Engagement on Instagram's Threads Has Cratered | Hacker News Reader

Engagement on Instagram's Threads Has Cratered

gizmodo.com

23 pointsjonathankoren10 comments

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Cons

1) No Desktop App

2) No iPad app

3) No DMs, Save Images Feature

4) People who hate Meta are gonna stay away.

5) Influencers have to rebuild their clout and following, though some have found success but it is nowhere near the level that they have on other platforms. There is also huge community on Twitter, Instagram etc and there is going to be a lot of inertia for people to sign up.

6) Twitter is taking them head on with new features like revenue sharing.

7) Lots of bots (in my anecdotal experience)

8) Feed Isn't always of high quality. For example, I find a lot of BS reccomendations on Threads which is not an issue on Instagram or Twitter ( I use Twitter to follow the ML community and read memes) and Instagram for cat pictures, both of which I still find reliably on my feed.

9) Some of the biggest names like Taylor Swift, Ronaldo, Dwayne Johnson etc have not joined.

10) It is not being run by Musk, but by Zuckerberg.

11) Eventually when ads show up, it is gonnna become terrible. Also, no ads might be driving brands away apart from the fact it is a new entrant to the social media game.

Pros

1) The community overall is very positive in my anecdotal experience.

2) It is not being run by Musk, but by Zuckerberg.

3) No ads (for now)

I suspect if this fizzles out, Instagram and Threads will merge into one with Instagram subsuming the other.

Why is (2) a pro? It's just one billionaire instead of another.

There are pros and cons to each of them. Musk has mishandled many things during his take over of Twitter, and Zuckerberg has a better temperament as a person seemingly but he also has been running Meta into the ground.

Though only time can tell what will happen.

TBF he also listed it as a con.

Honestly, Zuckerberg is smart enough to stay out of the way and let people smarter and more qualified to run the show. (This shouldn’t be considered praise. It’s literally the same level of getting out of the way when the fire department arrives to put out the fire.)

Musk is busy publically undercutting his employees (including his recently installed CEO) and fucking things up, and then blaming some jargon word salad.

A web version that people can use on their computers might help. If you want to post on multiple platforms simultaneously, it’s much easier when you can keep all the platforms open in a browser tab and swap between them to deal with replies and analytics.

As it stands, if you’re a content creator or social media manager for a brand, being restricted to only using a phone app is annoying.

Compared to the first 72hrs? Of course people are going to be less active.

Things will pick up over time, I’m getting lots of notifications on Instagram of my friends using and posting on threads even though I haven’t even installed the app. That kind of notifications will over time continue to drive people there.

It looks even more sanitized than chirper.ai

I dunno. If the conversations and people stay boring, I think users will just go back to Instagram.

What a non-story. We don’t even have a true baseline of engagement on Threads to work off.

boo fucking hoo.

isn't this what everyone else in the fediverse already expected? not even twitter because they saw threads as a threat but not the fediverse i suppose.

these fads come and go. its normal.

I don’t want to see people who I don’t follow. That’s it.

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