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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
>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"
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.
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.
If you want an example of "inside the bubble" it's thinking any of the social media channels, private or not for profit represent a realistic cohort of community engagement comparable to "the people have spoken"
It's some people, sometimes, in some contexts, saying some things which go to opinion. It's no better or worse than a radio or TV "vox pop" and equally biassed. Or that eternal source of truth "the man in the street you met in the pub that time" or a taxi driver.
I think it's social cancer and I regret ever participating and taking it seriously. It certainly caused me harm, to my own sense of self and to personal relations and trust.
Do yourself a favour and drop out. By all means stay if you enjoy it, but at least drop out of any belief and claim its a true expression of public views in the wide.
Your argument appears incomplete. Either there is some method of obtaining "a true expression of public views in the wide", in which case: What is it?
Or there is no such method, in which case: Why do you specifically advise to drop social media channels? What makes them less valuable as a method of gauging public views than, say, talking to a taxi driver, or an opinion poll? You are suggesting that I drop every belief that each one of these parts accurately represents the whole, but then why specifically ask us to drop out of one of these methods over any other?
What you say just seems to be a general property of humans exchanging information. Not an intrinsic problem to social media.
Where can we find "A true expression of public views in the wide"?
I've been using social media all my life and for me the benefits far outweigh the negatives.
I never believed it should be my sole source of information just as much as gossiping or talking to my hairdresser shouldn't be my sole source of information. If I want to have a nuanced opinion.
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.
> 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'.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
> 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).
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]
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
My beef with threads is that it’s just like IG. I was promised a text based social but lo and behold, I open it and find more sexy people posting short form videos. It’s so boring.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] dahwolf|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dhosek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdawson|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] rglullis|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] davidw|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tao3300|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justapassenger|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] operatingthetan|2 years ago|reply
I don't think they are doing very bad considering it's mobile only right now.
[+] [-] engineeringwoke|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] pyrophane|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mrcwinn|2 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] mrguyorama|2 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] marcosdumay|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
<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.
[+] [-] ggm|2 years ago|reply
It's some people, sometimes, in some contexts, saying some things which go to opinion. It's no better or worse than a radio or TV "vox pop" and equally biassed. Or that eternal source of truth "the man in the street you met in the pub that time" or a taxi driver.
I think it's social cancer and I regret ever participating and taking it seriously. It certainly caused me harm, to my own sense of self and to personal relations and trust.
Do yourself a favour and drop out. By all means stay if you enjoy it, but at least drop out of any belief and claim its a true expression of public views in the wide.
[+] [-] majewsky|2 years ago|reply
Or there is no such method, in which case: Why do you specifically advise to drop social media channels? What makes them less valuable as a method of gauging public views than, say, talking to a taxi driver, or an opinion poll? You are suggesting that I drop every belief that each one of these parts accurately represents the whole, but then why specifically ask us to drop out of one of these methods over any other?
[+] [-] thomashop|2 years ago|reply
Where can we find "A true expression of public views in the wide"?
I've been using social media all my life and for me the benefits far outweigh the negatives.
I never believed it should be my sole source of information just as much as gossiping or talking to my hairdresser shouldn't be my sole source of information. If I want to have a nuanced opinion.
[+] [-] skc|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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'.
[+] [-] spansoa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitorgrs|2 years ago|reply
That's how Telegram have 700 million active users.
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] srvmshr|2 years ago|reply
* 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|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopkeny12ko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anifru|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justapassenger|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adam_arthur|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
Then I just got bored, and realized it was just reclaiming the time that I had gained by quitting Instagram in the first place.
[+] [-] davidw|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] MildRant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pityJuke|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] bena|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl95|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://steamcharts.com/app/1063730
[+] [-] andrewstuart|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] terhechte|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toshk|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] laserbeam|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mvdtnz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChildOfChaos|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] djohnston|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] us0r|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voisin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mh-|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardwaregeek|2 years ago|reply
- 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.