writers) are
|
| For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts _on_ Mastodon by
| way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I
| believe.
|
| "But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't
| care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and
| made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing
| my responses are effectively zero.
| tivert wrote:
| > For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon
| by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular
| I believe.
|
| Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted
| attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting
| against?
| rglullis wrote:
| That was his _excuse_ , there are some alternative theories
| that say that he put the rate limits only to cut his AWS
| bills.
|
| Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers
| is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive
| (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if
| he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be
| surprised if the archive.org people came up with some
| browser extension that could help replicate the content
| elsewhere.
| slimsag wrote:
| [deleted]
| rglullis wrote:
| Wow, this seems really bad. Did you ask for your money
| back?
| foogazi wrote:
| > Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out
| with algorithmic feed only
|
| On it's first fucking day
|
| Been using the new follow feed and honestly I appreciate the
| algo feed sprinkling some randomness here and there
| [deleted]
| flopriore wrote:
| Yeah, that's exactly the "Cold Start Problem". You must get the
| "hard side" of the network (drivers for Uber, content creator
| for social networks) asap and they must be happy to use your
| platform, otherwise your product is going to be a failure
| throwaway-243 wrote:
| why not just ignore the "chaos monkeys" and focus on your
| writers instead? no one is forcing you to interact with anyone
| you don't like on X.
| medler wrote:
| One thing that's impossible to ignore is that Twitter now
| forces you to read bad replies. Before, it would rank the
| most popular replies near the top, but now you have to scroll
| past lots of low-quality replies from people who are boosted
| just because they pay for the privilege.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Bad replies aren't necessarily the least popular. Any
| number of people would prefer blue check (basically signed)
| replies than pseudonymous drivebys whose entire
| participation in twitter is sharp replies that get
| massively upvoted.
|
| Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified
| accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how
| many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts
| can only improve user experience (for content providers,
| not professional reply guys.)
| dmix wrote:
| I use Twitter daily and unless you're looking at major
| threads (like an Elon tweet) it's rarely more than a single
| verified user (if at all). And they are rarely better/worse
| than the average Tweet normally is in those mega threads.
|
| It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO
| dullcrisp wrote:
| What's X?
| throwaway-243 wrote:
| it's that thing you used to call twitter.
|
| x.com
| notThrowingAway wrote:
| This is what GP was referring to when they said "chaos
| monkeys"
| agubelu wrote:
| If I go to x.com it redirects me to a site called
| twitter.com in which there are things called "tweets" and
| "retweets"
| tempodox wrote:
| A variable you could substitute with anything.
| qup wrote:
| I'd like to substitute it for x
|
| which holds a value "X"
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It's what Musk is trying to rebrand Twitter as.
| [deleted]
| shlubbert wrote:
| It's a slang term for MDMA. Clearly the poster means that
| you don't have to interact with anyone when you're on
| ecstasy.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The X Window System allows applications to present bitmap
| images on a display, and receive mouse and keyboard input.
| The main implementation is X.Org, shepherded by the X.Org
| Foundation: https://x.org/. Originally for Unix-like
| systems, it is now available on many other architectures,
| such as Microsoft Windows: I find ssh's X forwarding
| feature especially useful there.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| So does twitter redirect to x.org now?
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| I'd like to see some semi centralized but social benefit Corp
| create a Twitter that utilizes the h factor score that
| scientific researchers have.
|
| ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how
| controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how
| many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do
| sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are
| accurate.
|
| Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more
| respected the brighter the blue color.
| ghawk1ns wrote:
| > It's becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn't going
| to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk
|
| Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to
| train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that
| fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has
| been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter
| will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death.
|
| You use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed
| lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers?
| Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a
| source of income?
| [deleted]
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from
| pre-Musk.
|
| If you don't have a Twitter account, you cannot see threads
| on Twitter anymore.
| tedivm wrote:
| And if you don't pay for twitter blue you can't DM people
| anymore unless they know to explicitly turn off that new
| filter. You also are limited in how many tweets you can
| view in a day, and without paying your reach is also
| shortened.
|
| At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted
| in my feed are now showing up all the time.
| mst wrote:
| If you're using twitter web, the Control Panel for
| Twitter browser extension takes the 'for you' abomination
| behind the back of the barn and gives it both barrels.
|
| (there's also a userscript version IIRC)
| davidw wrote:
| > Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions
|
| He already has?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i.
| ..
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-
| inves...
|
| It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to
| disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty
| underwhelming.
|
| I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has
| been successful and earned a decent amount of goodwill in
| other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal
| with social media which is just super difficult to manage
| even in the best of cases.
| wombat-man wrote:
| The network Twitter has will be hard to break for sure. But I
| think it's already worth much less than what he paid. Musk
| needs to be careful here, it is possible to lose.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| I would go further and say that at this point it will be
| difficult not to lose. Twitter is a wounded animal just
| waiting to be eaten.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| It couldn't be more fundamentally different for people who
| just want to read content without an account. Previously,
| Twitter was a thing that existed, now it's not a thing that
| exists.
| throwaway-243 wrote:
| 99.9% of people will just click the google login button and
| continue on as if nothing had happened. i sympathize with
| you. i had to make a throwaway google account. but it's not
| even close to relevant to the vast majority of users. not
| saying that's a good thing but it's reality.
| afavour wrote:
| > 99.9% of people will just click the google login button
| and continue on as if nothing had happened
|
| You have a very, very rosy perception of login walls. All
| the stats I've see would disagree.
| superfrank wrote:
| Based on the most recent estimates of Twitter's value, Musk
| has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars.
|
| You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different
| and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but
| their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The
| company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've
| saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a
| year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a
| number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.
| nomel wrote:
| > Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of
| dollars.
|
| Why would a user of the site/app care about this? How is it
| impacting their experience?
| rapind wrote:
| It doesn't usually matter to the user "why" a product is
| no longer appealing.
|
| Financial woes though will usually produce change that
| impacts the user, for better or worse (a good kick in the
| ass, or craven desperation may follow).
| superfrank wrote:
| I never made the claim that a user should. The guy I was
| replying to said "Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of
| billions" and I was responding to that.
| biscuitech wrote:
| Because if the site isn't making money, it's not
| sustainable. Unless musk wants to run it from his pocket
| money.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| It will certainly impact my experience when Musk gets
| tired of losing money and sells the husk to some grifter
| or Verizon.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Why are you asking that like someone suggested it? This
| was a reply to a specific claim.
| nomel wrote:
| I read the replies oas being in the context of the first
| comment they were under. It wasn't clear to me that the
| context changed.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Are you kidding? Twitter has limits on how much you can read
| now. It's useless for me.
| nomel wrote:
| I don't have a twitter account. Do you regularly hit the
| 1,000 tweet view limit? That's over 83 tweets an hour, for
| 12 hours.
| bhauer wrote:
| I consider myself a pretty frequent Twitter user. I don't
| pay and I've never run into the daily limit.
| zogrodea wrote:
| I had hit the rate limit a few trimes when it was new,
| but never since then. I think the limit has been either
| removed or vastly reduced from that experience. I don't
| see any of the people I follow complaining about it
| either.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Clicking into a thread will use up those views really
| fast. Could easily hit 200 views in 5 minutes.
| nomel wrote:
| So, you hit the limit often?
|
| I'm trying to find if there's anyone who regularly
| experiences hitting the limit.
| gochi wrote:
| Twitter doesn't track your eyeballs to see how many you
| literally read. It's how many has been sent to your
| device.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Scrolling through 1,000 tweets in your timeline will take
| a lot less time than you imagine.
| fourseventy wrote:
| It turns out that the network effect is indeed powerful.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I can't see how threads can be "launched" without a desktop
| client.
|
| That's not even an MVP, it's non existent.
|
| Some of these supposed genius tech leaders are really showing
| themselves to have very questionable decision making capability.
|
| It was also extremely off putting that it was so tightly linked
| to instagram.
|
| They also made a mistake by not leveraging peoples desire to get
| their own Twitter handle on threads.
|
| Failing also to launch is Europe.
|
| Honestly it doesn't seem that hard, if you weird the resources
| that Zuckerberg does. You say to them "clone Twitter". It's not
| like Twitter is the biggest technical challenge in the world to
| clone... why couldn't Meta do that?
|
| The outcome looks like what you'd expect - the Meta equivalent of
| a Musk Starship launch.
| gumballindie wrote:
| They probably use react or a similar framework, so building it
| would require hundreds, if not thousands, of people working on
| it for years.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| They're doing it incrementally.
| Karellen wrote:
| If your core target audience is people who use their phone for
| 99% of their computing/internet needs, why would a desktop
| client be part of your MVP?
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Wasn't Instagram iPhone-only for a very long time?
| voisin wrote:
| Yes and their web presence only very recently allowed you to
| upload from your computer. It was half baked on the web for a
| very, very long time.
|
| Also, WhatsApp and Instagram _still_ don't have an iPad app.
| Given the scale of their users and the company's resources it
| is unfathomable to me that they haven't tried to make their
| products more seamless experiences across the devices users
| use. But then I remember it is Meta and I would be hard
| pressed to think of a more user-hostile company.
| [deleted]
| SanderNL wrote:
| Hey.. don't diss SpaceX. Even their exploding rockets are
| leagues ahead of anything Meta scratches of the bottom of their
| barrel.
| hn1986 wrote:
| Adam Mosseri mentioned their intentions to get an MVP going. It
| actually runs smoothly and iterating quickly. Web version
| probably coming in few weeks.
|
| It's already surpassed Mastodon and Bluesky easily.
|
| and there's no conspiracy theorists on there.. like qanon or
| white nationalists. https://www.axios.com/2022/10/30/elon-musk-
| paul-pelosi-tweet...
| ArchOversight wrote:
| There's plenty of alt-right and right wing accounts that are
| attacking LGBTQIA+ folks and making it unsafe on threads.
|
| Due to the nature of things being linked to Instagram it is
| making it easier for people to hate on transgender folks and
| I've seen it first hand multiple times. Reporting also leads
| to no action on certain "large" accounts.
|
| Saying there no white nationalists on Threads is false.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/09/meta-
| thre...
|
| For those of us in the LGBTQIA+ community Threads is simply
| not safe.
| gochi wrote:
| >They also made a mistake by not leveraging peoples desire to
| get their own Twitter handle on threads.
|
| Not sure this outweighs people's desire to actually obtain the
| handle they've always wanted but was already taken on Twitter,
| which is a substantial reason to sign up for any new platform
| at this point. Either way both of these groups were ignored by
| not allowing custom handles in the first place.
| lquist wrote:
| Meta has a history of churning out MVPs and doubling down on
| what works. Launching with a desktop client, EU, etc are in
| direct opposition to a lean MVP. Meta definitely has some
| missteps but not sure this is one.
|
| Tying in to Instagram was what made it resonate with such a
| large audience vs all the other Twitter clones. Carrying over
| the social graph was a wise decision imho.
|
| The Starship analogy makes little sense as well. Starship is
| not an MVP and well on track to continue to push forward the
| state of the art of rocket engineering.
| voisin wrote:
| > Tying in to Instagram was what made it resonate with such a
| large audience
|
| Resonate, or was simply them leveraging their current user
| base? I don't think the use of an Instagram login and having
| your current contacts imported made it "resonate" with
| anyone. It was just a growth hack.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> Tying in to Instagram was what made it resonate with such
| a large audience vs all the other Twitter clones.
|
| This is false.
| davidkuennen wrote:
| They should've launched globally. Not including Europe was a big
| mistake in my opinion.
| the_70x wrote:
| Or just the opposite. We don't need another social media
| platform
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Wasn't at all, they couldn't even get a desktop client in
| place, why would they want to play with GDPR?
|
| This is ChatGPT again, over all Europe will be increasingly
| isolated from the rest of the internet because their
| politicians were tricked into thinking they had more influence
| over the forefront technology than they actually do: You can't
| be a steward of good policy from the back of the train, you'll
| just get kicked off the train.
| imadj wrote:
| I wouldn't call 'Threads' the forefront of technology. And
| I'm sure people in Europe have no regrets over their decision
| to better control their data. Not over a product from Meta
| anyway.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| I imagine that a lot of people created accounts to secure a good
| username, with no real intention of using it yet anyway.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| The usernames are your insta name, so no gold rush to be had
| really.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| Ah. I knew it was connected to Instagram. I suppose it makes
| sense that it uses the same usernames.
| bastard_op wrote:
| Like most things, speculators soaked up all the potentially
| valuable names to resell, so not really using the service
| anyways, and the minimal few that use it realized already it's a
| ghost town.
| crtified wrote:
| We already have a thing where everyone on the internet can
| congregate, then split off and find sub-communities of interest
| (such as this excellent one right here) to participate in.
|
| It's called The Internet.
|
| I don't see the attraction of turning that into a massive,
| homogenised, centralised commercial product under private
| control. Never have.
| canadianwriter wrote:
| While not perfectly matching to actual usage - interest has
| dropped MASSIVELY.
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=...
|
| It's kind of interesting to see stuff like that.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I sure hope it does not become another Twitter. Having Twitter as
| the source of truth people went to for everything was not great,
| and when you only have 256 characters to express something I feel
| that leads to very shallow and low quality content. Threads would
| be just the same thing except owned by Meta now.
|
| I would rather see Mastodon and federated services succeed, but
| it is not the most user friendly. Then again, just because
| something is big doesn't mean it's the best.
| cvhashim04 wrote:
| I'm trying to use social media and twitter less. I used Threads
| for a bit but it just reminded me how much of a time waste these
| apps are.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I tried it during the first week and just found all of the
| posting to be unbearably milquetoast. I understand that people
| have a problem with some of the more extreme elements of Twitter,
| it's a reasonable concern. But the last thing I need is an
| aggressively Disneyfied algorithm picking posts for me.
| roody15 wrote:
| Not surprised the app really doesn't seem to have a purpose.
|
| Cannot search by hashtag. Not sorted by time ... cannot post on
| news / politics.
|
| It's really just a generated text / pic thread for content
| consumption featuring mostly ads and payed celebrity marketing.
|
| I used it for a few days and honestly cannot think of any upside.
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| - Not letting you see just posts from your follows sucked.
|
| - Building up a good group of people to follow takes a long time
|
| - A lot of the people who I follow on Instagram I do not want to
| follow on Twitter.
|
| - Just felt like an inorganic extension of Instagram. Like the
| difference between a fake real estate developer created
| neighborhood and a real one.
| hn1986 wrote:
| they've added a Following feed (only posts from your follows).
| it's pretty nifty and best of all there's no toxic users from
| Twitter (qanon, conspiracy theorists, extremists, white
| nationalists, taliban)
| timeon wrote:
| > Not letting you see just posts from your follows sucked
|
| This is why I stopped using Instagram. I have been there since
| around 2010. Moment when I realized it's waste of time was when
| feed contained content I did not followed while missing some
| that I followed.
|
| Irony is that pre-2010 I was proponent of algorithmic feed.
| Young and naive.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| As the dust is settling on the last 15 years of this insanity,
| and the monopolies are being cemented, is Zuck not the only one
| left standing independently? Of the big guys, the early "wizkid
| founder" types, who else is left towing the line and controlling
| the destiny of their company? And who else is maintaining that
| techno-utopianist optimism publicly? I sort of admire the guy, if
| only for how every time he speaks, it feels like a time portal to
| 2009.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| To be fair to him, he basically just wants to rule the (social)
| world.
|
| And he was much, much younger than the Google founders who are
| the only real comparison (in that they consistently make
| money).
| Animats wrote:
| Did users "sign up" for Threads, or was it some kind of forced
| install for existing Facebook users?
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| It's connected to Instagram, not to Facebook. But I think
| existing Instagram users don't automatically get a Threads
| account.
| ksherlock wrote:
| It uses the instagram username/password but it is a separate
| app that needs to be explicitly installed.
| a13o wrote:
| I view this entire saga more as an unbundling of microblog
| topics. One website had all the microblog topics, and now they
| will be spread across N websites.
|
| If you're viewing this as a king of the hill scenario, you've got
| the wrong metaphor. This is humpty dumpty having a great fall. It
| won't ever be put back together. Not by Meta, not by Twitter, not
| by anyone.
| erulabs wrote:
| If the world is going back to microblogs -- does that mean we
| need something more akin to Yahoo/Geocities than to
| Google/Facebook?
| chipsrafferty wrote:
| [dead]
| max_lameme wrote:
| [flagged]
| kstrauser wrote:
| I run a Mastodon server. It respects the 1st amendment: I say
| anything I want there, and you can go make your own server if
| you want to say something different. And in no known cases has
| the US government told anyone they're not allowed to talk
| there, which is the only way the 1st amendment would be
| relevant to a social media platform.
| DueDilligence wrote:
| [dead]
| elicash wrote:
| I think, in retrospect, they made a mistake in launching quickly
| before having core features. There was a desire to capitalize on
| twitter technical issues.
|
| > Mr Zuckerberg [...] described the situation as "normal" and
| said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were
| added to the app.
|
| I think if it was normal, they wouldn't have publicly spiked the
| football after the admittedly incredible signup numbers. They
| would have been a bit more humble, said they expected most users
| to leave soon after, but that this is an encouraging sign (or
| something to that effect). Maybe a bit more celebratory, but
| playing with expectations a bit more. They started off with
| INCREDIBLY humble talking points about likelihood of failure and
| then I think just got too excited.
|
| None of this is to suggest they have no chance. They still have a
| ton of users and I'd still consider the launch a success overall.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It'd be a lot more compelling to me if it had a "people I
| follow" feed. I get that they didn't want it to be empty on
| launch, but at least giving me the _option_ would mean I could
| at least have a _chance_ of seeing mainly people I know on
| there.
| input_sh wrote:
| There should be one? Don't use it personally, but apparently
| they've introduced it a few days ago:
| https://www.androidcentral.com/apps-software/threads-
| update-...
| elicash wrote:
| That launched like a day or two ago -- though it doesn't
| remember your last setting and is hard to find.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Maybe they're A/B testing it; I don't see any such option.
| elicash wrote:
| Update, force close the app, then touch the main logo
| once you're back in.
| [deleted]
| drusepth wrote:
| Ironically, most complaints I see about Threads (as a still-
| active user) is that it has too many users (chronological feeds
| pushing content too far down, overwhelmed by advertisers already,
| and little to no sense of community).
| SilasX wrote:
| Okay something that confuses me: to replace Twitter (sorry, X),
| it has to be something whose posts get linked just as much, from
| outside that site.
|
| I have yet to see a single Threads post get linked anywhere --
| not here, not Reddit, not even from Facebook.
|
| (Edit: Or at least, I'm too ignorant to realize what such a post
| would look like, in which case, branding fail.)
| davidw wrote:
| It took a while for people to start linking to Twitter (sorry,
| X). I'd give it a bit. You can link to stuff though:
|
| https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/CvPrxHdr4Y2/?igsh...
| zerocrates wrote:
| Interesting that even without the ability to really use it on
| the web, Threads already has a better anonymous-user web view
| than Twitter.
|
| Since the recent changes, on Twitter you can't see replies if
| you're linked to a tweet while not logged in, and you don't
| even have any indicator that replies exist and that you
| _could_ see them with an account. The whole implementation of
| the changes in that area is a real baffler.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| "Already?" Elon _broke_ Twitter 's anonymous view just this
| month?
|
| Seriously dude. It takes more effort to break the web than
| just use it.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I'm just pointing out that it's been broken to a state
| where even an app-centric thing like Threads, spun off
| from web- and anonymous-hostile Instagram no less, is a
| better experience to link to.
| jedberg wrote:
| I've seen threads posts linked from Instagram stories. I think
| that's the main sharing use case right now. I don't know
| because I haven't bothered signing up for threads.
| SilasX wrote:
| That's the problem: if you don't sign up (as I haven't), you
| can remain blissfully unaware of Threads. The same isn't true
| of Twitter.
|
| I stand corrected on other Meta properties linking it, but,
| of course, they have to get links _outside_ of that sphere to
| compete with Twitter on mindshare.
| lambic wrote:
| The same is becoming true of Twitter, can't remember the
| last time I saw an embedded tweet.
| SilasX wrote:
| Huh? I see them all the time. And even without that, HN
| and reddit still link twitter or snapshot it. I have no
| idea what the Threads app looks like still!
| operatingthetan wrote:
| This is being reported in a strange way. We don't typically write
| about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to
| the active users as if they lost something by not getting 100% of
| them to engage. Do we even have numbers for what percent of
| twitter users actively engage versus total user base?
|
| I don't think they are doing very bad considering it's mobile
| only right now.
| engineeringwoke wrote:
| For how counter-cultural HN has always prided itself in being,
| I find it a bit hard to believe just how much the media has
| shaped the story here. There's a lot of reason to be
| skeptical... it's not that I like Musk but the media doesn't
| like him and that's no secret. I find it to be quite the
| opposite of what you're saying, that their press team has done
| a good job of shaping the story positively for Meta.
|
| The puff piece in the WSJ combined with the all the positive
| press over the success of Threads, with now a quite rosy view
| of how it has played out since. I'm personally not a believer
| that they internally think Threads is a success, but to each
| their own. I constantly hear from my engineering co-workers
| about how much Twitter has changed and how the sky is falling,
| but the user numbers don't back that up and my user experience
| seems to be much the same.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/zuckerberg-channeled-og-mark-to...
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >For how counter-cultural HN has always prided itself in
| being
|
| Really? A bunch of engineering types who work for big
| corporations and who also dream and or do start their own
| hopefully big corporations prides themselves as being
| "counter-cultural?" That seems like a tough generalization to
| support.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| It's also encumbant company solely owned by the worlds
| richest man versus enormous global corporation mostly owned
| by another one. There is no counter-culture here.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Right, and the closest thing I can recall to a counter-
| culture here is occasionally seeing the suggestion that
| software engineers should unionize. The rest is bread and
| butter tech culture (which loves obscure technical
| topics, psychedelic drugs, discussing money, various ways
| of accomplishing tasks in a clever way, statistics,
| design and so on).
| pyrophane wrote:
| I would assume most of the blame here really lies with Meta.
|
| I mean, didn't they: 1. Leverage their IG user base to get a
| lot of early sign-ups and then... 2. Use those early sign-ups
| to hype up the platform?
|
| They got exactly what they wanted, which was a lot of articles
| about how fast Threads was growing.
|
| They probably knew all along that most of those early sign-ups
| weren't going turn into active users.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We don't expect the number of active users to ever fall in an
| startup.
|
| You are correct in that this was unavoidable because the
| original number was artificially inflated in a non-sustainable
| way. But well, that would be a huge red flag for a startup too.
| It is less so for a giant company like Meta, as they can eat
| the loss from forcing the market, but it is still ridiculous,
| even for a company as large as Meta.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That's not accurate.
|
| There's often an early "tyre kicker" phase, with people
| signing up to explore a service. Or to ensure that others
| don't misappropriate well-known account handles.
|
| User attrition / retention rates for sites, services, and
| apps are well-studied and closely watched.
|
| E.g., "Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app installs
| worldwide in 3rd quarter 2022, by category"
|
| <https://www.statista.com/statistics/259329/ios-and-
| android-a...>
|
| General social media growth (or plateau) trends as of 2021 /
| Pew:
|
| <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-
| media...>
|
| The _highest_ retention rate listed is 11.3%, for the news
| category.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >We don't typically write about startups gaining initial
| signups and then compare them to the active users as if they
| lost something by not getting 100% of them to engage.
|
| I mean, we should? Startup valuations are full of MAU pumping
| and straight bullshit, so why shouldn't we judge their numbers
| with a cynical eye? Meta claimed a number of users the first
| few days, well, half of them aren't using it anymore, so they
| aren't "Users"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| We _have_ seen critical appraisals of past social media
| launches, e.g., "Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social
| Activity, Weak User Engagement" (2012)
|
| <https://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-new-google-
| stu...>
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977050>
|
| The study in question is, to my surprise, still available
| directly online: <https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/05/15/new-
| google-plus-data-s...>
|
| There are another 14 HN submissions matching "Google+ ghost
| town" at this writing:
| <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google%2B%20ghost%20town>
|
| I did my own assessment of G+ later, after there was much
| discussion of Google's own "engagement" numbers for the
| platform meeting open skepticism. (I used the platform heavily
| myself and appreciated elements of it.)
|
| I think we're seeing more and deserved skepticism generally in
| accepting statements of activity at face value, which is a Good
| Thing in my view.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >We have seen critical appraisals of past social media
| launches, e.g., "Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social
| Activity, Weak User Engagement" (2012)
| <https://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-new-google-
| stu...>
|
| This was nearly a year after G+ launched. The article in
| question here is about three weeks after the launch of
| threads. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I picked a particular item with significant HN discussion.
| The fact that it was data-backed (a 40k profile analysis)
| _also_ means that it lags actual activity. As with _all_
| complex evolving situations, hard empirical data are not
| realtime.
|
| The "ghost town" label had been stuck on G+ within the
| first few weeks, yes.
|
| HN discussion from September 2011 (G+ launched in July):
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019699>
|
| Numerous HN takes in comments from June -- September 2011:
| <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1316822400&dateRange=custo
| m&...>
|
| And, FWIW, at the time I was contesting the
| characterisation of G+. I distinctly recall the discussions
| and press coverage, however.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| Way too much conflation with labels, timelines, types of
| project, recollections from 12 years ago, etc. for me.
| Also we're comparing Meta, a company with experience
| running two successful social networks against Google of
| ten plus years ago, with none.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Your original position was "We don't typically write
| about startups gaining initial signups and then compare
| them to the active users".
|
| I've given multiple examples of just such a comparison
| being made over a decade ago.
|
| In both cases, the new launch was by an existing giant in
| the sector, with claimed performance being not entirely
| credible.
|
| Google of a decade ago _had_ launched [edit: or aquired,
| but in either event, _run_ ] Orkut, Friendster, Wayze,
| Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits,
| one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its
| small but quite significant fan base (Reader).
|
| The Social space is immensely fickle, and the ability of
| _even an established industry giant_ to succeed with a
| new venture is fairly thin. Facebook has largely bought
| rather than made its own follow-on successes to date (as
| did Google in buying YouTube).
|
| Note edit above. Poor language choice around pedants.
| jstarfish wrote:
| Waze was an acquisition. It was launched by an Israeli
| company.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Fair enough, noted in edit above.
|
| As Facebook did with Instagram and Whatsapp.
|
| And with the facebook.com domain name, Parakey, ConnectU,
| FriendFeed, Octazen, Divvyshot, Friendster patents,
| ShareGrove, Zenbe, Nextstop, Chai Labs, Hot Potato,
| Drop.io, FB.com domain name, Rel8tion, Beluga, Snaptu,
| RecRec, DayTum, Sofa, MailRank, Push Pop Press,
| Friend.ly, Strobe, Gowalla, Caffeinatedmind, Instagram,
| Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox.com, Karma, Face.com, Spool,
| Acrylic Software, Threadsy, Atlas Solutions, osmeta,
| Storylane (Mixtent), Hot Studio, Spaceport, Parse,
| Monoidics, Jibbigo, Onavo, SportStream, Little Eye Labs,
| Branch, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Ascenta, Salorix, ProtoGeo
| Oy, PrivateCore, LiveRail, WaveGroup Sound, Wit.ai,
| Quickfire Networks, TheFind, Inc., Surreal Vision,
| Endaga, Pebbles, MSQRD (Masquerade), Two Big Ears,
| Nascent Objects, Infiniled, CrowdTangle, Faciometrics,
| Zurich Eye, Ozlo, Fayteq AG, tbh, Confirm, Bloomsbury AI,
| Redkix, Vidpresso, Dreambit, Chainspace, GrokStyle,
| Servicefriend, CTRL-labs, Packagd, Beat Games, PlayGiga,
| Sanzaru Games, Scape Technologies, Giphy, Mapillary,
| Ready at Dawn, Lemnis Technologies, Kustomer, Downpour
| Interactive, Unit 2 Games, BigBox VR, AI.Reverie, Within,
| Twisted Pixel Games, Presize, Lofelt, Armature Studio,
| and Camouflaj.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquis
| itio...>
|
| Neither Google nor Facebook are distinctive within the
| tech sector in aequiring large numbers of other firms.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >Google of a decade ago had launched Orkut, Friendster,
| Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest
| hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by
| its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).
|
| Google didn't "launch" youtube. They purchased it. It was
| big before they purchased it. Regarding Reader, calling
| something "small but quite significant" is nonsensical.
| Additionally you're propping up a failed application
| which wasn't even a social network as a success.
|
| As I said, your comparisons included far too much
| conflation of several varieties for me to take them
| seriously.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Could you just be specific about why the first example
| brought up doesn't apply, instead of letting the other
| person put themselves out there to advance the discussion
| and finding little details to accuse them of bad faith?
|
| The idea that forgetting that Google failed horribly with
| Google Video before buying YouTube is a "smell" of bad
| faith is weird.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| I did regarding the timelines, then they pivoted to
| including HN threads in the comparison when my original
| statement was about articles. I don't know what you're
| talking about regarding Google Video, I did not mention
| it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| To lift the kimono:
|
| It's often easier to search within a specific timeframe
| _on Hacker News itself_ given Algolia search 's excellent
| date-range functions, and the fact that HN itself is
| strongly time-oriented. There are doubtless other stories
| elsewhere, but it would be more tedious to track those
| down and verify that they actually came from the period
| under consideration.
|
| It's _also_ possible to search via comments, with one
| useful set of terms being "Google+" and "ghost town", an
| assessment which was being thrown about early on.
|
| And we can link directly to the HN threads and see what
| contemporaneous discussions were like and how they
| characterised the issue at the time.
|
| By contrast, date-ranged General Web Search on, say,
| DuckDuckGo or Google is often confounded by Web pages
| which have inaccurate date indicia, or have been
| misclassified as to time by search engines. It's much
| more tedious to try to find specific content matching
| time criteria, though the universe of total such articles
| is obviously larger. Fortunately for this case, Google+
| was of sufficient interest to HN that there were numerous
| submissions concerning it submitted early on, many of
| course highly syncophantic, but also concerning the
| rather fumbling rollout and weak adoption.
|
| Amongst other possible archives, Google+ itself is no
| longer extant, and so cannot be searched. Its own search
| features did _not_ afford date-ranged search, though I 'm
| well aware that there was much early hand-wringing over
| the "brutally unfair" stories (in the framing of G+
| advocates) circulating at the time.
|
| Reddit might be another useful trove, though I'm avoiding
| that for the time being. Search there is limited to only
| the initial story title and, in a limited number of
| cases, the "self-text" content of text-based posts.
| Pointedly, comments aren't searchable on Reddit itself,
| and so the potential match space is far more constrained
| than it is on Hacker News.
|
| _Despite_ those limitations, in answering your own
| historically uninformed vague hand wave that the response
| to Facebook 's _Threads_ launch is exceptional, I 'd
| given numerous specific and quantified examples from a
| roughly comparable time period for Google's G+ launch
| strongly suggesting otherwise.
|
| Yes, the data I brought to bear are subject to a strong
| availability heuristic. But the evidence presented is
| rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.
|
| Cheers.
| [deleted]
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Then s/launched/running successful social networks/,
| which again in this case was your original position.
|
| We have now:
|
| - Long standing critical takes on new social media
| launches and claimed performance.
|
| - Google as "running ... successful social networks".
|
| You're litigating pedantry in a counterfactual manner.
| It's tedious.
|
| I've shown this twice, which is sufficient for my tastes.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| My comment was about news articles and you opened it up
| to HN threads and academic papers and whatever else. You
| hand waved away the fact that your timelines were vastly
| different, and are now complaining about pedantry when in
| several cases basic facts eluded you which changed your
| arguments when edited. You continually paraphrase my
| comment in an incomplete manner in order to serve your
| view.
|
| No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm
| not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| "Not getting 100%" is a bit of a straw man argument.
|
| "Less than half" is significant, particularly when the CEO (to
| his credit) is calling it out as something that must improve.
| And it matters to balance the existing narrative from the
| Verge, which seems to just regurgitate Meta's VP's language
| about it being a runaway success.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| >"Not getting 100%" is a bit of a straw man argument.
|
| Alright, forget the number. Let's focus on active users
| versus signups and how it's being reported for Threads.
| [deleted]
| hazebooth wrote:
| I want threads to succeed so badly. It's the only app I've ever
| actually liked the UI of. I've tried numerous Mastodon apps
| (Ivory included), BlueSky, Twitter, and all of their web
| variants. I find myself returning to Threads even if the
| functionality is limited, because it's just that enjoyable. I'm
| rooting for 'em!
| [deleted]
| woodpanel wrote:
| So wait, using an alternative social media platform just because
| the bourgeoisie doesn't like the market leader's owner's politics
| isn't as convincing for the plebs as it is for the bourgeoisie?
| who would've thought?
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Threads launched without the ability to only see the people you
| follow.
|
| To me that marked it as doomed from the start. Most people use
| Twitter to follow specific niches or topic areas, not as a
| general conversational platform. If I follow even one account
| that's posting low quality content at any sort of frequency, it
| seriously degrades the experience.
|
| It's really a headscratcher how they launched without that. I
| guess the idea is that ad placing is easier if you have an
| algorithmic feed instead?
| bhauer wrote:
| This is probably its most important failure.
|
| Ironically, the people who refuse to use the "Following" tab on
| Twitter are, I expect, the same people who are most
| dissatisfied with Twitter. If you use the Following tab,
| Twitter remains pretty damn great. It's when you allow an
| algorithm to feed you stuff that the experience can become
| something between unsatisfactory and toxic.
| rumblerock wrote:
| I was enjoying the first few days and went on a campaign to
| mute as many of these low quality accounts that had been ported
| in from Instagram as possible.
|
| Then I just got bored, and realized it was just reclaiming the
| time that I had gained by quitting Instagram in the first
| place.
| nologic01 wrote:
| Its inevitable that online social media platforms will split in
| two types.
|
| The type I that attracts those with something authentic to _say_.
|
| And the type II that attracts those with something to _sell_.
|
| The first type is the future fediverse. Its the 15%. The art
| house cinema. The colorful city center street. Flexible,
| innovative, human centric, low budget, soul nourishing.
|
| The second type is Meta-stasized and coming in X number of
| mutations. Its the 85%. The strip mall. The plastic, fake, mass
| consumption machine. Lucrative, manipulative, exhausting yet
| unavoidable for the titillation addicted masses.
|
| There is no way you can eliminate either one of the two types in
| the short term. Type I was created against incredible odds. The
| future will be a bit easier. Type II is, alas, the embodiment of
| dazed and confused, unsettled society that is unlikely to heal
| anytime soon.
|
| So let us part ways and live in peace.
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| What social media is Type 1? I feel like the history of the
| internet is social media apps starting close to Type 1 and
| becoming Type 2.
| [deleted]
| rvz wrote:
| So 100M+ Threads accounts created with 50M+ active users still
| sticking around on Threads after the media hype and fanfare?
| Compare that to the rest of the other so-called 'alternatives'
| other than Twitter / X that is a much better result especially in
| less than a month and the closest to a proper alternative to
| Twitter / X.
|
| This is even without launching in the EU, so as soon as Threads
| is available in the EU, they can get another 100M+ easily anyway.
|
| This is what I call 'early days'. We'll see what happens in 6
| months or a year whether if people want to continue using Threads
| rather than initial sign ups. Retention is what matters.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| New product had a spike of usage at launch.
| lcmchris wrote:
| They've probably built something no one wanted and their launch
| success makes it hard to see between the lines. This is always
| been a problem with tech giants coming out with new products. I
| sometimes even wonder if it's better to launch products like
| these under a different name/umbrella so that they can get some
| real users.
| toshk wrote:
| I feel like they dropped the ball on content.
|
| Most complaints I've read is that thread's content is just
| boring.
|
| Most instagram influencers are visually oriented and don't
| translate well to textual thread.
|
| If they would have been able to get that right from the start,
| they could have kept a lot more. Either through collabrations, or
| pushed influencers who get engangement on long text posts.
| owlbynight wrote:
| BlueSky is going to win. Domain verification and custom feeds
| (user-generated firehose filters) are its killer features. It's
| already better than Twitter, and it's still behind invite codes
| as they refine it.
|
| Once brands realize that they can utilize custom feeds to reach
| potential customers granularly instead of -- or in addition to --
| paying for advertising, it's going to be over for Twitter.
| Twitter could introduce something similar to compete, but they
| shit-canned all of their talent, and in the process hamstrung
| their ability to innovate.
| karaterobot wrote:
| In my experience, which I _hope_ is not that unusual, it 's
| pretty typical for at least half the people who sign up on launch
| to not come back. A lot of people just want to check it out. I do
| notice that we are not told how much less than half of the people
| stayed, though...
| skc wrote:
| Threads will be alright in the end.
|
| They launched it at a very opportune time when Twitter was having
| massive technical issues.
|
| That was enough to get millions of people to kick the tires and
| more importantly, create awareness.
|
| The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now, people
| will again flock to Threads and notice that it got a little
| better. Twitter will get fixed again, and a lower percentage of
| Threads users go back again.
|
| And repeat.
| dgrin91 wrote:
| > The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now
|
| People have been saying this since the day Elon took over...
| but has it really gone down that much? More than other tech
| products? E.g. how many outages have the big cloud providers
| had in the last year? When I hear people say 'any day now' it
| reads like they are looking for any excuse to say 'mars man
| bad'.
| atorodius wrote:
| I think the parent was referring to this rather massive and
| long outage very recently:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/01/tech/twitter-rate-limit-
| excee...
|
| rather than cloud providers it would probably be more useful
| to compare to eg Instagram or TikTok
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I wouldn't style that an outage. I'm not sure what regular
| users that affected, but it could not have been very many.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I don't know about outages, but Twitter's website has become
| completely erratic for me. Sometime it will load replies,
| sometimes it won't. Sometimes it will login-wall content,
| sometimes it won't. Sometimes I just get an error page.
| Clicking on a Twitter link today is like rolling the dice on
| whether you'll actually see anything or not.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| You should check your internet connection. It's much more
| likely that it's you who are having problems.
| spansoa wrote:
| And when it hits the E.U market Threads will gain more
| popularity. If they can just sort out the 'privacy problem'
| they apparently have. I don't understand the delay here. FB &
| Insta already has E.U people's data.
| curiousllama wrote:
| If I understand correctly, the DMA says you can't leverage
| one social network to support another (ie, you can't drive
| Threads signups via the IG Network).
|
| Meta chose quick growth over European users.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Everything that people were complaining about on Twitter is
| also true of Threads, other than that Musk doesn't own Threads.
| The solution to DMs being limited or filtered on Twitter can't
| be to move to a platform without DMs at all. Various trolls are
| already partying on Threads, and targeting people that used to
| get them banned on Twitter. Commercial people and celebrities
| are seeing _no_ engagement.
|
| Also, the idea that Threads will be better than Twitter is
| simply a promise based on nothing. The concept I heard is that
| they were going to mod out politics, but that's a) impossible
| at scale, ask China, and b) Facebook couldn't care less about
| politics; the reason they censored anything other than nipples
| was by government demand, and Facebook has promised to
| cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee that it was hiding
| documents from until a few days ago _under pain of contempt of
| Congress, personally, against Zuckerberg._
|
| I don't think he's hero enough to go to prison for the sake of
| this administration, especially since he started censoring for
| the _last_ administration. He doesn 't care about the politics
| at all, so who would he be going to prison on behalf of?
| Movement Democrats will certainly make him a hero, like Cheney,
| Comey, etc., but what will that get him if the Democrats go
| down in the next general? All this is to say is that he's
| motivated to govern Threads with a light touch.
| vitorgrs wrote:
| That's exactly how Telegram growth. WhatsApp always had outages
| and some problems. With every problem, people used Telegram -
| and Telegram was better.
|
| That's how Telegram have 700 million active users.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| The reason Threads is failing is that, for whatever reason, they
| chose to launch without a desktop experience. I can't imagine how
| many users went to threads.net, clicked around for a few minutes
| while being extremely confused on how to sign up or access the
| product, then left permanently. No, I'm not going to download
| your mobile app, and most people won't either.
| anifru wrote:
| What % of users do you think care about a desktop experience? I
| expect the vast majority of users would be mobile-only. I'm
| sure you can find relevant statistics about Twitters desktop vs
| mobile usage.
| Fordec wrote:
| I know I gave up on it anyway without desktop. But what I
| really gave up on was lack of discovery on how to get my
| twitter network replicated. I was at least able to do that
| with Mastodon for all its UX sins.
| explain wrote:
| 87.6% of Twitter active-seconds are mobile, according to
| Elon's most recent data.
|
| Would've expected closer to 70/30 personally.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| And do you _actually_ believe this statistic?
|
| I don't know a single person who willingly prefers a
| limited, bogged-down experience of any product (social
| media or otherwise) over a full-fledged desktop client.
| User23 wrote:
| Most people don't take their laptop to the bathroom.
| ketzo wrote:
| It doesn't really matter whether you know them or not.
| They objectively make up the majority of internet users.
|
| 81% of Facebook users interact _only_ by mobile phone:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-
| of-f...
| bhauer wrote:
| I don't think it's a matter of preference.
|
| Of course I _prefer_ doing all of my computing on my
| desktop computer. But I don 't take my desktop computer
| with me to the grocery store. And I use Twitter to
| entertain myself when I'm waiting in line at the grocery
| store, for example. When I am at my desktop computer, I'm
| much less likely to be interested in using Twitter.
|
| That said, one of many reasons I didn't bother creating a
| Threads account is precisely that reason: no desktop
| client. Unless forced, I won't use anything that is
| exclusively available on mobile devices.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| I have mod rights on a general subreddit (a city), and I
| see that mobile is consistently 75-80% of the traffic.
| That seems consistent with the numbers above.
| nimbleplum40 wrote:
| I think that's a bit of a tech bubble. My non-tech family
| and friends all do the vast majority of their computing
| on mobile.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| A lot of people just don't own a desktop, or laptop.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| That data is biased by the small minority of super active
| users who spend 4-5 hours/day on Twitter.
|
| The relevant number would be to condition on only the 20th
| to 80th percentile users (by time spent/day) and see their
| breakdown. I am going to bet that number is more biased
| towards desktop, while both the 0-20% (occasional users)
| and 80-100% percentiles will be mobile focused.
|
| The other confounding effect is the bots and the pseudo-
| bots (humans operating many accounts). I don't know how
| they change these numbers.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Failing?
|
| You do realize that even after the initial drop (which is
| expected, for something that managed to get so much hype)
| they're likely still the biggest app in the history in terms of
| DAU in few weeks after the lunch?
| sys_64738 wrote:
| _shrug_ I wouldn 't install Facebook spyware on my iphone
| anymore than I'd install twitter junk on it either.
| throwaway070077 wrote:
| It's easy to see why the user churn in Threads is on a spiral. A
| simple measure is trying to follow a timeline for the Women's
| World Cup happening now. Crickets.
|
| The Instagram easy sign-up got Threads its users and it's the
| same feed algorithm which will churn the users. If nothing
| changes by the start of the NFL season, Threads will be niche.
| It's a darn shame.
| ploden wrote:
| I checked it out, but I won't use it. Social media in its current
| form is exploitation.
| dahwolf wrote:
| It's pretty common that after a peak of new signups, most do not
| convert to long term active users. This doesn't even take into
| account that most "active users" tend to never post anything,
| they just leech. They still count as MAU. I'm sure that Meta has
| plenty of ways to boost that number in the long term but overall
| I find the entire thing underwhelming.
|
| Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can
| very well include photos. It has exactly the same shallow culture
| as Instagram: commercial, flat, vain.
|
| Meta has openly expressed that it's disinterested or even hostile
| to news/journalism making their way to the platform (which comes
| with a lot of political flame-wars), instead to focus on making
| it a "fun" platform. Quite obviously because advertisers prefer
| networks without controversy.
|
| Users may self-censor as on Threads the link to your real name is
| not very far away. Many users may have a real name Insta account
| linked up which in turn is linked to your Facebook account. Even
| if not visibility linked to your real name, internally you should
| assume it's there. So who knows what happens to all those
| accounts when you step over the line in Threads?
|
| Hence, it's not Twitter which is defined by the culture war
| taking the main stage. Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also
| known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far
| lacks. It also produces quite a lot of original content, whether
| they be memes or otherwise. You'll find none of that originating
| on Meta networks.
|
| As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users
| (such as journalists) are lost. There is no longer a "cultural
| network" where you push a message and get reach. None of the
| alternatives work for this purpose either.
|
| I have no idea what will become of Twitter, but I do know to keep
| an open mind as we live in wild times. Just because Musk is a
| chaos monkey does not mean that it will not eventually rebound or
| even surpass old Twitter.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's hard to say. What I see is a lot of people in my network
| really scaling back or dropping Twitter and maybe playing with
| the alternatives but not really embracing them. I suspect that
| for many it will be a case of "Social media was nice while it
| lasted."
| strangattractor wrote:
| Sounds like Musk did them a favor.
| ghaff wrote:
| Lots of people used Twitter to keep in touch with
| professional peers and other non-outrage communities of
| interest. So that's a cheap lazy take.
|
| But I do think there's some regret that is similar in
| nature to the Eternal September. Things were "fine" before
| the plebes and political interests found the platform.
| dahwolf wrote:
| I think that's an excellent point. Social media fatigue seems
| at its peak in this time of transition, further accelerated
| by the COVID era.
|
| People are becoming aware of their over-usage and the largely
| minimal or even negative benefits that come from social media
| altogether. Or just bored and indifferent about it. The
| fatigue is further strengthened when they soon learn that the
| alternatives are worse or at best just moving the problem.
|
| I'd advocate for people to stop rather than cheer for any new
| potential winner. Just uninstall the app and walk away. It
| was all a lie anyway. You're not in a "community". You do not
| actually have followers. You did not learn anything new that
| you couldn't learn elsewhere.
|
| They are lies we tell ourselves as we play the slot machine.
| Throw it in the trash.
| srvmshr wrote:
| I tried using Threads religiously for few days alongside Twitter:
|
| * The feed is chaotic & no guarantees people (and by extension,
| Topics) whom you followed will show up primarily. Seeing a
| machine learning thread between a Barbie post & scantily clad
| influencer is bizarre.
|
| * The feed is jumpy with tiny accidental refreshes. You could be
| reading the thread and do a deep dive, and come out to find the
| timeline slightly/significantly different.
|
| * No message/DM. No bookmark feature. No topic suggestions - Just
| pure Instagram-like scrolling.
|
| The good part is no ads. But that could be a matter of time.
| Overtaking Twitter in engagement will be hard. Social networks
| have some inertia & needs some key users to remain successful (I
| forget the paper name - but it describes growth/implosion of
| network graphs when some key community members used/left. Like a
| hole in the graph. If any HNer knows about it - It came about 7-8
| years ago.)
| the_snooze wrote:
| >The feed is chaotic & no guarantees people (and by extension,
| Topics) whom you followed will show up primarily. Seeing a
| machine learning thread between a Barbie post & scantily clad
| influencer is bizarre.
|
| I follow some local weather sources. The algorithm decided that
| I'm really big into weather and started feeding me weather
| sources in other cities. Thanks, Threads. Good job trying to
| guess what I want instead of just listening to what I've
| clearly opted into.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| And no browser version, mobile only!
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I only use desktop Twitter, so without a desktop client I can't
| use threads.
| jurassic wrote:
| Threads badly needs search and trending topics. Once they have
| those features, it will do much better. The product as it
| currently exists makes it exceedingly difficult to find
| conversations you are interested in about current events.
| terhechte wrote:
| A part of these users might be europeans? Initially it worked
| here if you created a US App Store account, but after 10 days
| they disabled it based on VPN & IP. Like everybody in my European
| network had the app installed and is not using it anymore because
| of this.
| gabereiser wrote:
| In other news, man-child wars between tech bros end with both
| failing to find product fit and alienating all their customers.
|
| Facebooks growth was because it was where your friends were
| posting. Twitter growth was because of where influential people
| posted that you were interested in their (brief) thoughts. X was
| a failed payments platform that eventually became PayPal and sold
| to eBay (due to eBay being their only true partner at the time).
| Facebook/Meta keeps buying their way into the cool club only to
| realize they're not cool. The bodies of friendstr, MySpace,
| phpbb, and even reddit now, as the tech bros learn that
| "features" aren't what bring people in. People do. Make it
| friendly to people like the growth days. Not friendly to
| corporations so you can milk more advertising dollars. I'll stay
| on the "I deleted my meta and I'm not coming back" fence.
| pessimizer wrote:
| You're trying to bring in money, though, not people.
| skydhash wrote:
| > I'll stay on the "I deleted my meta and I'm not coming back"
| fence.
|
| I deleted it and, so far, no noticeable impact on my life (and
| that's in a country where almost everyone who has a smartphone
| is guaranteed to be on Facebook). Almost nothing of worth is
| being posted on them.
|
| The pitfall of social media is that they don't reflect social
| interactions. The algorithm process is unnatural. I only want
| to hear about my friends and a selection of people and
| institutions I choose. I don't need to hear about LeBron James
| because I watched a video clip. Or be shown ads for some weird
| games, as I've not played on my phone or computers for ages.
| The simplified interaction mechanism missing
| downvote/dislike/hate is another thing I dislike. If I can
| approve, I should be able to disapprove. That's why I prefer
| Reddit to Twitter. What's at the top is either something useful
| or echoing the culture of the community.
|
| I've been interacting with forums more these days, and it's a
| breath of fresh air. No engagement, only discussions and
| information. Some are showing ads, but I don't mind as it's
| always pertaining to the subject of the forum.
| rvz wrote:
| So far out of all the Twitter / X alternatives and competitors,
| Threads is the clear serious contender. Especially one that has
| 50M+ active users (as admitted by Zuck) out of the gate in less
| than a month with 100M+ registered users even without launching
| in the EU.
|
| The rest don't have a chance at all and are as good as dead or
| cannot handle the amount of users that both Twitter/X or Threads
| has.
|
| It is clear that both of them will co-exist and retention always
| matters, with any so-called 'exodus'. For Threads it is early
| days. On the other hand over at Twitter / X [0] it seems far from
| 'dying', from the months of nonsense from the media who
| exaggerated the immediate collapse of Twitter / X last year which
| never happened.
|
| Perhaps it is time to admit that you have been manipulated by the
| doomsayers who's only mission is to post clickbait and attract
| your eyeballs to their articles spreading nonsense to grift for
| affiliate links.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684978651857596429/phot...
| partiallypro wrote:
| The app is missing so many core components, no DMs, no web
| interface, no trends, it's hard to find people. This absolutely
| has a market; but honestly given how half-baked it is, they
| probably should have waited for another Musk crucial mistake,
| which is inevitable.
| coldcode wrote:
| It's missing everything necessary to make it for you and your
| interests; instead, you get what Zuck wants you to see. No
| hashtags (needed to build an audience if you want to post about
| things or find interesting people to follow), and it's not on
| the web (given how completely shitty the Instagram web
| interface is, they could care less about the web). I think they
| released it to capitalize on Elon's stupidity but with
| something that barely works. I'm not interested in some generic
| stream of celebrities and influencers I could care less about.
| [deleted]
| icey wrote:
| I'd use it a lot more if it had a web client.
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