Threads Surpasses 30M Signups | Hacker News Reader

Threads Surpasses 30M Signups

threads.net

42 pointssergiomattei70 comments

When the app basically amounts to a new tab for an existing dominant social network, I don’t think this is too interesting. It’s almost like reporting “30M people opened the Facebook Marketplace tab” or something. I signed in, took one look at a Mr Beast tweet on my homepage, wondered “why would I want to look at this?” and then closed the app. But I count as a signup!

I really want the old pre-musk, before blue checkmarks, Twitter back so I've been trying to give it a real go. Something's gotta fill that void I have now. It can't be Twitter, it is so terrible now. Bluesky and Mastadon just haven't done it for me either.

Other than people complaining that the new twitter sucks, I have noticed no difference. Why is it terrible now, and why was it good before? The checkmark thing is whatever, I never gave checkmarks any deference.

The only change that I've disliked has been requiring being logged in to read tweets.

One complaint I've seen from a lot of people is that they dislike the tweets they see in replies now because of the blue check prioritization but I'd imagine this really depends on the type of content you follow on twitter

> The only change that I've disliked has been requiring being logged in to read tweets.

Yeah, fair, I agree that this is not good. It makes the prospect of posting news/updates on twitter worse because you can't link it externally, it reduces your reach.

> One complaint I've seen from a lot of people is that they dislike the tweets they see in replies now because of the blue check prioritization but I'd imagine this really depends on the type of content you follow on twitter

This is also fair but it doesn't bother because I think it will be the direction all social media sites must go. I think the amount of bots on the internet will grow beyond all reason and we'll need some sort of filter to be sure that we're actually interacting with humans. Maybe there's another solution than a paywall, but I can't think of one.

The problem with the blue checkmarks is now if you expand any popular tweet to see replies you just see the blue checkmarks, who happen to be a self selected particular type of person most people don't want to hear too much from.

1. I have to keep notifications disabled on twitter now, because they keep suggesting truth-social type content. Regardless of your politics, regardless of who you follow.

2. It’s a social network, and other people leaving changes it. I followed a handful of interesting people to mastadon, but it’s not everyone and now my follow list is fractured. Neither thread nor mastadon solve this, but it’s something new caused by Elon.

3. You can not give blue check marks any deference but the platform does. Now more than ever.

4. All these crazy shenanigans are tiring. The 600 tweet a day limit, Disabling moderation, banning mastadon links, etc. they make twitter unstable.

To get to brass tacks: some groups continue to be bitter over Musk due to a self-created petty, political, disagreement. They want their safe spaces back. Like a child upset that the people she kicked out of her birthday party are back.

Threads is going to fail because you would need various social groups of large representation to move en masse e.g. African Americans. Last I checked Black Twitter isn't going anywhere over some petty disagreement over Musk. Anyone migrating (I.e. leaving Twitter while simultaneously going to Threads) is in a small bubble.

Threads is going to be the "Twitter killer" just like Mastodon was supposed to be. Everyone declaring success already hated Twitter to begin with. They have the Musk-hating media behind them writing slanted articles. I've already read the doom and gloom headlines this morning. Instagram sucks and everyone I know hates it. This was the Hail Mary pass to save it because Meta is out of ideas.

It's vastly different, you're being disingenuous or just don't know anything about Twitter.

There's a bunch of new features that nobody uses, like communities. Blue checkmark comments for days before you see good comments on popular tweets. The for you feed is full of people I don't want to see, and that was my favorite feed before. Ratelimits, and just overall skyrocketing negativity across the board. The only good thing is spaces. A lot of good people stopped tweeting. It's vastly different.

I am also not understanding what people think is wrong with current twitter. Nothing really has changed from my pov.

It's owned by someone that the left can no longer stand because he doesn't align with their beliefs enough. They have been ramping up their dislike of Musk the more he doesn't align to their ideas (the partians on both sides tolerate no meaningful divergence from their agendas). At this point it pours out of them like their hatred for Trump does. Just mentioning Elon Musk sets off an emotional trigger and they'll rampage about how terrible he is (Reddit is overflowing with it). It's largely a partisan tell, how you respond to Musk. Before the left went crazy about him, the right used to dislike him for being supposedly too green, environmental-focused, too cozy with the Obama Admin, etc.

Back in reality, who cares if he destroys Twitter. It doesn't matter. Something else will take its place. Personally, I almost enjoy the chaos and watching people lose their minds over entirely trivial things. Culturally the US is imploding (not a new momentum, merely advancing further), I might as well be entertained by the very large numbers of people starting the fires.

What about people like me, who have considered him a toxic moron the whole time?

Yeah I wonder if there really is this supposed demographic of people that loved him and dislike him now. I think people who knew much about him either never liked him or have hitched their political leanings to his and gone along for the ride.

I used to have a lot of respect for the quiet and reserved Elon who put rockets into space and had an interesting car company. Now's he's spreading misinformation about mass shootings where children died and just being unbelievably awful and toxic. Turns out he's an absolutely horrible person all the way down. He should have just stayed quiet and built his companies.

It was the road tiles and the roof tiles for me. I did not know about him before hearing about those.

I remember when Tesla started out, before him. I used to use their car as an answer to smug Hummer owners. Then suddenly I hear that this Musk dude "founded" Tesla, but the earliest articles never mentioned a founder, just a bunch of engineers doing cool stuff.

And then one day my wife shows me this article of this guy who's got this cool idea of roof shingles with little tiny inefficient solar sensors in it, like that was going to accomplish something, and then the same guy, he wants to make these road shingles with hard glass to get all scratched up, and that's gonna HOLY FUCK THIS GUY IS A FUCKIN IDIOT

And ever since all these people acting like he's this... I swear they got sold on billionaires as useful strictly on the strength of this guy's bad ideas.

I might be overindulging after work a wee bit

I'm probably a minority user but for Twitter I use it to follow official government accounts (like the National Weather Service) and a few transit-oriented shitposting accounts that I participate in. I only use the Following feed because I do not, in any way shape or form, have the slightest inclination of "discovering" people or reading what "influencers" have to say or any of those things. For that, Twitter, is still great. I can live in my own content bubble.

Bluesky is good but it doesn't have those accounts (yet, maybe ever?).

Threads seems cool and I've never used Instagram before, but that default feed you have to view makes me dizzy to look at. The comments and posts from accounts I would never follow are so fucking stupid and awful that I cannot use that app until/unless I can silence all of that bullshit. I don't even mind the ads. Whatever. Maybe I'd even pay (ala Twitter Blue but Musk is acting like a piece of shit so not giving him money) but I am not going to be subjected to a steady stream of the worst possible content imaginable.

What I want is Simple Global Message Service with the ability to dig/drill in to things I want/like, and to be able to only view content from people I allow (i.e. follow). Whatever product (Twitter today) gives me that gets my eyeballs or wallet.

-full of bots.

-full of russian troll farms.

-full of random porn.

>one look at a Mr Beast tweet on my homepage, wondered “why would I want to look at this?"

I would think you'd always expect the most popular stuff to be recommended to you until you have some data in the app for the recommendation engine to go off of?

I haven't done much digging but I don't see where I would go to only see content of people I follow.

While you are correct, I think this is one of those the user might not care, and a contributor to why being an upstart in this market segment can be so difficult.

yeah, everyone and every corporate PRs are signing up to secure their userid for fear of squatting but... not sure if there is more to it.

btw, it seems across-platform squatting is becoming increasingly worsening problem. horrible people just take IDs they've seen elsewhere, just-like-that.

Does threads not use the same usernames as Instagram? Like if I sign up, using my instagram account it wouldn't be the same?

It does, yes, I think you can just log in with existing Insta without problems. But not all of those wanting an escape from Twitter at this stage have Instagram accounts, or at least not in the same ID.

>one look at a Mr Beast tweet on my homepage, wondered “why would I want to look at this?"

They haven't implemented a follower feed yet, but it is in the works.

It will be interesting what their Daily Average Use or Monthly Average Use looks like in a month. It's hard for successful firms to rediscover the skills needed to launch a new product that is not an offshoot or derivative of existing offerings. I think the more new competitors to Twitter that emerge the less likely it is than any gain critical mass to challenge as a viable replacement. But nothing lasts forever so it will be educational to watch.

How many of these posts do we need? Is HN to become an hourly counter?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36612615 Threads has 10M sign ups in seven hours

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36610716 Threads hits 5M signups in the first four hours

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609632 Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

2M -> 5M = 2.5x

5M -> 10M = 2x

10M -> 30M = 3x

Counting at exponential intervals is fine and notable.

Maybe exponential intervals are better than linear indeed. But your remark is orthogonal to parent's complaint that the updates are simply too frequent: to take your exponential framework, they would probably prefer a x100 interval before the next post rather than a x3.

Assuming we see a new post about Threads user growth at x2 intervals, we'll see a maximum of eight more posts before they run out of humans.

And would all of these posts be useful information?

The comments would be. They'd be a nucleus for the latest findings about Threads. For example, in the comments of the most recent one I found out that although you can deactivate a Threads account, you can't delete it without also deleting the linked Instagram account. That's useful to know.

You really don't need these submissions for that purpose, because it's all over the news:

Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting Instagram account, Meta says https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36612434

Threads profiles can't be deleted without removing your entire Instagram accounthttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36621526

You can't delete Meta's new Threads app without deleting Instagram too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627712

You will later be able to delete your Threads account with o losing Instagram https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630147

The rapid consistency of these posts and them being about something so benign makes it seem like Meta is posting these to HN for publicity.

Yeah, I'm sure meta is just dying to get publicity on this tiny site.

Any non-invite launch will peak heavily to start, and drop very quickly after. One thing I'd be very curious about is what their WAU will be a month from now. This is the death knell for any social network - can you get ongoing engagement instead of just "Testing this new platform for the first time, here's a dog pic" type posts?

One thing that worries me for their longevity is that they don't actually offer any tangible user benefit. Right now their biggest sales pitch is that they're "not twitter". Many of those users who were looking for a solid replacements have moved to mastodon already, so it'll be interesting to see if they have long term stickiness.

Still that doesn't discount that this is a massive amount of users on day 1. Big props to the team!

Usually I'm pretty judgmental about moves like this, but despite the limited feature set, I think the execution here is impressive. Solid UI, easy to follow accounts, and basic UX interactions just work.

The only "gotcha" (and it's a massive one) that I've seen are the privacy implications. If they take a step back on that, this could be a legitimate threat to Twitter in a few months time—especially if they establish a healthy release pace.

It couldn't be any bigger of a threat to twitter than twitter itself

together it's a The Cascadia tsunami that will bury all of Washington and much of Oregon.

it would be naive to assume that company like facebook/meta is gonna value privacy in long run.

The huge issue for me right now is there's no way to look at just the accounts you follow. Without that it's just as bad as the For You page on twitter which isn't great. It's the same issue making me hate Instagram at the moment you can only disable suggested posts in your feed 30 days at a time.

What privacy implications?

https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/threads-no-eu-launch/

They basically want you to sign the rights to your life away in the form of data collection. That seems to be their business model here so I don't think they are going to take a step back.

The sad part is the average person will likely continue to not care. I can only hope the advertising industry gets destroyed or at least decimated. Maybe once mega corporations realize advertising isn't driving the kind of value that they think they will pull back spending. Thus making the ad driven business not financially viable and killing facebook and the like.

I think the promise of threads is exactly what many people want. Hopefully the product improves to meet the expectations. Some things I'd like to see:

1. Native notes like feature for long form posts I can embed and share. I cannot stand the tweets threads of (n/27) about a topic.

2. Topic based feeds. Whether it's hashtags or some other type of categorization process. I think I read on HN the other day a twitter engineer had come up with something like that but it never got buy in from the decision makers. This would also help filter out things I don't want to see more broadly than manually muting users.

3. Enabling the option to only see verified accounts.

4. Private threads. Threads where you can tag an audience where only they can see the posts and replies. This would be a form of DM that isn't just another chat app.

They mention the fediverse in their onboarding flow, so it seems like they’re somewhat serious about interoperability.

I’m really hoping that this will be the push needed to make ActivityPub social networking go mainstream.

My biggest issue with Threads is that search only searches profiles.

What was Twitter’s “magic” to me was that search was for tweets.

So you could hear about a live event happening and in near-time find information about it and people who were there or knowledgeable about the event.

My first exposure to this was the Atlanta Gas Shortages in 2008 and it was when the hashtag really came into its prime as a way to quickly find relevant content.

Threads has none of that. Try searching for the “Tour De France”. This morning when I did that I only got two profiles. This kills discoverability and the ability to follow the zeitgeist.

If Threads changes search to index content then it could work. But until then it’s just bland with its attempt at using an algorithm to spoon feed you content without your ability to control what you want to see.

Shameless link to the thread where I first put these thoughts down: https://www.threads.net/t/CuW77iEuquK/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA...

non-geoblocked content, for people in EU: https://archive.is/TAIyP

Threads is blocked in the EU?

yes, they have to address EU compliance requirements before they can release it there

And to clarify, it's not "blocked", rather it hasn't launched in EU countries (and indeed reported to be due to worries regarding legal compliance, but afaik no official statements on what aspects of (presumably mostly GDPR) law Threads has / might have issues with that FB/Instagram don't, nor whether there's significant work to be done or if it's just that their legal team haven't yet finished deciding that it can launch there.

tells you how good and moral the parent company's intentions and priorities are

Not wanted here...you can keep it. Besides, 30m people can't be wrong.

though it would be interesting to see how many Europeons do eventually sign up, once our inalienabile rights have been paid for, i mean 'guaranteed'.

Just reading is not geoblocked. The original link works fine for me.

oh, indeed! For me it was showing just a Threads logo when I had "enhanced tracking protection" enabled in Firefox. After disabling it, I can read the website fine. Thanks!

I don’t understand why anyone is going to Threads at all. I mean, post Drop Facebook and all, why would you go back into the Zucks social arms?

Because even Zucks FB empire isn't as toxic and shittified (yet) as Twitter and Reddit have become. Plus, Zuck ate cake last year with metaverse, and FB has redeemed themselves slightly with open source ai. Elon on the other hand is an egotistical billionaire that thinks the only way he can go is up, so it's nice to see people with big egos fail, even just a little. Hopefully Spez is next.

I'm not a social media guy, I'm not going to use threads probably ever, and I understand that Threads is basically just an appendage out of Insta...

But I still say hats off to the devs for making a product that scaled so well so quickly. How many day 1 launches fail due to servers buckling under the load? Props to you guys for a technical job well done.

to be fair, if load is just shared between Instagram servers, a lot of people are probably testing out threads and using Instagram less today. Though, I imagine twitters usage is dropping like a fly. How they retain any advertisers after this, I can't imagine.

Never heard of Threads until seeing this post. Not sure if the home page is broken, or if it is just utterly unhelpful in learning more about this app. It seems like the goal is to get you to install the app to find out. I'm giving it a shot, so I guess it worked.

[dupe]

We can stop posting these now? There's plenty of discussion in the other two or three threads (pun intended)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36609632

Are there any good lists of scientific, academic, hacker-news type people to follow? Was hoping to see Yann LeCun at least, but so far it’s just Mr. Beast, etc.

Why is this flagged? It’s worth having the discussion

Presumably because it's the tenth one of these we've had today and the discussion under each is identical.

Oh good. Yet another one of these posts.

Indeed, each one brings worse news than the previous.

I signed up out of curiosity, but just like my instagram/tiktok/Mastadon/whetever accounts, they are just... there.

People like me count as a signup, but active users after the hype dies down will matter more.

I stick to youtube even for shorts, because its content/recommendations are much better than tiktok/instagram reels (I could spend time time curating it, but why other when Youtube has already done it for me?)

Same for twitter, already curated with multiple lists setup for me to browse depending on topic, I am not going to do the same on threads/bluesky/mastadon, ain't nobody got time for that.

Something drastic will have to happen for me to switch, but it's unlikely.

Then again I am in the wrong demographic. I guess its the age group thing, I am in my mid-30's, a Gen-whatever we are called.

New kids probably who are hyped on instagram and tiktok are probably already telling us OK boomer and making leet memes on threads, and we will just look on in confusion.

I will believe Threads is real when people start to ratio each other on it.

____

Prophecy: usage will split and depending on the social/cultural/commercial sphere, people will start posting on the relevant platform. If you regularly post on instagram, you will append threads into your workflow.

News twitter will NOT be following to threads. Food twitter will, and stuff like that.

I actually like it better, if only because they have nested threads like HN and Reddit which makes way more sense than twitters single thread replies. They definitely need better search and hashtags, but for day 0 launch it's not too shabby.

I am waiting for a better web experience before I dive in, I have the app installed but for now it feels weird to me. Maybe I am getting old?

Abc, cnn, Yahoo News, techcrunch, wired, Bloomberg, vice, and many others are already posting news updates on threads, so I don't know how you figure?

I meant individual journos and other affiliated individuals, not the parent organisation.

Maybe they shift, maybe not, but for now, I have a feeling the news is still on Twitter. My prophecy could be wrong but still, it's just the vibe I am getting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com