What I don't understand is why Bluesky didn't seize the opportunity first. People were literally banging on their doors begging to be let in and they continued to go "sorry we are exclusive, invites only". Now no one gives a shit.
Speaking from experience working on a social site with loads of signup flow experiments: the results are consistently wild. It's no competition on all the normally-valued metrics like interactions and retention.
*for some degree of "know" anyway. Better in most cases than "the news talked about this tweeter thing"
(edit: I do think they may have missed what might be the biggest boat sailing party, which was probably a mistake. But invite-only is quite reasonable.)
Threads solved the cold start problem by not having a personal feed at all at launch. There is only a single algorithmically curated one, prioritizing first/second/third/etc degree connections and otherwise showing content from everyone else. So the place always felt alive from day 1.
Nothing very special about those shortcuts. Had they had a standalone system, it's not be much better than all the other attempts. This is akin to how Snoy launched the playstation.
I kind of feel like Google was onto something with the "circles" idea and it's not clear to me why something like that didn't catch on. I don't want to share everything with the whole world. My college friends, my professional contacts, my family - these are all social circles that I'd want to be connected to with a service like this, but in separate buckets that don't overlap (or only somewhat overlap).
So from a user's point of view, exclusive/invite-only can be really appealing. But if you're thinking from a "make as much money for the company as possible" point of view then yeah anything that limits the number of potential customers you can attract is going to hurt.
What about one invite to create an account, a second to participate?
1. Generate hype
2. Launch the MVP
3. Focus on growth and scaling
4. Add new features
5. Figure out trust & safety and the rest of the long tail of problems
Diverting resources to focus on problems before they become problems is the #1 recipe for failure for startups, and bluesky seems hell bent on it.
He is definitely sympathetic to unfettered free speech and allowing misinformation to proliferate.
I actually figured that this was the strategy, but now that they let that golden moment pass them by I now realise that nobody there has any idea what the fuck they’re doing.
Guess Jack just wants it to be a haven for all the worst blue checkmark behaviour of Twitter, in which case I commend him for creating a containment website.
They aren't failing due to privacy, or invite strategy, or anything else. They are failing because there's no differentiation whatsoever. It's so simple, and it's been true since forever.
The meme that Twitter is burning down is cope. The only people for whom it's burning down are extremely online liberals. And even they are not leaving Twitter. They are the only ones praying for these alternatives to succeed, or in recent HN threads asserting the downfall is assured and imminent. The actual ground truth of using Twitter if you aren't extremely online and praying on political rivals' downfall is that it basically hasn't changed much at all.
You need to differentiate, be cool, and be fun in some new way to leap past immense network effects. And probably also guarantee revenue share through a sort of decentralized network.
Threads is going to do well.
It would not surprise me if two weeks ago they were not planning on this release and t was only the recent drama that influenced them to release.
It's the sound of Zuckerberg whipping the carpet out from under Twitter and all the new upstart platforms.
And I'm no Zuckerberg fan. The contrary.
The ony plus point is seeing Elon get made. I heard he's now threatening to sue Twitter.
Hey Elon, you cannot sue your way to an excellent social media platform, no matter how good your lawyers are ...
The odds are so wildly against Threads that I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
After seeing Bluesky so far, it may be higher than what most thought…
Also Zuckerberg wanted to acquire Twitter in the 2008 for $500m because in his paranoid head, he was scared that perhaps Twitter could overtake Facebook. Let me be clear, Zuckerberg is cutthroat competitor that doesn't care about anything except success. And looking at the Zuckerberg's track-record he won't let go this massive opportunity which is basically to kill off Twitter with Threads without much effort because Twitter is and was imploding for a very long time.
One side-note about Kevin Systrom; he said that back in the day when he co-founded Instagram, he didn't hear and know about AWS. So I must come to the conclusion in this ad-hoc way that not all successful founders know what they are doing and yea there is a lot of luck involved. And btw he is a Stanford graduate?! What is Stanford teaching these "kids"?
2) Zero downtime on a day 1 launch at the scale is a very impressive technical feat. If it had been rushed or released prematurely, this level of app stability would not have been the case. If I had to guess, this would be the reason why Bluesky hasn't been able to release to the general public
In terms of the app being a foundation that will be built on and cannibalize Twitter, I'm very bullish on the future for Threads!
There is absolutely no content. Not as in “blank page nothing here” type of no content, I mean as in the “open the fridge, look around, and decide there’s nothing to eat” type of no content.
Meanwhile, Threads is content rich and there’s already people I know posting cool stuff to see and interact with.
The result, is that I don’t give a fuck about Bluesky, and I’m not going to bother spreading invite codes.
If I get at least 20 upvotes on this comment though maybe I’ll consider it since it means the interest is there.
Edit: lol so FAANG just steals any and all actively used product names now. Got it.
b) Threads.com raises Seed round back in Oct, 2018. [2]
c) Meta acquires Meta Threads trademark in Nov, 2021.
d) Threads as a trademark itself has been widely used well before Threads.com. [3]
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/threads-aa50/company...
But D is relevant because of course trademarks are highly specific to a category.
And so Threads (social network) would be considered different to Threads (business chat).
One Google Play Store, Threads the chat app has "not affiliated with Threads by Instagram" in their listing. I wonder if they are getting lots of downloads by confused people.