Threads has 10M sign ups in seven hours
threads.net
threads.net
My prediction is twitter will remain the refuge of the long tail. Niche people and communities will stick around, as will I. But that doesn't support billions in ad revenue. Threads will become the "place things happen". The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz and the screenshots are of Threads, you'll know I was right.
Some very obvious features are missing, but for a v1 launch the app runs smooth, feels clean, is easy to get started, and has a jovial early internet feel.
Meta will ship most every feature the average Twitter user would want in the next month or so and then it's game over.
Aside, it's amazing how Elon's antics over the last year (or many years) have somehow made Zuck seem both personable and competent
People are on twitter because everyone is on Twitter, not because twitter has better features...
Censoring the aforementioned topics does not make them go away, time has shown that. And Megacorps controlling the public Overton window has just lead to society boiling and rumbling in the dark.
Perhaps, but not censoring those topics makes the user go away. Most people are simply not interested in wading into the constant mudfight that current twitter seems to have devolved into, so if the platform makes it impossible to evade those topics on the platform itself then the user will evade the platform altogether. A similar thing can be said for advertisers, if a platform cannot guarantee that a companies ads will not be shown next to hate content then the advertiser will eventually just start evading the platform altogether.
This is just some growing pains as Elon Musk is working on improving it. This is why he is so visionary, the ones before him didn't dare to go through challenges such as this one, so it shows why they needed him to step in and be the adult in the room.
If a community builds up on Threads (and why wouldn't it, reserving spots for 2B Instagram users?), the ad value will then probably be much greater there, and businesses (and thus influencers) will see a more lucrative environment there.
Why?
1. Meta harvests more data from your phones than Twitter which provides more accurate ad targetting.
2. Twitter is poorly ran and struggles even with basic things like not pissing advertisers off as they keep making controversial decisions for the network.
The news of rate limits must have spread like shock waves through the ad community, as one example. Reducing reach by now walling their garden and killing embedded tweets to make it harder to get to their ads another.
As for celebrities, they already have good community contact on Instagram since the visual medium lends itself extremely well in that regard, and I'm 100% sure Threads will ultimately become an extension to Instagram.
Isn't it funny how Elon has hunted his X.com idea for a "social network for everything"?
Instagram is far ahead than him now. They have Instagram photos, Snapchat stories, TikTok reels, and now Twitter threads.
This trope of "pissing advertisers off" is repeated ad nauseum, but there is no evidence that rational advertisers have preferences regarding which content surrounds their advertisements. They only care about paying less money for advertisements than they make in revenue attributable to those advertisements. And therein lies a Yogi Berra-esque paradox: if all the advertisers leave Twitter, then the advertising prices will decrease, and advertising to Twitter users will become cost-effective ("Republicans buy sneakers too.")
What advertisers do care about is angry mobs of people harassing them about all the wrongthink their ads are appearing next to. It would be more accurate to say that "advertisers don't like being harassed by a mob of people who are pissed off at the platform that hosts the ads."
This may take some time to evolve. Indeed, sometimes it evolves with the platform; Instagram basically _created_ "influencer" as a job description. Youtube created its Youtubers. So what's happening on Threads? Anyone got any good launch content to post here?
All or most of the successful ones grew mostly organically and evolved other time, and were not a copy of another big social app.
Twitter has not even that much users relative to how much it is talk about in the press.
Are we going to go back to country specific social networks like Orkut? VK? (which is still going)
It doesn't seem to me that logging in to your account from multiple apps should be a GDPR issue. Lots of companies have that kind of setup where they offer separate mobile apps for different user roles.
This is not the glowing recommendation some might think, it's more of a condemnation of the state of moderation.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
Once TikTok gets fined out of the US and Twitter collapses (any minute now /s) out of existence, we will now have Zuckerberg be the arbiter of truth on a third social networking platform.
The internet is a strange beast. Getting 50 million users is easy. Monetising them is hard.
I stopped being impressed with headlines that boast about sign ups once I had this revelation.
>The first time a blog post is written about the Epic Dunk that AOC had on Ted Cruz...
How do you reconcile these two statements?
I feel the performative "mic drop" moment is a major source of toxicity on Twitter. A breath of fresh air would be a place that promoted thoughtful and empathetic conversations.
I like Mastodon, because it doesn't chase growth at all costs, but chooses to foster well-behaved communities (it's more like connected phpBB forums than Twitter). I can talk to a random stranger and actually share ideas, instead of getting caught in a loop of outrage and dunking.
I also like the bit on how you dismiss wholesale IP theft from a large corporation because you have issues with Musk.
* Data breach of 533M users
* Record-breaking €1.2bn fine in Europe for illegal data transfers
* Record-breaking $5bn FTC fine for privacy violations
* Psychological experiments run on unconsenting users in 2012 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...
* Cambridge Analytica
I don’t know anyone with a “For you” tab like that. What’s the explanation? Are you engaging with that kind of content?
Oh boy, sign me up! I need a space where I can cheer my team on and we can dominate the conversation through censorship and shadow banning of the opposing team like twitter used to be. Echo chambers make me feel good because it's a fun, friendly place where you never have to engage with opposing arguments and we all upvote each other.
It's clear that they intentionally did not release a web application in order to maximize app installs and thus maximum control over their users (eg. scrape your contacts, push notifications, and most importantly to show you ads).
In 2023 nobody wants to install yet another app, so this is a clever strategy to optimize for app installs. Not going to work on me though. If it's just a Twitter clone only accessible to mobile users, then content quality is going to be low because nobody is typing thought provoking, in-depth analysis from their mobile phones.
Are people actually typing thought provoking, in-depth analysis into Twitter?
Since for the ISW folks, following the war in Ukraine is kind of their job, I think that's a pretty good approximation of the two platforms' relative importance in that area.
Every time someone lands troops somewhere they mark it as a territory gain, even if the area is still ‘disputed’.
It’s deeply annoying - small thrusts and retreats or probing attacks by either side get marked as territory gains/losses, which is entirely inaccurate and usually the situation has changed by the time ISW posts it.
People have no problem installing new apps if they actually offer something.
Just like people have no problem installing new software on Windows or buying new games for their PlayStation.
Since Threads is basically another view into your Instagram account, it makes some kind of sense to start with mobile.
It doesn't even have a login-switch feature. They didn't release a web application because this is the M of MVPs.
Sadly I think that's just you and me. If something requires an app then I'm most likely not going to use it. I can't/won't deal with more apps (or subscriptions).
Oh and also, the vast vast majority of the time there was no thought provoking in depth analysis on twitter. That's not what's driving engagement in these sites.
The app serves Meta more than it does the public.
But I get your point, I doubt people really care.
Instagram was app-only for years, though. It added the web version a long time later
But the GP didn't do that. They gave access to health data as the example, and that's just not a permission that the app asks for. (Is it even a permission that exists?). It's pretty clear that they're just regurgitating that misleading screenshot that was making the rounds a couple of days ago with no understanding.
If the app's privacy story really is that bad, one should be able to make that case while sticking to the facts.
That is a screenshot of the Privacy Labels. It's basically a structured form of the app's privacy policy, self-reported by Facebook. Them putting "Health and Fitness" in that list does not in any way grant their app access to any health data on your iPhone. The same is true for literally every other item on that list. It has no impact on what iOS lets the app do.
The reason all of that data is listed there is that Meta might already have it associated with your account, due to e.g. your use of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Quest, and they might make use of that data in this app too. Or possibly they want a single unified privacy policy for all their apps.
If, as you say, this covers all data "used" in some manner by all Meta apps then I think this is a clear misuse of the policy. Providing a list of labels that includes literally every label isn't helpful to the person deciding if they want to continue using the application or not.
In any case, if Threads doesn't collect health data then, IMHO, the privacy label shouldn't be listed. By Meta's own admission, their app collects this data and posts it back to Meta.
The list of permissions is a different list, with different contents.
It doesn’t give the app access to your health data.
"The following data may be collected and linked to your identity: Health & Fitness, Purchases, Financial Info, Location, Contact Info, Contacts, User Content, Search History, Browsing History, Identifiers, Usage Data, Sensitive Info, Diagnostics, Other Data"
You agreed to give all that data to Meta when you downloaded the app from the App Store.
When I go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Health, Threads is not listed as an app that has access.
Maybe at some point in the future it will request access, and you can just deny it then if you don't want it.
I think the poster is confused between technical system-granted permissions (e.g., Contacts, Location, Bluetooth, etc.) and app privacy labels (i.e., a self-declared user-friendly version of a legalese privacy policy).
That tells me this is a rush job. Probably it's because they were afraid that the small opportunity in the market for someone to compete with Twitter might be very short lived. I think they are right and that they are late to the party.
Let's see what happens but I think this will indeed fizzle out pretty quickly. It will be interesting to see if they'll ever even bother with an EU launch of this thing. Without a strong story on privacy any attempt to launch in the EU is in any case doomed. So, this is looking like it's off to a lack luster and weak start.
Look how popular TT is and they track/capture data out the ass. I've got 18-21yo friends who don't even bat an eye when it comes to it, it's become a fatalist "this is just the way the world works" thing I think.
THis is just peak Hacker News. Most people just click ok to get the stupid popup out of the way.
It's doing incredibly well for v0.0.1-alpha. Not a single hiccup that would indicate scaling problems. Bluesky had this for the taking, and they failed to execute. It's a shame that it'll be Meta owning it, but let's face it: they were able to ship a product with good market fit, and people are happy with it. They'll study Twitter's meltdown in college marketing courses decades from now.
Also no EU apparently because making a product that doesn't record every interaction and pushes it down some "personalized ads" pipeline is unimaginable.
Metaverse.
Threads is not available in EU, which is the biggest chunk in terms of population of the so called West.
Many citizens of many countries can't afford a laptop or desktop setup, go to a small village in Thailand or something and they'll all have cheap Chinese Android phones as their connection to the local outside worlds.
> you are so far in the niche in today's internet userbase it will not matter
That the idea that a user who wants a web app (mobile first) is niche is only applicable to the West; that most of the rest of the world wants a web app.
It means I can’t even look at it as the app is not available in my region (Europe) :D But I guess I’ll be okay, if today is any indication, I’ll get the play-by-play on both Hacker News, and Lemmy …
This is just such a mind blowing lack of creativity. If I didn't know better I would think this is a type of parody or satire.
I say this sarcastically because that was the narrative whenever Twitter has had load issues.
Not saying people saying that where correct but it wasn't just people randomly blaming the CEO for no reason.
It's normal to happen during extreme growth of several millions per hour. Less normal to suddenly happen to a functioning website post-organic growth for a decade.
When I open the link I just get a funny logo and the "from meta" label
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
"They want to kill ActivityPub!"
Elon has become the Kanye of IT world. That's unfortunate but it's the truth.
(Late Registration also is way better than any Tesla around though, so maybe not the fairest comparison).
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
You don't find that a little bit strange? Instead of saying "It's a Twitter clone", you thought it would be wise to drag people into your own miserable (and false) opinions. For what, to make them just as miserable?
So you have to access via a device which will leak enough information that you will be easily identifiable by the platform and those that the platform gives or is forced to give access to.
Surely that makes the platform dead for the world to safely discuss anything vaguely controversial ( ie anything that matters )?
https://www.threads.net/ does not (yet) show anything useful though.
Right now the www.threads.net landing page is awful and slow and entirely targeted at getting people to load the app, but your direct link shows a bit more promise and obviously doing a decent web site is something Meta could do if they so wished.
Have meta defined any public interest oversight
What are they doing about hate speech, CSA and crime
Do they have a penalty box or exclusions policy for politicians and political hacks and what appellate process exists
Do they recognise the force of national laws in any specific jurisdictions beyond the USA
How does meta intend dealing with Iran and china
Through appease, of course
Yes: they recognize the GDPR and are therefore not launching at all in the EU.
All of the dark patterns are already there. No timeline control, no web UI, everything is aimed at data harvesting and it brings absolutely zero new innovation.
It's kinda sad that we can't make a better Twitter. Is that really it?
For people saying it's not taking off, my Swedish community over at Mastodon is currently about as active as on Twitter. I think we're passing critical mass especially with the most recent exodus that filled the ranks even more. And yes it looks like not all but many are staying.
The problem is, will people keep posting text?
Before TT got massive I remember seeing stickers with just the logo slapped all over the place in Hammersmith, London where I worked at the time. Very guerilla, creating something that seems semi-exclusive. I won't be surprised if they (or already have) also follow in TT's footsteps of paying some big names to sign on and do some content for the platform, which caused a surge for TT.
Then again, TT was funded by a government...though sometimes FB/meta appears to have all the power of a small government.
If the site no longer functions as a prostitution platform I wonder if it can survive here.
I think Meta felt the pressure, seeing people might move to Mastodon (happy user from today) and wanted their piece of cake
Meta has 3.59 billion active users: https://www.investing.com/academy/statistics/facebook-meta-f...
I don't think that's an accurate description. Not only is Instagram not aggressive about the one account thing, they are actively supportive of multiple accounts. You can in fact not only be logged in to multiple accounts at the same time, you can have an Instagram feed that shows combined content for multiple accounts.
While I don’t think Meta has the culture to foster the kind of chaotic insanity that goes on at Twitter, Musk better up his game - this is a far more serious mainstream contender than the Fediverse.
Whatever happens, the fediverse will be fine. It's not dependent on VCs, ads, influencers, scammers, etc. All it needs is people willing to set up servers and host some users. It's open source so as long as there are people willing to work on that, it continues to exist.
The Fediverse requires money and donations to continue their uptime and it will get difficult for them to stay relevant if they cannot handle the influx of users posting on Threads when they federate.
Meta is already making money and is insanely profitable and doesn't need VCs. Essentially they have won social networks and have already signed NDAs with Mastodon admins of the largest instances to federate with them anyway.
This integration only benefits Meta and Threads and at this rate Threads will be larger than the entire Fediverse and will be the Fediverse.
Regular people don't care about the minutiae of a platform, they just want to use the platform & get on with their lives. Of course this is isn't great, but it's just how people are.
As a long time inhabitant of the Fediverse, I do not like the idea of Meta slurping up my public posts hosted on my own server. Would it help to put my profile and public posts under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license? I guess that would hinder Meta, in theory at least, to use my content as they are the very definition of a commercial actor, earning big piles of cash mixing user content with ads.
EDIT: I guess I'll use this license for all my posts from now on: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The whole point of the Fediverse is that any random person or company can come along and start slurping up your public posts (which, of course, is just another reason that it's a terrible idea).
Explains the 10M signups though, Meta has a huge network but I would've span it off, no Insta et al.
OK - I'm off to create an Instagram account so I can create a Threads account so that I finally won't have to start using Twitter!
I already dislike the platform. I cannot browser threads.net nor sign up on the web.
ROBOT All your data are belong to us.To quote https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-05/meta-won-... :
A number of companies, including Meta, have self-designated themselves as “gatekeepers” under the DMA rules, which will potentially make them subject to stricter regulations around data sharing and giving preference to their own products.
Gatekeepers are banned from combining users’ personal data across different platforms under the DMA.
Threads is designed to let users follow the same accounts they’ve connected with on Instagram and keep their Instagram usernames, helping the social media giant leverage its billions of users to quickly gain scale.