Threads has lost half of its daily active users a week after launch | Hacker News Reader

Threads has lost half of its daily active users a week after launch

bgr.com

84 points_2z1p52 comments

It’s an unusable app. I’ve followed about 5 people. On the app there is no way for me to see a list of the people I’ve followed. There’s no way to get a list that contains only the threads started by people I follow. Threads is a terrible implementation. It’s embarrassingly bad.

I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it embarrassing… But I’m certainly looking forward to being able to see only my friends’ threads. (And ads, I’m sure). Until then I’m just waiting, I dislike wading through random peoples’ posts.

At that point, is it the same as Facebook?

Zuck is "very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected."

I wouldn't count it out.

I’m not counting it out. Lots of people want an alternative to Twitter since Musk has alienated a significant percentage of users. The Threads app though sucks really bad. It is a very bad implementation and it’s embarrassing that Facebook launched such a bad app.

Well, since technically it's a Twitter clone from top to bottom with no new ideas, it deserves to be bad.

It doesn't matter though. Copying the features of incumbents has always been FB's MO. They will eventually compete or even outrace Twitter in due time, as much as I do not like to see that.

I argue "buying out the competition" has always been FB's MO.

They are not even remotely close to having the technological foundation of Twitter and FBs internal incentive structure fortifies short-term thinking.

They were also very optimistic about Horizon Worlds.

from day one you can see the people you've followed. Just go to your profile and click "following".

As for the general implementation, I'm with you on the problems of lacking a feed with only posts from those you follow. But according to the Threads team, this was a minimally-viable-product and features like that are coming soon.

Other than that, it's been very smooth in my experience. And much less full of crap that Twitter. Though that's likely due to it being brand new.

I just checked it out. I’m on the iPad. I clicked on the icon for my profile. It shows a grayed out text that says “0 followers”. There is no link for a list of people I’m following and there is no display of who I’m following. After a while of poking around I see that if I click on “0 followers” - and it is not obvious at all that this is a link - I get taken to a page that shows that I have zero followers. There is a tab that says “Following”. I click on it and it shows who I’m following.

This is a shitty app. It is user hostile.

It’s way more crappy than Twitter. I’ve blocked around 100 people and I still get dumb influencers on my feed. Clearly I have no desire to see what Selena Gomez or any other similar person is doing.

Sounds like it might be working as expected - weeding out the unprofitable users by pushing marketing hard and finding out who will put up with it

It’s not working well if they already have lost half their daily users. Did you read the article?

The standard play for new entrants is to make a great experience and then slowly make it suck more by injecting intrusive ads into the experience. If Facebook’s strategy is as you seem to suggest, namely make it suck to begin with, then Threads will likely fail.

Calling initial sign-ups shortly after the product launch an active user is the biggest joke ever.

Let's see in 6 months time how many users have been active daily for a prolonged period of time (3+ months) then we talk about "active users".

I don't think this is a big deal, of course you're going to have a massive wave at launch and a load of those people are going to bounce right back off it. The question is whether communities have started to form, because if even some small communities have started to form there that will slowly drag users back in as more features come online and more churn happens at Twitter. A social network can't really just come into being overnight, forming those communities, finding like-minded people takes time. The initial launch has done a great job of seeding the ground. The question is whether it grows and flourishes - and either way that'll take time to figure out, and it'd be silly to write it off given the incredible ability Facebook has to drive users to a new service.

Tbh its a weird launch.

Seems it still wasn't ready. I guess they wanted to push it out while it was at "peak-hype" but I have a real feeling of "now what?" when going on there. Can't look at companies and celebrities tweeting all day, lol.

The rumour was that they rushed it out when Musk started rate limiting Twitter which I think was a perfectly reasonable move. A lot of people in this thread are complaining about missing features, but that's a solvable problem.

Sure... but timing is a big factor here. Vine was basically TikTok but for whatever reason didn't catch on the same.

If its just a twitter clone that can be viable for a lot of people but if you do the "big announcement" and then drop the ball you won't have users coming back.

When you lock out half of the developed world at the time of biggest hype around your app and eventually open it up only after, you can't expect more.

Still waiting for the killer feature, besides just being not twitter.

If it ends up killing off twitter, would you consider it existing its killer feature?

Based on the HN response, Threads has an amazing future.

There was this post yesterday or so ago about harbingers of failure. Given how odd of a crowd HN is compared to average population, i think your prediction checks out.

FWIW Manifold believes Threads will not have more dau than twitter by the end of the year (34%).

dau? Dumbest average user?

Daily Active Users.

All of the content is brands and influencers posting ads thinly-veiled as content. What's the point?

Whats it like on threads though?

I think you just answered your own question, actually.

But how much is this due to Meta suddenly blocking international users?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/meta-blocking-vp...

Besides, while I am not a fan of Zuck I think most people can agree that he is not batshit crazy and have somewhat competent people around him that will eventually get this right. Can't say the same about the other guy.

(Discalimer: I haven't tried Threads and quit twitter 5 years ago)

Zuck is evil, while Musk is just childish sometimes. Social media is a lot worse for the world than electric cars and cheap rockets.

True, but Musk is in the social media game now too!

Thread's DAUs has fallen from almost 50% of Twitter's DAUs to 20%

Hardly a death sentence

For either app.

Twitter’s existential crisis is that it’s lost almost half of its advertising revenue since it was bought by Musk, and posts by its most active users continue to decline. When Facebook’s ad machine kicks into gear, Twitter’s troubles will deepen.

Right, everyone hates Twitter now because you can’t block ads, you can’t use clients that don’t show ads and you can’t use it without logging in to an account.

How is a Facebook enterprise going to be any different in anything apart from perhaps a very short honeymoon period?

Not that I love the ads, but bad ads might not be the main or only reason that people are leaving twitter.

So what’s the rest? Hurr durr Musk bad? Is Zuckerberg any better?

It's exactly that for a lot of HNers.

Wait— why are all the stats from the article based on users ‘on android’?

…is that even a reliable metric ? Is android users representative ratio of iOS users and web users as well?

There'd have to be a legitimately fundamental personality and behavior split depending on your platform of choice in order for that to make sense. At a certain point, the numbers work out.

You follow the same people as on Instagram but don't get to see pictures. In other words, it's a poor version of Instagram.

The point of having a Twitter account is that you are following a completely different crowd.

Well yeah, all the brands caught on and their algorithm sucks rn.

I spent more time muting brands and ads than I did reading anything. I'll go back when there's a following feed and/or the algorithm is better tuned.

Managed to get a whole screen or two worth of mutes between each interesting post when someone told football about Threads. All the football stadiums in the UK started threading their "im new here hello" threads. Completely unusable that day haha

Yeah, because the feed is dogshit. I’ve blocked 100 accounts I would never want to see that are thrown into my feed (and so has everyone else it seems) but they just keep coming.

Why wouldn’t I uninstall that? It was the easiest decision ever.

Wait, you mean you didn’t want to see NFL teams from 10 states over?

seems expected for a new app with hype that people want to see for themselves. it would have been the same regardless of this or that feature. how many moved to telegram from Whatsapp to see what it is and never logged in second time when the whatsapp tos came out? about 99% of my personal contact list. that's how things work.

i would have use mastodon as an example as well but the create account there is so challenging that hype or not, you can't login. for example i still didn't get where best to create the account at. so its just skipped.

Someone should have told Zuck that he already owns a Twitter-like platform. It's called Facebook and has been neglected for years.

Facebook is such a wasteland in every way at this point. There has been no useful feature innovation or design update for years. It's slow, boring, and culturally dead.

Another way of reading this: Meta still sees tremendous activity in Threads. Because first days of sign ups were crazy, like over a million a day. Obviously that isn’t sustainable nor expected to be. What shall be interesting is where Threads is in half a year, both in terms of their evolved culture and activity.

Leveraging Instagram identity was smart, but it offers little for most Instagram users that either publish or consume images.

We’ll see how bad it’s really going if Zuckerberg does an interview with The Verge in the next 6 months. The Verge is the canary in the coal mine.

Increasingly everything about Threads reminds of Google Plus.

I'm a bit surprised, I thought people would like the heavy handed censorship model.

Do people LIKE the tribal wars of Twitter?

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