Threads is losing active and engaged users. I think I know why | Hacker News Reader

Threads is losing active and engaged users. I think I know why

zdnet.com

28 pointsthm39 comments

> Threads' algorithm shows users a mix of content from people they follow and from people they don't to keep users engaged with the app.

This is exactly that made me stop reading my facebook news feed and eventually led to me deleting my facebook years ago.

It's not content from people I don't follow, it's spam.

This ^

On facebook, I get stuff on my feed from random police departments halfway across the country, and bizarre comics from foreign countries with a different sense of humor. It's really bizarre.

The notion that the retention curve for users on Threads is going to be a steady up and to the right line is such a pedestrian take.

Any and every product that sees a massive surge of media-driven signups is then going to see a dramatic dip, then (hopefully) a new normal of usage. The more dramatic the initial surge in signups, the more dramatic the drop-off will be. This pattern tells us very little about the strength of the product and it's going to be months not days before there's anything meaningful for us to say about its ability to retain users.

The media is very odd with this; pretty much _every_ time a low-impedance free service launches and retention numbers are available, the media reporting is pretty much "shock, horror, they only have X% weekly/monthly/whatever retention, they are surely doomed", even if X is really rather high for such a service (as it is in the Threads case).

I think people find these stats quite unintuitive.

It's not just for services, remember when they tolled doom and gloom for laptop sales after they returned to normal growth curve after 2022? There were separate articles for growth (for each brand, Apple, Lenovo, Dell, etc.) and then for the fall back to normal (again, one article for each brand).

So many clicks were farmed.

I don't know about that. When we launched Firefox 1.0 and sprinted to 100 million users, we didn't see our user base fall in half, ever, it simply slowed it's growth trajectory some until about 300 million users. It held that for some years and then began declining. There is zero reason a great product will necessarily fall to earth after a big launch. You're just making things up to suit your narrative here.

Surely we can agree that the growth of a key utility in the early 2000s is pretty different from the growth of an entertainment app in 2023. The poor quality of users acquired through a moment like the one that Threads just had is pretty well understood.

The "so .. what do we do here?" phenomenon is real. People keep forgetting the social part of social media. It's the same brain that reduces everything to "content". What's actually in the content, what it means, and who it appeals to, matters.

The four questions:

    - who's using the platform
    - what are they using it for
    - who's NOT allowed
    - what purposes are NOT allowed

The platform itself makes affordances as to what kind of thing is easier to do, and the vanguard of users (usually including the founders and their friends) determines the starting conditions, but then it tends to evolve from there.

Finally, an under-appreciated condition: what are the PVP rules? Twitter allows a fairly high degree of inter-poster hostility which participants are expected to deal with themselves via block/mute. Bluesky, crazily, launched without this feature, and had to retrofit it with the odd choice to make blocks public.

>with the odd choice to make blocks public.

To me, this seems insane.

Bluesky wants to do a federation, sort of like Fediverse/Mastodon but with cryptographically guaranteed identities not tied to your server. So apparently the public blocks thing is required by the way their federated protocol - which is presently vaporware - has to work.

Now, you or I might think that if your idea reaches an absurdity like "blocks are public", then you've hit a reductio ad absurdum and you need to go back and check if your idea is actually good and not terrible. But the Bluesky crew are ex-crypto-bros, so they don't think like that.

Thanks for heads up. Good grief.

Not only do I not understand, I never want to understand.

Our BBS era offline mail readers had twit filters in the '80s. So simple.

The thing Twitter does is give you a sense of ‘what’s going on in the world right now’

Threads doesn’t do that. You can’t even do a search based on a topic.

It’s crazy they haven’t got this most basic feature for a Twitter clone.

I'm willing to bet that removing spam from real-time search is a challenge Facebook haven't solved and they didn't want to have any spam issues on first impression

Biggest mistake threads did was nudge you to follow all your same instagram follows at sign up. Ironically turned it into more of an instagram clone than a twitter clone. The people I follow on Twitter are completely different than insta, twitter scratches a different itch.

Meta specifically aimed threads away from being a news app too, so that itch may never get scratched if it had anything to do with news/politics.

To be fair Twitter was never designed to be used by news sites, it just was when it happened to be good at it.

Twitter didn't know what Twitter was designed for.

I don't think I'm the only one who opened the app and saw a full page of influencers and brands, and decided it was just more of the same.

Can you have more than one account? I have two Twitter accounts, one for personal stuff and hobbies and one for professional programming. I don't want those mixed on any platform.

Ah the sweet smell of Astroturf in the morning...

Article claims that Fediverse (Mastodon) engagement is down, when, in fact, the past weeks have seen an increase in both sign-ups and active engagement.

you think Musk is paying for astroturf disinfo?

I've seen way more in the opposite direction.

I don't think people have to pay for bad press against Musk: he made enough enemies of people in the press by being a total asshole to them that I'm sure they'll do it for free any chance they get.

The press are stuck in a difficult position: They hate Musk, but they love the clout/numbers they have on Twitter.

Mastodon is too anti-corporate and doesn't have a viral algorithm to boost their reach, and Threads is too anti-controversy. All their hope is with BlueSky, which is just progressing too slow with their invites.

I don't think anyone corporate really hopes on Blue sky, it's just too insignificant. And also doesn't have algorithms like mastodon which IMO is a great thing.

I always hate crap being put in my timeline that I didn't ask for or sign up for, and I left Facebook for that reason. Twitter I never even bothered with.

https://mastodon-analytics.com/

I am sure as with any statistics there are major flaws and reasons why we can't trust the data, but from a glance it seems very reasonable. They had an initial spike in active users, then a major decline as the initial novelty was lost, and now it will either stagnate or get a steady but slow growth.

Number of created accounts will naturally increase forever.

> Article claims that Fediverse (Mastodon) engagement is down

Lemmy seems to grow quite nicely. Doesn't that count as fediverse?

When I tried using the app nothing felt like it was meant for me.. just a sea of random people with uninteresting shit to say, no substance.

These kind of things need to be public goods instead of private companies. For that reason, I'm much more inclined to bet that Mastodon or some other community owned venture will be the true successor to Twitter.

It looks to me like we're going to end up with split social networks.

* Mastodon for tech folk

* Threads for brands and celebrities

* Twitter for politics and news

Will Threads eat IG?

Well that's just a split of the old Twitter social media niche. Which was already a weird one: the short length promoted nonsense updates like what someone had for dinner and limited serious insightful content by having to split it in tens of parts, each with its own thread attached. It's no wonder some websites like threadreader exist.

For this reason I never even used Twitter but I did use other social media.

Fair point - just like the old internet with lots of forums then :)

I use Twitter for tech. I don't understand why people would use Mastodon for anything other than tribal political signalling purposes.

The UX of Mastodon is terrible compared to Twitter, in terms of global post search and discoverability of accounts.

And the arbitrary/political natural of fedi-blocking means I'm only seeing a subset of views on Mastodon.

I'm not saying Twitter is perfect, but I think the opposition to it seems contrived and coordinated.

It's a long story, but basically search on Mastodon is broken on purpose. Moderation is time consuming and extremely difficult with varying laws around the world, allowing proper search would make that even more obvious.

There's a popular patch set for Mastodon* which allows searching your local federated post cache, and non-Mastodon Fediverse software has long had this obvious and sensible feature. Gargron is now mumbling about enhancing the official Mastodon's local search.

* https://universeodon.com/@vyr/110147855442446535

The opposition to Twitter seems to mostly be opposition to Elon Musk himself.

I miss reading John Carmack's .plan file.

how many more social medias to we need anyway?

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