I mean it is funny but I don't recall seeing anything on Instagram about threads. iirc, the first time I read about threads was on techmeme a few days ago when it became available for 'pre-order' on the apple app store.
It's got a lot of things to work out and improve on, but I assume that will come in time. It feels like the launch was rushed by a month or two to take advantage of the horrific start to July that Twitter has had.
Brands seem incredibly enthusiastic to be there though, signifying they were just waiting for something like this to jump onto and away from Musk.
iirc ad targeting was never that good on Twitter. I would imagine there's some kind of relationship between a Threads user and their Facebook account (if they have one) in order to bring all the ad targeting intelligence from Facebook over to Threads. Brands/Advertisers probably love that.
I have tried it here is my experience:
I am new user, I login and begin to search for content:
Whatever I search for does not match the content on any tweet equivalent either the text or meta information - like hashtags. Only the content of the users name and words in their Bio.
This I can understand for instagram where the concept is based on a stream of pictures that will be released over time. But how do I find within content ? - like breaking news items?
Beyond duplicating the accounts you follow in instagram.
This only serves to find and follow accounts built around a single concept.
Or a named celebrity.
But it does not work at the moment as a tool to find anything based on the content within a thread (happening now, or around me, or an upcoming event or a specific programming code example) - isn't this the main value of these kind of tools?
Find content that is important or interesting to you and then follow them to hear more.
Can anyone spell out exactly what it means to ‘sign up’ to Threads? Are these users who heard about Threads (from a friend or the news) and actively sought it out, or are they users who just tapped “OK” on a dialog that popped up when they opened Instagram, or what exactly? The answer to this is important because it would give an indication of how likely these users are to stick, which is everything.
Google once introduced a social network called Google+, and guess what, billions of users were ‘signed up’ overnight by virtue of already having Google accounts. And it meant nothing. That’s the extreme end of the scale, where the user doesn’t even know they signed up. I’m guessing Meta’s 10m figure is not that meaningless (otherwise it would be “2.35bn users in 1 ms”) but what is it exactly?
For me I was HOPING it will replace Twitter. For me it looks like it will not. I had to sign up for Instagram first, since I didn't have an account, and that's required. I heard about it from... the zeitgeist? Not sure where first, but I feel like it's been all over the tech press. My guess would be this is what Instagram looks like for most people, minus all the pictures?
It looks fine, but there's a HUGE BUT... it's an algorithmic feed and as far as I can tell, I can't change that. It's full of boobs and butts and celebrities. I can't find any easy/obvious way to change my feed into something that resembles just the people I want to follow. I use Twitter to learn and find things that are interesting. Using Tweetdeck means I can avoid all the worst parts of Twitter, and the algorithm. It looks like I can't do that on Threads, at least not now.
And there's not a web app.
I assume those things will change, but right now, it's not for me.
A junior dev could build a working twitter clone in a couple weeks; tech was never Twitter's moat.
Twitter had a first mover advantage and got the community of microbloggers. Mastodon and now threads aren't going to fully coopt that community -- And they need to fully coopt it to win.
There are too many people who won't touch a Facebook product with a 10-foot pole(Myself included), so there's a whole group of users, especially academics and technologists, who will never seriously use threads
> A junior dev could build a working twitter clone in a couple weeks; tech was never Twitter's moat.
Aren't we over saying things like that? That's Dunning-Krueger speak. The bits that you see as a user are just the tip of the iceberg required to support hundreds of thousands of tweets per minute that Twitter currently is capable of.
> Mastodon and now threads aren't going to fully coopt that community -- And they need to fully coopt it to win.
And that's the problem with end-stage capitalist thought. Mastodon isn't trying to "win". Never has been.
Mastodon was all about creating a non-commercial community of people talking with each other. It was done so to prevent the inexorable enshittification process of a for-profit social network that must raise the walls of communication higher and higher to extract smaller slices of profit.
But no, Mastodon does not "need" to win. We're not even playing the same game. Winning in our collective cases is being able to talk with friends without being psychological-advert games, fuckyoupayme demands, bulk selling data to anyone who pays, forced viewing of advertiser content, or a multitude of new scams made by the advertiser committees.
And threads.net is still unblocked at my instance. We're waiting to see how it's going to play out. If they somehow, some way, actually act like a proper steward of the fediverse, I wouldn't mind talking with their users over federation. But if they allow or otherwise enable the wasteland facebook has created, fediblock'em.
"Users" of Threads are basically ones with Instagram account. So, having a 2B+ user base, this number means about 0.5% of the Insta users installed a new app.
Still, is that the fastest yet? Instagram took 2.5 months for reaching 1M users while it was 5 days for ChatGPT.
Somebody called it out on HN already that Twitter is going away because of Threads. Monopoly is never good, especially not in social media business. There should never be one social network to rule them all.
> Somebody called it out on HN already that Twitter is going away because of Threads
It seems severely early to say this especially when threads is such a barebones and incredibly unwieldy experience that seems to have been rushed out to capitalise on twitter's fumbles.
There's no "Following" timeline at all, you cannot mute accounts that you do not follow (only block), the video player is somehow worse than Instagram's, the UX is buggy and kind of awful, the algorithmic feed is desperately trying to focus on your particular region rather than even try to attempt your interests, things are tightly coupled with your Instagram profile and so on. This is also not even going into the nightmare that are the privacy settings which will probably prevent an EU launch for quite some time.
It feels to me that the "low" barrier of entry of simply having an Instagram account is enough to sign up for this which makes joining much more low effort since most people interested in this already had one. I'm not sure this is going to kill twitter so easily. Unless their velocity of improvements is significantly improved and they take the right feedback, this is probably going to be a flash in the pan.
Though I will say, if they somehow bring Japanese Twitter over to Threads by courting J-Pop artists, vtubers, mangaka etc, that will truly be the death knell for twitter.
If my impression of Instagram is representative then 80% of the 2B+ user base is bots.
The worst case here is Meta start automatically forcing Threads down Instagram user's throats if they don't get the levels of signup their revenue forecasts demand. That would be annoying, Twitter is a cesspool and I think Threads has the potential to be the the detritus of that.
People who Are heavy Twitter users dont associate with insta and vice versa. It's a hard sell. Let's see what happens. But would be hard to believe meta can pull it off
While the new app isn't perfect the pent up demand for something else that is easy to sign up for and use is real. If only my local weather service and meteorologists move over thar is good enough for me. It's gonna hit 100 MM in less than a month.
-Main page is some Three.js example (that you can break if you find the controls)
-Android app isn't available on Android 10 ?
-The one-thread link (this link) is minimalistic but takes literally 10 seconds to load and looks to just continue the "zuck is surely a real human not a robot" theme with the branded replies. Also manages to have a horizontal scrollbar
If this is USA-only they could at least mention on the webpage. But now this looks like a really weird failure mode of a launch.
This is exactly what a serious Twitter alternative is supposed to be. We don't need to wait long for this to surpass the entire population of the 'Fediverse', but again this growth is not a surprise but excepted.
At the point, Threads is the Fediverse, and it cannot be stopped. Either federate with Threads or stay irrelevant. But either way, LLaMa is going to get trained on Threads and the smaller fediverse.
Earlier posts said that there was no way to see Threads on the web but I was able to see this in the browser (don’t even have Threads yet because I’m in Europe).
I presume Instagram could make a "share pictures of your poop in the toilet" and get 10M users in a few hours. My Threads initial experience was a bunch of apparent influencers and brands I haven't heard of, with no way to see only my friends' posts. Fairly miserable. I get that they want it to feel instantly busy for new users, but yuck.
Interested to see what numbers (and stickiness) is like in a few months.
The iOS app requires you to share an astonishing amount of data with Meta. Why do they need access to my health data for me to see others shitposting and dunking on Twitter?
Until they offer an option for people not willing to share their daily step count with Meta — and let's face it, in the age of surveillance capitalism and Meta going down the tubes, that's not likely, — it's a hard no from me.
Why is this not surprising at all? Of course they will slurp in every single data point your device will grant them. Why shouldn't they? They are providing you with all of that amazing entertainment for free (and always will be, right Zuck?), so why shouldn't they make a buck off of knowing you're a couch potato that doesn't exercise? </sarcasmThatSadlyIsnt>
[+] [-] kjhughes|2 years ago|reply
Start with 2.35B users.
[+] [-] mcny|2 years ago|reply
> Start with 2.35B users.
I mean it is funny but I don't recall seeing anything on Instagram about threads. iirc, the first time I read about threads was on techmeme a few days ago when it became available for 'pre-order' on the apple app store.
[+] [-] ommz|2 years ago|reply
- Non-chronological home feed (to force-feed ads & gate-keep influence)
- Nerf users' reach to force them into buying ads
- Perpetual PII data-gobbling
- Draconian account control rules (to pad user numbers?...hmmn)
[+] [-] sylens|2 years ago|reply
Brands seem incredibly enthusiastic to be there though, signifying they were just waiting for something like this to jump onto and away from Musk.
[+] [-] chasd00|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimparkins|2 years ago|reply
Whatever I search for does not match the content on any tweet equivalent either the text or meta information - like hashtags. Only the content of the users name and words in their Bio.
This I can understand for instagram where the concept is based on a stream of pictures that will be released over time. But how do I find within content ? - like breaking news items?
Beyond duplicating the accounts you follow in instagram. This only serves to find and follow accounts built around a single concept. Or a named celebrity.
But it does not work at the moment as a tool to find anything based on the content within a thread (happening now, or around me, or an upcoming event or a specific programming code example) - isn't this the main value of these kind of tools? Find content that is important or interesting to you and then follow them to hear more.
Am I missing something fundamental?
[+] [-] cal85|2 years ago|reply
Google once introduced a social network called Google+, and guess what, billions of users were ‘signed up’ overnight by virtue of already having Google accounts. And it meant nothing. That’s the extreme end of the scale, where the user doesn’t even know they signed up. I’m guessing Meta’s 10m figure is not that meaningless (otherwise it would be “2.35bn users in 1 ms”) but what is it exactly?
[+] [-] blakesterz|2 years ago|reply
It looks fine, but there's a HUGE BUT... it's an algorithmic feed and as far as I can tell, I can't change that. It's full of boobs and butts and celebrities. I can't find any easy/obvious way to change my feed into something that resembles just the people I want to follow. I use Twitter to learn and find things that are interesting. Using Tweetdeck means I can avoid all the worst parts of Twitter, and the algorithm. It looks like I can't do that on Threads, at least not now.
And there's not a web app.
I assume those things will change, but right now, it's not for me.
[+] [-] liorben-david|2 years ago|reply
A junior dev could build a working twitter clone in a couple weeks; tech was never Twitter's moat.
Twitter had a first mover advantage and got the community of microbloggers. Mastodon and now threads aren't going to fully coopt that community -- And they need to fully coopt it to win.
There are too many people who won't touch a Facebook product with a 10-foot pole(Myself included), so there's a whole group of users, especially academics and technologists, who will never seriously use threads
[+] [-] mariusor|2 years ago|reply
Aren't we over saying things like that? That's Dunning-Krueger speak. The bits that you see as a user are just the tip of the iceberg required to support hundreds of thousands of tweets per minute that Twitter currently is capable of.
[+] [-] za3faran|2 years ago|reply
Real life is not a white board design interview.
[+] [-] holistio|2 years ago|reply
I really expected we'd end up going towards a standard with various clients.
Instead this.
[+] [-] pierat|2 years ago|reply
And that's the problem with end-stage capitalist thought. Mastodon isn't trying to "win". Never has been.
Mastodon was all about creating a non-commercial community of people talking with each other. It was done so to prevent the inexorable enshittification process of a for-profit social network that must raise the walls of communication higher and higher to extract smaller slices of profit.
But no, Mastodon does not "need" to win. We're not even playing the same game. Winning in our collective cases is being able to talk with friends without being psychological-advert games, fuckyoupayme demands, bulk selling data to anyone who pays, forced viewing of advertiser content, or a multitude of new scams made by the advertiser committees.
And threads.net is still unblocked at my instance. We're waiting to see how it's going to play out. If they somehow, some way, actually act like a proper steward of the fediverse, I wouldn't mind talking with their users over federation. But if they allow or otherwise enable the wasteland facebook has created, fediblock'em.
[+] [-] abhayhegde|2 years ago|reply
Still, is that the fastest yet? Instagram took 2.5 months for reaching 1M users while it was 5 days for ChatGPT.
Somebody called it out on HN already that Twitter is going away because of Threads. Monopoly is never good, especially not in social media business. There should never be one social network to rule them all.
[+] [-] aniforprez|2 years ago|reply
It seems severely early to say this especially when threads is such a barebones and incredibly unwieldy experience that seems to have been rushed out to capitalise on twitter's fumbles.
There's no "Following" timeline at all, you cannot mute accounts that you do not follow (only block), the video player is somehow worse than Instagram's, the UX is buggy and kind of awful, the algorithmic feed is desperately trying to focus on your particular region rather than even try to attempt your interests, things are tightly coupled with your Instagram profile and so on. This is also not even going into the nightmare that are the privacy settings which will probably prevent an EU launch for quite some time.
It feels to me that the "low" barrier of entry of simply having an Instagram account is enough to sign up for this which makes joining much more low effort since most people interested in this already had one. I'm not sure this is going to kill twitter so easily. Unless their velocity of improvements is significantly improved and they take the right feedback, this is probably going to be a flash in the pan.
Though I will say, if they somehow bring Japanese Twitter over to Threads by courting J-Pop artists, vtubers, mangaka etc, that will truly be the death knell for twitter.
[+] [-] stevenhubertron|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leejo|2 years ago|reply
If my impression of Instagram is representative then 80% of the 2B+ user base is bots.
The worst case here is Meta start automatically forcing Threads down Instagram user's throats if they don't get the levels of signup their revenue forecasts demand. That would be annoying, Twitter is a cesspool and I think Threads has the potential to be the the detritus of that.
[+] [-] wouldbecouldbe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inamorty|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChatGTP|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenhubertron|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxlin|2 years ago|reply
If this is USA-only they could at least mention on the webpage. But now this looks like a really weird failure mode of a launch.
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
Is it Apple Maps bad? -Gavin Belson
Is it Bard bad?
[+] [-] nateburke|2 years ago|reply
But if they can get 50% of Twitter's (remaining) BRANDS to switch where they spend ad dollars, that's a win for FB!
[+] [-] cal85|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|2 years ago|reply
This is exactly what a serious Twitter alternative is supposed to be. We don't need to wait long for this to surpass the entire population of the 'Fediverse', but again this growth is not a surprise but excepted.
At the point, Threads is the Fediverse, and it cannot be stopped. Either federate with Threads or stay irrelevant. But either way, LLaMa is going to get trained on Threads and the smaller fediverse.
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wunderland|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delfinom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceejayoz|2 years ago|reply
Interested to see what numbers (and stickiness) is like in a few months.
[+] [-] gtirloni|2 years ago|reply
If it was empty you'd probably just go "meh" and close the app.
This is about network effects, hype, getting famous people to use, etc. I doubt it's meant to be anything better than Twitter.
I have low expectations and I'm not the target audience but I fail to see how they should have done this differently.
[+] [-] AndrewOMartin|2 years ago|reply
Previous submissions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=true...
[+] [-] ddon|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colesantiago|2 years ago|reply
There is no question of it now.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weevil|2 years ago|reply
Until they offer an option for people not willing to share their daily step count with Meta — and let's face it, in the age of surveillance capitalism and Meta going down the tubes, that's not likely, — it's a hard no from me.
[+] [-] dylan604|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quicklime|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freediverx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slenk|2 years ago|reply