Threads is an entire era now? Surely it's a liiiiittle too early to make that claim.
Something has to be said about about the fact that now Meta decided to launch a Twitter clone.
IIRC, G+ was a defensive maneuver. G was terrified of FB, who was executing successfully on many fronts and putting pressure on advertising revenues. And so G tried to make G+ happen.
By contrast, in this case, Twitter keeps shooting itself in the foot. (I guess that's what happens when you lay off huge swaths of the company and demand that engineers print out their code on paper.) So Threads (and others) are moving into the vacuum that's been created.
So things right now feel like much more of a competitive land-grab, and it's not entirely clear who's going to win (or even why/how they'll win, or even what the victory conditions look like).
There certainly seemed to be a number of advertisers who reduced, or entirely removed, their commitments to purchase space on the platform. While many have since reversed somewhat on that, many have not or have not completely unless there has been a major change this quarter (the just full figures I've seen reported in were for 2023Q2 and IIRC the total advertising sales were down >55% compared to 2022Q2).
That is two fairly negative indicators with demonstrable evidence. Do you have any positive metrics in mind?
I read somebody today remarking that Twitter was an indignation machine, but I think twitter is very productive if you're following people who produce content or information rather than following political pundits and reporters.
> Twitter was a minor, failing social media site up until Musk bought it.
Maybe "slowly failing", accelerating after the purchase.
But I slightly disagree with this:
> Twitter didn't even matter when it was just Twitter.
I think twitter was disproportionally more significant, though not as hugely so as its denizens believed. If there were a graph of "number of subscribers" (X) vs "influence over Zeitgeist" (Y), Twitter would appear a little above the curve.
The reason is that a lot of journalists corresponded on it so things discussed on it would appear in the press.
I started using it last summer or so -- a few months before the sale. I never (and don't) like the short form. I'm more likely to see something outside my "bubble" on TW than FB, but frankly FB is more useful to me (I just want to know news about my friends and family, and their kids, basically, plus cat and dog pictures). Climate Twitter is pretty good; for some reason the same kind of thing doesn't appear on FB (Machinist FB is good and there appears to be no Machinist Twitter that I can find).
If this sounds like a defense of twitter: it isn't. I'm just saying that "didn't matter" is probably too absolute. It never mattered a lot, though.
Twitter was anything but a minor player in the social media space. Financially, it was treading water due to the difficulty of monetizing its userbase.
What doomed the site was the Elon purchase. The additional debt has basically ensured the sites deterioration, long before Elon started alienating his advertisers and demonstrating his lack of commitment to free speech.
More of Zuck cheating at life.
No, it is a seperate app that users have to get from their device's respective app store. After you download the app you are given the option to login with your Instagram account. After authenticating you are then asked to setup rest of your profile like setting your bio, website, and importing follows. Google and Facebook provide oauth libraries for Android, iOS, and web that could similarly be used to let people log in with an account they already have.
(Because 110 million is basically "no one" compared to the full FB userbase. It's just the statistical "a small percentage of a fuckton of people is still a lot of people")
is it active?
Because it sure doesn't sound like it is.
I have nearly non-existent social media footprint, so please enlighten me.
How do we know that these 110mm users amassed were not just user accounts from existing Meta portfolio systems?
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...
My working theory is that because the nature of relationships on Twitter and IG (seed data for Threads) is different, the conversations will be different. If anything, Threads is going to be a hotspot for memes and pic-based content bc the pic features are way better already.
Various changes in the market place have opened up things, possibly to more competition, posisibly to less, but a new era nevertheless.
This is nothing like "clone apps" on a "marketplace". This is Facebook pushing an app out, and the world pretending it's somehow not just another Facebook app that BY DEFAULT will have several percent of the Facebook/Insta userbase signing up because, again, there is no downside.
Feeling cute, might cancel later.
Except cancelling turns out to be a mild inconvenience compared to signing up, so people won't bother.
I wouldn’t take either of the above for granted but I wouldn’t think either is impossible. What puzzles me the most is that Threads is seemingly 50 times larger than the Fedi already at which point there doesn’t seem to be any point in Thread joining it. Many people on the Fedi want to block Threads for various reasons, not least because some people don’t want to share a social network with anyone who disagrees with them, but also Threads doesn’t support features that are important to anyone who takes Fedi participation series such as image alt text and hashtags.