Threads, a Slack alternative unrelated to Instagram, has seen downloads surge | Hacker News Reader

Threads, a Slack alternative unrelated to Instagram, has seen downloads surge

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Does anyone remember Clubhouse? Clubhouse the social audio app at clubhouse.com ?

The sudden popularity of clubhouse.com overshadowed clubhouse.io forcing the latter to rename to shortcut.com.

https://www.shortcut.com/blog/clubhouses-name-is-now-shortcu...

It was super confusing the first few times I heard it mentioned when I switched to a new company.

Now their name and logo are similar to apples shortcuts.app and news.app

Slightly OT, but we used this at my last company and it was a delight. Very much a "what if Jira were good" dream-product

Same, after that I migrated to using Jira at another company and was a pain in comparison.

Reminds me of how the $ZOOM stock kept shooting up whenever ZM was in the news: https://securityboulevard.com/2020/04/investors-buy-up-the-w...

This is an actual play book strategy in good times

Looks like meta might have to change the name if the other threads owns the trademark, that or pay for the name. That clearly this is proof the two products are getting confused by would-be users.

There's no US trademark for "Threads", but somebody submitted an application for it on Jul. 07, 2023 for... Next Computer Inc. Hmm! https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=98075358&caseType=SERIAL_...

According to Delaware filing, this "Next Computer Inc." was incorporated 12/14/2020.

> For: Downloadable computer application software for mobile phones, namely, software for providing access to information, advice, food and exercise databases and calculation tools including a interval timer, covering the field of diet, weight loss, diet planning and lifestyle wellness, and intermittent fasting

Lol, I wonder if they had a generic dieting app ready to go so they could jump on any new brand name that they could grab the 'downloadable software' mark for.

There is trademark common law that covers unregistered trademarks. I am not a lawyer, so I won't comment on how or if it applies on this case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unregistered_trademark

There actually is a trademark files for THREADS https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87522273&caseType=SERIAL_...

Thanks! I later found their application, but thought it was refused (due to confusion with other "Threads" for some kind of threat analysis software). Seems like it was finally granted after amending.

Instagram had a threads product previously, so I am sure they have figured out if they are allowed to name it Threads or not: https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/17/22787783/instagram-threa...

They also took the "Meta" trademark from an existing augmented reality company. I believe that company decided to sue facebook. I think facebook probably just doesn't care and will just settle any possible lawsuits or something.

I don't see a ton of actual people or friends posting on there. I do see a ton of brands, though.

Is there a way to see corporate brands on the Slack-alternative-Threads, or is this comment about the Twitter-alternative-Threads?

I’m guessing they’ve given brands that advertise on FB and IG various promotions if they post to Threads to create the illusion that someone is actually using it.

Plus NSFW content is banned and moderation is much heavier handed than Twitter. This seems like a ploy to get people addicted to the algorithm but in 'Threads' fashion. Twitter may have an advantage if people perceive it to be a more 'realistic' portrayal.

A lot of people use instagram where NSFW content is banned. Most people wouldn’t post or look at NSFW content online if it was related back to their IRL selves. There’s certainly a big niche for a “more wholesome web”. While I think it’s goofy to expect the entire web to operate like this, I kind of like that I won’t be inundated with porn, videos of people getting killed/maimed, etc. when I’m scrolling on some social media apps.

I’m the complete opposite. Obviously no one enjoys spam, but I want real human content. YouTube comments are even more useless now as it’s all just happy happy joy joy from the algorithm.

I definitively get videos of people getting killed/maimed on my instagram feed despite using the "not interested" option every time they show me this stuff.

I can't tell if you're talking about OP's link or to the unrelated but same named product.

I’m sure the geo-restrictions placed upon the app, only making it available in the US and a few other select countries are contributing to this.

There may be -no- official IG Threads app in the AppStore when curious minds go searching.

Yea It took some time before I had it available in the PlayStore here in Canada after the release, but the app from this article had updated their description saying they are not related to META Threads.

Hm? Threads is available in all countries except EU (and China I guess).

It's dumb. Needs a web interface. Hard pass without the ability to block adds or export data.

Funny, Meta just went through the same trouble with the name 'Meta'.

Who or what is a meta. Everyone knows what facebook is though.

As a former employee with a decade in the shop and as much inside baseball as anyone could expect:

I have no fucking idea what the Meta name change was about.

Same thing as Google -> Alphabet

Lack of regulation leads to a giant megacorp buying up corporations to grow even bigger.

They used to call it trust busting.

> I have no fucking idea what the Meta name change was about.

Forget about the metaverse, it seems like it was a good change to me, just to not be named Facebook.

I can tell Meta has a much more positive association in my mind than Facebook (the company). Probably because I associate it with Instagram as strongly as I do with Facebook, and "insta" is still considered kinda cool.

People are having fun on Threads, and somehow zuck seems to be considered cool there. I never would have expected it. I see Instagram mentioned there, I see zuck mentioned there, sometimes I see Meta mentioned there, and I don't know if I've ever seen Facebook mentioned there.

The branding seems to have allowed Threads to have mostly its own branding with strong association with Instagram given the slick onboarding and graph copying, and no real association with Facebook.

Lets them sell the Meta Oculus instead of the Facebook Oculus, and so on.

Just like everyone knows Google but never heard of Alphabet

That's the goal. This way headlines will read "meta/alphabet fined $X million for selling user data to cartels/illuminati" and nobody will know WTF this is about because they'd need to read the article to learn it's the parent company of Facebook/Google.

I thought this was the idea. The public stopped trusting Facebook so they needed to obfuscate.

It's scary when you open Instagram and it says "from Facebook" but meh when it says "from Meta."

Same as reading "business X acquired by Facebook" versus "acquired by Meta."

It's a form of reputation separation. Same thing Google did with Alphabet.

Honestly why have the “From whatever” at all?

I thought it's to transmit good reputation to Meta

E.g. when people trust WhatsApp, and then see it's from Meta, they may trust Meta more too

Who or what is an alphabet. Everyone knows what google is though.

It's a master class in obfuscation:

"What even is Meta?"

"It's... meta"

It tickles my dad funny bone, but not sure it will throw anti-trust regulators off the scent.

Meta is a nameless holding company that stands for nothing. Facebook is a dieing platform that GenX & boomers may still use. At least they seem to have the clue that hitching your company name to a dead platform is a bad business strategy.

It's not growing but I would not say it's dying. People are definitely sti using it and they are making profits. Many young people at least have an account, and many are caught up in the web of Messenger.

I still just call them Facebook, just like most people still just call Google Google (instead of Alphabet)

Well technically Google still exists; it’s a subsidiary of Alphabet, and people who work at Google are employed by “Google LLC” (and not Alphabet). (In fact I think I remember there was some training that explicitly told us to NOT say that we were employees of Alphabet.)

The company “Facebook” no longer exists, though.

Yup they rebranded for different reasons.

Therefore to frustrate the marketing efforts of both you should call them Facebook and Alphabet (even when actually referring to the current Google).

I hate Elon so much that I'm willing to help Zuck steal more of my private data ... sigh.

an elegant summary of american politics in 2023

Happened to me.

They say something like "this is similar to slack, not a social network", but it still seemed like a plausible description of the FB Threads.

They should be more explicit: "THIS IS NOT FACEBOOK/INSTAGRAM THREADS".

You say "they should", but man does that sound like an annoying thing to have to do to your product...

It really was a huge L to not have threads.com

Meta was caught flat-footed by the success of Threads. They had better get in gear and take Threads seriously or they risk losing the thread.

badump tsss

Such a bizarre decision too. This is the best chance Meta had to eat Twitter's lunch and obviously the branding is going to make-or-break that. With the massive +EV potential that represents, and the value provided by owning a .com (as demonstrated by the amount of confusion from people going to threads.com), does it not seem obviously worth it to negotiate extensively with Threads.com for them to rebrand and sell them the .com? It's not going to get cheaper for them if Threads does indeed eat Twitter's lunch.

People aren't going to _any_ URL, they're opening the app called "Threads".

Did Tiktok stay a mobile app forever? It's just common sense to have your url and eventually serve desktop

On one hand, I agree with you.

On the other hand, it's common sense for a photography-and-video oriented social media site to support tablets, and yet there's still no iPad Instagram app! (Although there is a minimal browser version.) From that perspective it would not surprise me if they end up staying app-only, as weird as that seems.

If 100 million sign-ups in five days is losing, I don't want to win.

I mean, at Meta's scale it seems hard to know. Expectations are through the roof.

A better number would be that they were able to push 1 in 40 of Meta's users and 1 in 10 of Instagram's users into the app signup in 5 days of national press coverage. I have no idea what typical uptake of a feature is in Instagram. Nor do I know how many people signed up and checked it out vs. became actual active users.

I also am not sure if 100 million users is even anything to be excited about at Meta's scale. Google seems to kill projects that have that many MAU for lack of executive support.

The DAU drop off is going to be (already is?) monstrous. Not sure if that’s a metric that matters because I don’t care, but people have already stopped using Threads in large numbers.

The same "L" as not having steam.com

or minecraft.com

https://youtu.be/Ardk5agFomY

Just looks like a more expensive and less feature rich version of slack?

Well, now I am wondering what the reports of threads user base plummeting means....

It means the record-breaking sign-up boom has tapered off, and user behavior is evolving from "hello world" mania to more normal usage patterns.

> Between July 6 and July 12, figures provided to TechCrunch from Data.ai indicate that Threads had more than 880,000 downloads globally on iOS alone, having had “few downloads” prior to this point.

It also means that Meta calling their Twitter-killer "Threads" is the best thing that could've happened to threads.com, which was (at best) not thriving.

People wanting to download a Twitter clone and downloading a Slack clone by mistake. Both with a bland generic name. Describes the state of tech pretty well right now.

In the past we never had generic names in tech, like windows or apple

Indeed. Nothing is as specific as that disk operating system.

Someone should start a company to sell business machines internationally.

Would be smart if they broke into integrated electronics.

Some savvy capitalist should start a shipping company and name it after a country in the east

And they should go to the oracle to have someone read their palm.

Maybe this time they can avoid enabling the holocaust

In the 1950s every company was literally called General X. General Electric, General Motors, and General Dynamics are still huge today

And it wasn't only in the US either, lots of big French companies were called Compagnie générale de X since the 1800s. Many modern behemoths such as Veolia, Transdev, Vivendi, Vinci trace their origins to such companies (sometimes the same - Compagnie générale des eaux was massive at some point).

Or "Fabrique Nationale"

I love how many banks are named First something or 1st something.

Less so now, the past it seemed like it was almost all local banks.

I think this actually had to with the specific legal framework some of those banks were chartered under.

"National banks" were established under a specific charter type, which included the authority to issue paper currency under certain Federally-sanctioned conditions, so a lot of them took names that focused on them being National Banks. Thus, you got a lot of First National Bank of Pacoima, Second National of Pacoima, Merchants National, Totally Not A Scam National, etc.

Even though that ended in the 1930s, the precedent for a lot of "First" and "National" names has persisted.

Absolutely love that naming convention. It’s so vague and specific at the same time. Like someone’s asked them what they do and they’ve just waved their hands vaguely and said, ‘oh stuff, you know, with electricity, that sort of thing’.

The best is General Magic, whoever thought of that should’ve taken the rest of the week off.

Maybe Mark could brand rename to .... ElonsLunch

Maybe he would accept that idea for the name of another offspring.

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