Threads users down by more than a half
bbc.com
bbc.com
Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can very well include photos. It has exactly the same shallow culture as Instagram: commercial, flat, vain.
Meta has openly expressed that it's disinterested or even hostile to news/journalism making their way to the platform (which comes with a lot of political flame-wars), instead to focus on making it a "fun" platform. Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy.
Users may self-censor as on Threads the link to your real name is not very far away. Many users may have a real name Insta account linked up which in turn is linked to your Facebook account. Even if not visibility linked to your real name, internally you should assume it's there. So who knows what happens to all those accounts when you step over the line in Threads?
Hence, it's not Twitter which is defined by the culture war taking the main stage. Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. It also produces quite a lot of original content, whether they be memes or otherwise. You'll find none of that originating on Meta networks.
As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost. There is no longer a "cultural network" where you push a message and get reach. None of the alternatives work for this purpose either.
I have no idea what will become of Twitter, but I do know to keep an open mind as we live in wild times. Just because Musk is a chaos monkey does not mean that it will not eventually rebound or even surpass old Twitter.
But I do think there’s some regret that is similar in nature to the Eternal September. Things were “fine” before the plebes and political interests found the platform.
People are becoming aware of their over-usage and the largely minimal or even negative benefits that come from social media altogether. Or just bored and indifferent about it. The fatigue is further strengthened when they soon learn that the alternatives are worse or at best just moving the problem.
I'd advocate for people to stop rather than cheer for any new potential winner. Just uninstall the app and walk away. It was all a lie anyway. You're not in a "community". You do not actually have followers. You did not learn anything new that you couldn't learn elsewhere.
They are lies we tell ourselves as we play the slot machine. Throw it in the trash.
If all you're doing is keeping up with a tight-nit group of friends, you could use a million other services. Group SMS, I-message, discord, Hangouts, even plain old email.
Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?
I do have some group chats and email threads but there’s a broader that extends beyond that which social media apps can be useful for.
It’s the media bit… Insta is created to share pictures and videos with your _own_ selection of followers. You couldn’t do that in WhatsApp without creating some horrific cartesian product of different groups chats for every node on your social graph. Even then the UX is designed around messaging, not as a content repository.
This has to be one of the most asinine takes I’ve ever seen.
You offer a bit of insight about using something as a content repository. That's an interesting take.
I appreciate the question and the thought process it invites. I'm also glad you added your insight in response.
Yeah you couldn't do it by whatsapp, but you could do it with discord, slack, teams, skype and a bunch of other services that you failed to mention to create a strawman.
That you get so defensive is really, and I mean REALLY, telling of the real reason.
The most absurd part of this argument is that discord, WhatsApp, messenger, etc… are all also social media platforms. This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.
But that’s really besides the point, because as you said, they’re all social media platforms, and it’s social media when somebody posts content on them to their large public audience, and it’s social media when I post to my small audience of friends. It’s the suggestion that one of those scenarios is social media and the other isn’t that’s completely illogical.
I actually 100% agree with you here, but assuredly not in the way you meant it.
What it's NOT is that you couldn't replicate a simple media sharing experience between a tight nit group of friends. That's demonstrably false.
> This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.
No, it's... something else. Again, you're being extremely defensive when someone points out simple facts. Iykyk.
Ultimately they can all be used for the same purpose, sure. At the end of the day you're pushing the same bits around. But UX can make all the difference.
Having an Instagram account and messaging your friends is not social media, it's a social network using the same aforementioned platform.
In other words, a public Telegram channel can be as much social media as Instagram can be, and Instagram can be as much a social network as Telegram is. And exclusively inverse, as well.
The point they were trying to make isn’t difficult to understand. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Also before complaining about the toxicity of social media I’d suggest you take a look at the toxicity you’re choosing to contribute to this platform with how intentionally abrasive your comments appear to be.
Is there a reason you are so reactionary when people pose an alternative viewpoint to your own?
Why did you bother posting such a thing as "I don't understand why people think that social media is toxic" if you are just going to attack everyone who attempts to give a reason for it?
In my case, I didn't give up social media entirely, but mostly shifted back to "web forums", which also seem to be experiencing some sort of renaissance (another data point). They have more of a local/semi-closed community feeling, as opposed to the "wide open sea" of major social media.
I consider HN to be one of those "forums", although it's more a bit of a hybrid between the two worlds, and of course it has been existing all along.
Maybe LinkedIn for the professional stuff.
And soon my army of clones will be ready!!!
Good for them. Social media is a miasma of addiction and time-wasting. ~~They~~ we should `touch grass.social`
Yeah, for the "chronically online". But twitter is also celebs and brands, and the "normals" following them. I think for those Threads will find an audience. It will be... Twitter, but for Instagram.
Twitter has always had an outside impact compared to it's actual userbase, mainly due to nailing the news media + politics segment. Threads could fail to pick up the same cultural impact, but still be a thriving business/website, especially if brands and advertisers prefer it over Twitter.
Isn't that Threads's whole thing? Everybody gets the same feed, no matter what you post?
I don't think a sizable portion of people are even willing to entertain the idea that it might still having a place in the Internet ecosystem. Maybe not in exactly the same form as pre-Elon Twitter, but still a place.
It's absolutely an example of political editorialising and narrative control.
And Musk now has a history of enabling criminal behaviour. https://gizmodo.com/twitter-dom-lucre-ban-elon-musk-child-ex...
So - yes, maybe it will continue in some form. But when progressive content is being deboosted it's not going to be the platform it used to be.
This + less moderation headaches for Meta as political discussions invite the most toxic users
I’m back in the Elon corner. Is he goes down, it’ll be doing something interesting at least.
Meta might have a head start with WhatsApp, but I don’t see them doing anything interesting or well.
Nothing has to be anything and I feel like I got down voted because people hate Elon now. I’m not asking you to like him. I’m only saying he’s going to try and create something and maybe it’s good.
How was it more shitty than what it is now or what Musk is trying to turn it into?
At least it had a quite decent logo instead of as generic as it get X character.
> interesting
Also what so 'interesting' (in a non crazy/entertaining way) about what Musk is doing?
>At least it had a quite decent logo instead of as generic as it get X character.
It's just a logo. Companies come and go. Everyone needs to get over it.
Trying to duplicate WeChat is an objectively interesting strategy. At the very least, by integrating payments your social media platform doesn't have have to sell ads. You could buy items directly off a merchants Twitter/X page and Twitter/X can just take a merchant fee. You could have a market place with integrated payment methods rather than posting on Facebook and working out an intermediate payment method on the side.
oh.. I never personally liked Twitter. I was just thinking about the company itself rather than their products.
> It's just a logo
It also objectively sucks. I don't think we just handwave poor design instead of making fun of it and mocking it. The world is as already as ugly as it is..
> At the very least, by integrating payments your social media platform doesn't have have to sell ads
How much do they think they could get from these payments? 1-3%? Shopify's net revenue is lower than Twitter's was before they buyout and they are not even profitable. The interest payments alone on the debt Musk offloaded to Twitter as part of the acquisition are about equal to Shopify's quarterly revenue.
It's a very competitive field with basically no margins, I'm not quite sure what Twitters edge would be? They'd need to charge way more than their competitors if they wanted to use the revenue to fund the rest of the company after getting rid of ads...
> integrated payment methods rather than posting on Facebook
The lack of an integrated payment processor is not the reason Facebook Marketplace doesen't support direct payment payments. That's an insignificant problem compared to all the other stuff they would need to handle with huge costs due to significant overhead (just like at what Ebay does, also they charge 10%+ and they are not that profitable either).
In the US, if you met someone via online dating and said “here’s my whatsapp” 99% of people would think you are a scammer or something.
It could take a while, but look at all the social media messaging apps from the past: ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, My Space, GChat, Orkut, Tumblr, Snapchat, FB messages etc
They come and go. I sure don’t know what the ultimate chat/social media app looks like.
WhatsApp is used by teenagers, great-grandparents, businesses, everyone. When you give someone your number in Europe, they won't ask how to contact you, they will just send you a message on WhatsApp 100% of the time. Only tech nerds and small groups use Signal etc.
To be clear, I don't think this is a good thing. But it is simply the reality of the world. It's been like this for 10 years with no signs of changing. WhatsApp could of course die one day, but only if Meta does something categorically stupid or unpopular that forces people off the platform (eg, what Twitter is doing).
WhatsApp is not a social media platform and that's precisely why it is so universally used.
We prefer the verb “lurk”.
Lurking is when you frequent a forum but never post.
I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.
My uncle told me a story of when he was at his first programming job carrying a box of at least 500 punch cards across a factory floor on his 2nd or 3rd day. Someone opened a garage door somewhere and a gust of wind came and blew every single punch card across the factory. They were everywhere he said. My uncle was terrified of losing his first job meanwhile these factory guys are pissing themselves laughing and almost literally rofl.
Turns out it's a prank they pull on everyone. There's only been a few that held onto the box and the cards are complete trash.
It sounds fun.
The former has negative connotations, the latter is neutral.
I also don't have the time or the energy to put out quality content. It is draining to put out good content and have a handful of moaners criticise it in a toxic manner.
It is even worse if they criticise your content, because 3 years ago you said something about Musk/Tesla that wasn't 100% positive.
It's an amazing way to reach very interesting people doing very interesting things and to be amazed almost every day (if you like to learn, or just like human ingenuity). It needs curating, and liberal use of blocking, muting... but having (or watching) a short conversation with a security expert, programming language warrior, database benchmarker, or HPC researcher is something I feel I couldn't do elsewhere.
Nebulous anecdotes such as this always made him curious: opinion regarding what, precisely? “David Lane’s 14 words and 88 precepts, perhaps?” — he wondered to himself, unable to divert his eyes from their username.
Not at all. "Journalists" are as biased as they come. They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them. That hand is most often advertisers but may also be governments. Chances are the articles they produce are actually hidden advertisements or propaganda. How could anyone with such massive conflicts of interest bring credibility to literally anything? I want access to real information posted by real people, not agenda-pushing "credible authorities".
> Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.
What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site. Their particular brand of hot take is not automatically more valid than anyone else's. As far as I'm concerned their only purpose is to generate material for us to comment on.
There is exactly one site in the entire internet I have enough respect for to call them true journalists: LWN. It's just excellent in every way and they don't need to posture as authorities for everyone else to believe it. Everything else ranks lower than HN's comment sections to me.
It's pretty ridiculous to compare someone who has a university degree, years of training and experience, professional qualifications, and maybe a strong reputation, with a "random" posting on an internet forum.
A random university degree is a much lower barrier, and just FYI it isn't required to be a journalist.
Big deal. I have all of those things. Lots of people here do too.
There used to be a time where as a rule journalists were below that threshold unless they were specifically working for The National Enquirer writing stories about Elvis still being alive, but whatever the threshold is, we damn well got closer to it.
It's a fair question to ask, what's the threshold and where we stand regarding it. You cannot say they're all like that, but you can say TOO MANY journalists are like that. I'd even agree with the latter statement. Would the remaining journalists be more or less likely to be out there on Twitter, mostly unheard? How about after Elon Musk's takeover? My sense is that Elon is more likely to get rid of the good ones when they correctly call him out on his nonsense.
So, you got any other account posting behind a pseudonym, being more unbiased than a journalist posting to Twitter/X using their professional name and attached to their organization? At least with the journalist, you gain some insight into what their biases might be.
> They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them.
You say that as though every dev working professionally on HN is 100% of the time working on projects they want to work on, writing the features they want to add, and releasing on a schedule that ensures the code is at a quality that fully reflects their talent.
This is my only HN account. I post pseudonymously and anonymously elsewhere on the internet but not here.
> You say that as though every dev
Devs on HN usually don't make it their business to present their biased version of the truth to vast amounts of people.
I remember when the Beirut explosion happened so quickly you had footage of what had happened.
This kind of latency is unachievable by traditional news
Random footage of some explosion is not useful news without accurate explanations of what you are seeing. It often takes time to sort out the facts of a story. Moving breathlessly ahead without facts is usually called gossip.
Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers.
These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.
Most people of course are not on twitter at all (and could care less). Some use it as a group-chat service. Some use it as joke-of-the-day. But the biggest user base by far is journalists who have invested in it big time.
The only people who would even know are other Twitter users, most real people in real life don't use it and they are not interested or affected at all.
Every single time they say "Let's see what people on the internet are saying.", the scene always changes over to tweets and tweets and tweets.
Journalism is beyond redemption.
A prominent case: A few years ago, J.K. Rowling wrote an article on gender bathroom policy. I'm pretty sure most random people, when given the piece to read, would have judged it to be some rather moderate opinion. But on Twitter the author encounterd a massive wave of accusations and hostility. The journalists were probably sympathetic with those people, and moreover thought them to be in the majority among the general population (because the JKR criticisms were in the majority on Twitter).
So the journalists went out and wrote news pieces casually describing Rowling as being a transphobic, as if this was an uncontroversial description of fact, like the sky being blue, when it was really a serious accusation by the journalist. Their Twitter filter bubble confuses them about which views are common and which are fringe.
This is one of the reasons I left that field.
No, journalists hate that Musk took away the digital caste system that they took advantage of, where they (blue checks) were an elite ruling class. Now they are on equal footing as, and are forced to engage with, whom they perceive as the "Dalit scum" of the platform, who bought their way in for a measly $8.
Twitter was one of the most segregated societies on the planet, and Musk upturned its power structure nearly overnight and made it a more democratic society (albeit one with a benevolent dictator). Yet we all sat and watched while celebrities and journalists threw public temper tantrums, reminiscing about a time when life was better in their online universe, during the digital apartheid days, and their followers who sympathized. Talk about disruptive.
X
People keep saying this, but I've been a daily Twitter user since long before the Musk timeline and if anything the platform's never felt more engaged. Perhaps particularly vocal complainers like Taylor Lorenz leaving the platform makes the exodus seem greater than it is, but in general it seems high-follower users are just as engaged as they were before.
The only exception seem to be characters like Lorenz whose conduct has been so poorly received by the community that they seemed to be looking for any good reason to leave while still saving face.
That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting with people you care more about.
And even without that, the influencers mostly went away for me when I followed people I found more interesting.
And marketers. Remember: marketers ruin everything. They early adopt every up-and-coming platform and fill it with grifty posts.
Hell, it required an Instagram account to sign up. You already have their follow graph.
ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are accurate.
Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more respected the brighter the blue color.
Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death.
You use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?
If you don't have a Twitter account, you cannot see threads on Twitter anymore.
At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.
(there's also a userscript version IIRC)
He already has?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-inves...
It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty underwhelming.
I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has been successful and earned a decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.
What’s the point of the question mark there? Are you not sure of your statement?
You have a very, very rosy perception of login walls. All the stats I’ve see would disagree.
You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.
Why would a user of the site/app care about this? How is it impacting their experience?
Financial woes though will usually produce change that impacts the user, for better or worse (a good kick in the ass, or craven desperation may follow).
I'm trying to find if there's anyone who regularly experiences hitting the limit.
First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't.
My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly revert back to their familiar network that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).
It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave.
Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be the most avid hardcore fans.
I, and many Fediverse people, are on the Fedi explicitly hoping it isn’t in that list. Mastodon is a success to me because of the thousands of people on it and that I interact with, and that it is precisely not containing the masses.
So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter.
Mastodon and Lemmy/etc are a smash success to me. They have more traffic, users and activity than the other comparable options combined (citation needed). And most importantly, they did it without becoming the next big thing.
Plus if, god forbid, it does become the next big thing - It can still isolate and be a small forum. That alone is lovely to me.
Personally, interactions feel more significant in smaller communities, too.
"Everyone was declaring Twitter over."
I mean...Twitter is very much over. References to Twitter, or Twitter being the canonical source, has utterly disappeared. Whole media spheres have made Twitter just another place, not the place. Whole fields have dried up on Twitter.
If you're hardcore into culture wars, Twitter is probably your place. Probably feels as alive as ever. In virtually any other field (sports, media, tech), while some people with big accounts are still trying to hang on -- for obvious reasons as other platforms just set them back -- engagement and "the crowd" has absolutely dissolved. Governments, agencies and groups used Twitter as a public space, and not only have many pulled back, I cannot fathom anyone making that choice today.
And that doesn't mean one needs to cite where someone replaced their "Twitter-like" activity. Many people just took it as an opportunity to assess the joy that sort of site was bringing them and decoupled. In the same way that the decline of blogger didn't mean that other sites grew the same amount...many people just stopped blogging.
[1] isn't it for a "general public, all topics" solution. Mastodon absolutely is a technical solution for niche spaces and groups and is absolutely flourishing in those realms.
But, i would posit that there is a rhetorical currency exchange at play here. The "value" that one might assign to a silo like Facebook or Threads is not the same "value" one might assign to various software stacks and/or networks on the Fediverse. Like, its not enough for me to state that they're different/like comparing apples vs oranges. I mean, for example, if I only have a single kid/offspring, does that mean that i have not grown the "value" of my family, because i have not maximized my partner's reproductive capabilities, or resorted to adoption to extend that, etc.? That's sill of course. Well, i assure you, the intent of networks on the Fediverse is NOT the same as the goals and intent of silos like Facebook, twitter, threads, etc.
I think @unshavedyak stated it great with their comments, but this is my favorite of theirs: "...So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter..."
At least that's what I think you mean. Lots of ambiguous "it" in the text above.
Not accurate according to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/ or my subjective experience. mastodon is fine. mastodon is growing. Mastodon is fundamentally not a business that needs to "get big fast or die trying" so that VCs can make their big ROI back. Slow, steady improvement is fine. Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in decline. (1)
I'd say - to write the above in a clearer way: "Twitter peaked in November 2022 and then went into decline. Musk's antics might prop twitter up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users of twitter will be the most avid hardcore fans."
1) https://doctorow.medium.com/of-course-mastodon-lost-users-c4...
There was a huge rush of most of the people I follow going to mastodon. But even those who still has their mastodons links in their name or profile haven’t posted in months.
The fact is that discussions happen on Twitter. Not mastodon.
But this is not my subjective experience actually. And yes I follow "programmers" and other IT people in the mix. I'm not here to tell you what's true _for you_ but you appear to be telling me that what I experience isn't "reality". On the contrary, it works fine for me, as I said above.
"Discussions happen only on X not Y" is a binary, absolutist, black or white thinking. If taken literally, it is ridiculous. I suppose you would also say that this here isn't a discussion, because that's "only on twitter"?
Discussions and communities are going to happen in different places. It's almost like there's a use for a protocol that lets them interoperate in some kind of "loose association".
I’m not sure where threads sat for me, it was all the same folk who I follow on instagram but only posting text, now they post pics on thread and their reels on insta.
I’m not fully up on all the fedoverse stuff but I think that’s just due to a lack of effort so far.
Twitter can go away without being replaced by a singular entity.
If not, maybe wait more than 3 weeks before declaring it Twitter's successor.
People are certainly going somewhere (outside?), what isn't happening is for all of them going to the same place. IMO, that's a very good thing, but it does break any ambition of social world domination large companies may have.
That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.
You might as well jabber on about tulip bulbs.
Just about all the people whose opinions I'm interested in hearing are on Mastodon now. I don't really care if anyone else shows up. Maybe it's better that they don't.
I only finally checked it out during all the Reddit protests and am thoroughly amazed to simply see content without all the cruft.
It is only now that I don't feel as sure; Twitter still has its login wall today. I reactivate my facebook account only when, say, I absolutely need to interact with a particular small page/business. I don't use Instagram. I have only since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following list and make a first pass at building my Fedifeed by seeing who's moved over (incidentally, most of the people I follow that are still active). This time, I might actually check my feed regularly while logged in, since I'm not seeing a sponsored submission or ad every other post.
I only look at Xitter for Ukraine news - that community hasn't migrated elsewhere. But that's mostly on third-party pages, I don't log in anymore, so the site itself is useless to me.
that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols (most people) throw up their hands and leave at the first notion of needing to choose an instance or needing a JS bookmarklet to follow someone not on your instance
plenty of those people are experts in their field and write interesting content i wouldn't otherwise encounter, but they aren't migrating to mastodon because of that, and there's a decent chance they won't migrate anywhere and will return to sharing their work in niche walled garden academic journals and conferences
sure, mastodon maybe keeps out the garbage firstnamelastname9023285023 accounts that do nothing but send low-content replies and retweet inane celebrity(s' social media managers') posts, but it's keeping them out because only a very specific population will bother to get in, which is a bad filter
It is a startup wisdom that it is better to have less users who love your product than many who merely like it. Tech-savy people often have a strong opinions (both positive and negative). By the mentioned startup wisdom, it can be very valuable to have them as users.
Mastodon is great if you want to read nerds talking with other nerds. For the rest of the population though, we need some takes from outside the nerd-cage.
I assure you I genuinely do not like what Twitter has become. The lack of viable alternative doesn’t change that fact.
Mastodon works for the people who are willing to "pay" (in social labor or hosting money) the startup costs. Threads very likely has the limitations it has because that's what Meta thinks will generate useful advertising data — their bread and butter.
For tech people, I think the most likely way to get a Twitter killer in the near-medium term would be to convince Microsoft to add that feature to Github. As usual, you're the product.
Mastodon is chugging along, still growing steadily, unglamorously. I don't see a boom and bust there. It is unbacked by VC "get big or die trying" money, not buoyed by big tech or media hype. Don't write it off in a week or a month.
The technology is crumbling (see rate limiting, interaction counts), the product is moving further away from what people want not towards it (see Zuck's tweets about Threads to see what popular product direction looks like, even if it's not perfect), the ad quality has dropped very noticeably suggesting they've lost good top paying advertisers, the new ad payout program suggests that their ad inventory is low anyway (see also interaction numbers here too), and the culture has gone from pretty bad to openly hostile to large swathes of the population, at least among English speakers (see anti-trans trending topics, rise of hate speech).
I'd agree that reversion to the mean and people going back to what they know is the most likely course of action in most circumstances, but these are not most circumstances. Twitter can't recover from this, at least not without a change of leadership and many years to rebuild.
Still, I believe that BlueSky and Threads remain a looming existential threat to Twitter. One important role that Twitter filled was being the de-facto centralized RSS feed. It is by far the thing that I see that Twitter is still used for, even by ex-Twitter users and people like me who never used the site in the first place.
To be the centralized RSS feed, you need a web-facing interface, so you can pass links around over the clearnet. Threads doesn't have one. BlueSky isn't even open to the greater public yet. But either one of those could change overnight.
A. Attention-seekers have gone to Threads or stayed on Twitter
B. People who are into niche interests and not part of group A are very active on Mastodon.
Mastodon to me very much feels like early-days Twitter. I truly I hope it stays like this. Threads might even be blessing in disguise for Mastodon network when it develops into a network similar to Instagram (content creators, brands, attention-seekers).
It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO
Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts can only improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)
... where "any" is the number of people who paid for a blue check.
x.com
which holds a value "X"
A not implausible theory I’ve seen bandied about is that Musk isn’t happy about having been forced into buying Twitter so he’s trashing the place out of spite.
It seems a rather expensive bit of spite, but it makes as much sense as anything else.
On it’s first fucking day
Been using the new follow feed and honestly I appreciate the algo feed sprinkling some randomness here and there
For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe.
"But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing my responses are effectively zero.
Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting against?
Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be surprised if the archive.org people came up with some browser extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.
While Twitter hosts some services on its own servers, the company has long contracted with Google and Amazon to complement its infrastructure. Prior to Musk buying Twitter last year, the company signed a multi-year contract with Google to host services related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things.
Relevant: https://www.xing.com/
(a site very similar so LinkedIn that rather has its mainstay in the German-speaking market instead of a more international focus like LinkedIn)
Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app.
Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.
Do they want to? Definitely, but it's not a simple lift and shift. It will only happen once Musk either terminally runs Twitter into the ground (bankruptcy), or makes it completely unbearable.
They totally may fail. But even after that initial drop (which is expected, for something that managed to get so much hype) they’re likely still the biggest app in the history in terms of DAU in few weeks after the launch.
And if there’s one thing Meta knows how to do is to copy successful idea and slowly grind the growth till it dominates market.
But secondly, I'm skeptical that it's even fair to talk about Threads stats using the same measurements as any "new" app, since it's really an extension of Instagram. You don't make a new account for Threads, you just use your Instagram account. They are one and the same, the only difference being which app you use to access which features. It's most closely analogous to Facebook and the Messenger app - do you count the users of each of those separately?
If I implement Google oauth into my app, it doesn't make my app an extention of Google. It just reduces the friction of people making a new account for my app.
Even just having a few people automatically followed can make a difference, even if most people diverge quickly after joining.
Additionally, 90+% of my Threads feed is photos, so, like, what’s the point?
I’ve opened it a couple of times and scrolled for maybe 30 seconds and lost interest.
I’m sure if I put a little effort into it I could find more interesting accounts to follow, but at least in my experience the “bootstrapping” hasn’t really worked.
Plenty of good developer-focused content now, and they implemented a following-only feed. Worth having, for me so far.
I and half the people I know on Twitter are not owners of Instagram accounts. It's absurd to require Insta to login to Threads.
The account linking was a quick fix, the app was released early, and the accounts will not be forcibly linked later on. You won't need an Instagram account to sign up to Threads. But still, if you don't have one, just sign up to Instagram as you would Threads, and you already have your account made.
So what you claim to be a problem isn't a problem because you and every other prospective user knows how to create a Threads account.
Porting over the Instagram graph to Threads is literally how they created the network effect that made it the fastest growing app ever.
Engineerbrained.
I agree, but will that prevent the majority of the public from signing up? A bridge will collapse regardless of what the motorists think, but people being ignorant of Meta's misdeeds does mean that Meta's untrustworthiness won't—can't—factor into their decision regarding signups. Maybe Meta will make the news again with another scummy decision, and maybe that'll drive users away—but how many? I suspect it's a small fraction.
'Course, one might be able to make the argument about "the most important N% of users who create most of the content", who are also unusually savvy... I don't know empirical details here.
Perhaps but the login thing seems totally tangential to this..
Well, you could compared it to Instagram's previous Threads app, which no one used https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
Twitter/threads is (or should be) a highly viral application.
New users should find themselves compelled to use the product and compelled to encourage others to use it.
With a 100 million user head start, if they were succeeding this shoukd have immediately resulted in the viral loop being triggered into explosive growth.
It’s a huge failure.
Not necessarily unrecoverable, but absolutely a gargantuan fail.
100,000,000 signups should ignite your viral engine and blast into orbit. Enough functionality to be viral was the MV part of “Minimum Viable” for Threads.
People were battering down the door for access.
You seriously compare growth at the planet scale with a growth at few universities?
Yet not only is Twitter not growing but it’s shrinking.
I think your expectations for success in this vertical are off.
I’d say that’s probably broadly the number of potential Twitter users.
If you think user growth should be exponential to all people in the planet, then that is false.
Source? Musk just tweeted about a new all-time monthly user record. It's not impossible that he would lie, but my impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
There's a whole lot of discussion about Twitter shrinking and high profile people leaving, but they don't. Stephen king comes to mind as a big critic that threatened over and over to leave, but he hasn't.
On the rare occasion he makes non-trivial, falsifiable claims, its pretty common that they turn out to be other-than-accurate, yes.
> but my impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
My impression is that the set of advertisers (not regular Blue users, though they are a different kind of advertiser paying for reach) are narrowing and moving downmarket in a way which would take truly enormous numbers of Blue users to compensate for.
Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the point.
> Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the point.
In a thread entirely about Twitter/threads user count, whether it's shrinking is the entire point.
I have been using Twitter almost since the beginning.
Never have I ever seen this many bots and fake accounts on the platform.
So I would be highly dubious of that user record count.
Threads attracted two kinds of people: 1. People coming mostly from instagram / tiktok who had never considered using Twitter because it had an established reputation and they knew it wasn't the kind of product for them, and 2. People switching from Twitter because they love Twitter-the-idea but can no longer stand Twitter-the-actual-product-today.
Most of people from group #1 tried it and concluded that yep, it wasn't for them. There is zero surprising about that, and it's where the giant initial numbers came from. But if any of those people stuck around, that's pure bonus.
The more interesting question is what's going on with group #2. Certainly lots of them decided there were too many missing features at launch and kept using Twitter mostly. But that is not a "they'll never check back", those people are still in play for any of Twitter to keep or its competitors to win eventually. But the current DAUs wouldn't be where they are if a significant portion of this group hadn't decided to actually stick around. And that's pretty surprising.
For years the conventional wisdom has been that you can't actually convert users from one social network to another in the exact same niche. You can cut off growth - like instagram adding stories corresponding to Snapchat's growth plateau - but people stay where their existing networks are.
But not this time!
Whereas most social media apps have the cold start problem (the stars need to align such that creators and users show up at the exact same time), Zuckerberg has solved it for Meta.
Threads doesn't need to be a hit on day 1 or even 100 because it has the existing Meta user base that counted on to consume Thread content (whether they like it or not).
For example, I have a FB account but am too lazy/old to sign up for Instagram but I did/do see a lot of Instagram reels that are converted into FB reels - particularly as Instagram reels was starting to take off. I am sure when it is monetizing those views for content creators and advertisers the converted reels get counted.
So while the power Instagram/Thread creaters will likely only push/consume the content in the corresponding app, Meta has the unique platform level ability to push the content to users of all 3 apps (i.e. FB/Insta/Threads).
What percentage have left twitter for threads? Unknown.
The viral growth you're talking about pretty much never occurs after a huge launch event like this, and is reserved for more methodical releases and/or lower initial starting user counts, e.g. Instagram testing Stories, Facebook growing from college to college.
For all it’s faults I quite enjoyed pre-musky Twitter, but I completely abandoned the s...show even before the insane rename. I was an early FB user but left that many years ago around the time of the CA scandal.
Mastrodon is too quirky and challenging to go mainstream which is why I think it will remain great and I’m loving it there.
The same statement holds for Mark Zuckerberg. ;-) (EDIT: and perhaps also Steve Huffman)
These are awful companies (not all awful employees) with awful leadership.
Can you say more on this?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/07/27/twitter-...
around here the only desire that exceeded the desire to watch Meta fail was the desire to see Threads kill Twitter first on its way down
How many years/decades of grinding growth will it take to get back to the initial DAU numbers?
It's not very reasonable to consider it a new app when it's in many ways just a shell on top of instagram.
Facebook Marketplace seems to have totally replaced Craiglist as well, where I live, for buying/selling. Facebook Messenger took over e.g. MSN for a lot of people, the News Feed replaced a dedicated news site for a lot of people, and so forth. Events replaced Evite I think (or similar?), FB Photos basically replaced Flickr back in the day...
(I’d say that twitter killed clubhouse also)
Also, keep in mind this is Threads “2.0”. Threads was first launched in 2019[1]. As such, it may even be a stretch to call it new. They have taken several years to test the market and iterate on that earlier MVP to finally find a fit that found up to ~100 million users. Not exactly an overnight success.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833903/facebook-instagr...
I don't think they are doing very bad considering it's mobile only right now.
"Less than half" is significant, particularly when the CEO (to his credit) is calling it out as something that must improve. And it matters to balance the existing narrative from the Verge, which seems to just regurgitate Meta's VP's language about it being a runaway success.
Alright, forget the number. Let's focus on active users versus signups and how it's being reported for Threads.
I mean, didn't they: 1. Leverage their IG user base to get a lot of early sign-ups and then... 2. Use those early sign-ups to hype up the platform?
They got exactly what they wanted, which was a lot of articles about how fast Threads was growing.
They probably knew all along that most of those early sign-ups weren't going turn into active users.
I mean, we should? Startup valuations are full of MAU pumping and straight bullshit, so why shouldn't we judge their numbers with a cynical eye? Meta claimed a number of users the first few days, well, half of them aren't using it anymore, so they aren't "Users"
<https://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-new-google-stu...>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977050>
The study in question is, to my surprise, still available directly online: <https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/05/15/new-google-plus-data-s...>
There are another 14 HN submissions matching "Google+ ghost town" at this writing: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google%2B%20ghost%20town>
I did my own assessment of G+ later, after there was much discussion of Google's own "engagement" numbers for the platform meeting open skepticism. (I used the platform heavily myself and appreciated elements of it.)
I think we're seeing more and deserved skepticism generally in accepting statements of activity at face value, which is a Good Thing in my view.
This was nearly a year after G+ launched. The article in question here is about three weeks after the launch of threads. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me...
The "ghost town" label had been stuck on G+ within the first few weeks, yes.
HN discussion from September 2011 (G+ launched in July):
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019699>
Numerous HN takes in comments from June -- September 2011: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1316822400&dateRange=custom&...>
And, FWIW, at the time I was contesting the characterisation of G+. I distinctly recall the discussions and press coverage, however.
I've given multiple examples of just such a comparison being made over a decade ago.
In both cases, the new launch was by an existing giant in the sector, with claimed performance being not entirely credible.
Google of a decade ago had launched [edit: or aquired, but in either event, run] Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).
The Social space is immensely fickle, and the ability of even an established industry giant to succeed with a new venture is fairly thin. Facebook has largely bought rather than made its own follow-on successes to date (as did Google in buying YouTube).
Note edit above. Poor language choice around pedants.
Google didn't "launch" youtube. They purchased it. It was big before they purchased it. Regarding Reader, calling something "small but quite significant" is nonsensical. Additionally you're propping up a failed application which wasn't even a social network as a success.
As I said, your comparisons included far too much conflation of several varieties for me to take them seriously.
The idea that forgetting that Google failed horribly with Google Video before buying YouTube is a "smell" of bad faith is weird.
It's often easier to search within a specific timeframe on Hacker News itself given Algolia search's excellent date-range functions, and the fact that HN itself is strongly time-oriented. There are doubtless other stories elsewhere, but it would be more tedious to track those down and verify that they actually came from the period under consideration.
It's also possible to search via comments, with one useful set of terms being "Google+" and "ghost town", an assessment which was being thrown about early on.
And we can link directly to the HN threads and see what contemporaneous discussions were like and how they characterised the issue at the time.
By contrast, date-ranged General Web Search on, say, DuckDuckGo or Google is often confounded by Web pages which have inaccurate date indicia, or have been misclassified as to time by search engines. It's much more tedious to try to find specific content matching time criteria, though the universe of total such articles is obviously larger. Fortunately for this case, Google+ was of sufficient interest to HN that there were numerous submissions concerning it submitted early on, many of course highly syncophantic, but also concerning the rather fumbling rollout and weak adoption.
Amongst other possible archives, Google+ itself is no longer extant, and so cannot be searched. Its own search features did not afford date-ranged search, though I'm well aware that there was much early hand-wringing over the "brutally unfair" stories (in the framing of G+ advocates) circulating at the time.
Reddit might be another useful trove, though I'm avoiding that for the time being. Search there is limited to only the initial story title and, in a limited number of cases, the "self-text" content of text-based posts. Pointedly, comments aren't searchable on Reddit itself, and so the potential match space is far more constrained than it is on Hacker News.
Despite those limitations, in answering your own historically uninformed vague hand wave that the response to Facebook's Threads launch is exceptional, I'd given numerous specific and quantified examples from a roughly comparable time period for Google's G+ launch strongly suggesting otherwise.
Yes, the data I brought to bear are subject to a strong availability heuristic. But the evidence presented is rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.
Cheers.
We have now:
- Long standing critical takes on new social media launches and claimed performance.
- Google as "running ... successful social networks".
You're litigating pedantry in a counterfactual manner. It's tedious.
I've shown this twice, which is sufficient for my tastes.
No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.
As Facebook did with Instagram and Whatsapp.
And with the facebook.com domain name, Parakey, ConnectU, FriendFeed, Octazen, Divvyshot, Friendster patents, ShareGrove, Zenbe, Nextstop, Chai Labs, Hot Potato, Drop.io, FB.com domain name, Rel8tion, Beluga, Snaptu, RecRec, DayTum, Sofa, MailRank, Push Pop Press, Friend.ly, Strobe, Gowalla, Caffeinatedmind, Instagram, Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox.com, Karma, Face.com, Spool, Acrylic Software, Threadsy, Atlas Solutions, osmeta, Storylane (Mixtent), Hot Studio, Spaceport, Parse, Monoidics, Jibbigo, Onavo, SportStream, Little Eye Labs, Branch, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Ascenta, Salorix, ProtoGeo Oy, PrivateCore, LiveRail, WaveGroup Sound, Wit.ai, Quickfire Networks, TheFind, Inc., Surreal Vision, Endaga, Pebbles, MSQRD (Masquerade), Two Big Ears, Nascent Objects, Infiniled, CrowdTangle, Faciometrics, Zurich Eye, Ozlo, Fayteq AG, tbh, Confirm, Bloomsbury AI, Redkix, Vidpresso, Dreambit, Chainspace, GrokStyle, Servicefriend, CTRL-labs, Packagd, Beat Games, PlayGiga, Sanzaru Games, Scape Technologies, Giphy, Mapillary, Ready at Dawn, Lemnis Technologies, Kustomer, Downpour Interactive, Unit 2 Games, BigBox VR, AI.Reverie, Within, Twisted Pixel Games, Presize, Lofelt, Armature Studio, and Camouflaj.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...>
Neither Google nor Facebook are distinctive within the tech sector in aequiring large numbers of other firms.
The puff piece in the WSJ combined with the all the positive press over the success of Threads, with now a quite rosy view of how it has played out since. I'm personally not a believer that they internally think Threads is a success, but to each their own. I constantly hear from my engineering co-workers about how much Twitter has changed and how the sky is falling, but the user numbers don't back that up and my user experience seems to be much the same.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zuckerberg-channeled-og-mark-to...
Really? A bunch of engineering types who work for big corporations and who also dream and or do start their own hopefully big corporations prides themselves as being "counter-cultural?" That seems like a tough generalization to support.
I think people assume that because Musk is highly successful that he is a normal person, worthy of being judged by such a standard. From the outside nothing seems normal about him to me. He is almost certainly on the spectrum, yet fairly highly functional.
I attribute half of the hatred for him not because of his behavior, but because of the general anger towards the billionaire class.
I think the sharp divide in perception of him shows that polarization within America has reached unhealthy levels. I won't invoke the terms used to describe people believed to be pro or anti Musk here, but I think most know them. I wish we could get to a point where we discuss less about people and more about their individual actions.
Business Insider in particular likes to publish articles that are either outright shameless puff pieces or occasionally contain thinly veiled attempts at spinning things in his favor.
Some examples:
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-new-logo-x-twitter...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-x-rebrand-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-asana-dustin-moskov...
And here’s a Newsweek one:
https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-has-undeniably-gotten-bette...
As for the disliking or hatred towards him, I’m not sure why this puzzles you.
He is simply an unlikable person, doing unlikable things.
Yeah sure it doesn’t help that he’s wealthy in this time and age and it also doesn’t help that he’s attributed accomplishments of mythical proportions that are mostly veneer, nor does it help that he seemingly has taken it upon himself to disprove the business acumen that people attribute to him, but all of those are just cherries on top.
Certainly not half the reason people dislike him.
Gates, Zuckerberg and Bezos are in the same order of magnitude as Musk (at least from the perspective of most people) and don’t nearly get as much hate, because they don’t act like utter tools at every single chance they get.
That’s it, that’s the reason. It’s not rocket science.
Which is why it’s weird that you seem to yearn for a time where people will judge him on his individual actions, when they already do so.
You are correct in that this was unavoidable because the original number was artificially inflated in a non-sustainable way. But well, that would be a huge red flag for a startup too. It is less so for a giant company like Meta, as they can eat the loss from forcing the market, but it is still ridiculous, even for a company as large as Meta.
There's often an early "tyre kicker" phase, with people signing up to explore a service. Or to ensure that others don't misappropriate well-known account handles.
User attrition / retention rates for sites, services, and apps are well-studied and closely watched.
E.g., "Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app installs worldwide in 3rd quarter 2022, by category"
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/259329/ios-and-android-a...>
General social media growth (or plateau) trends as of 2021 / Pew:
<https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media...>
The highest retention rate listed is 11.3%, for the news category.
As an example, Facebook (the site, distinguished from other aquisitions) has seen stagnant or falling usage in certain markets, notably the US and EU, as of about 5--6 years ago:
<https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956818/facebook-q4-2017...>
<http://www.businessinsider.sg/facebook-hits-wall-usage-falls...>
What part of my comment exactly is wrong?
Facebook is one case, and is still the largest (or among: TikTok and a few newer entrants may be giving it a run for its money).
But if you want to look at multiple platforms over time, it helps to ... well, consider other cases.
I've been something of a purveyor of niche and smaller social networks, from the beginning (Usenet). What I've observed of these is that even among those which continue for a considerable period as a viable option there is the tyre-kicker uptake, a fade back, and then ... several possible trajectories. One of those is straight to the floor, but another is to have either a steady base or a longer and slower growth.
Sure, both of those are death for a venture-backed site or service. But if that's not the foundation, then steady-state or long-steady-growth is a viable option.
And I've seen the pattern:
- On Google+: there was an initial excitement, then the site got stale (2011--2013 or so), then I (and from what I can tell, others) came back. The forced integration with YouTube annoyed a lot of people (on G+, on YouTube, and of course, Not On Either). After about 2015 things seemed to go into a long slow fade, which turned into a race for the exits after the planned shutdown was announced in 2018.
- On Diasapora*: Similar pattern, though I'd participated early on (2011-ish), after leaving G+ for a spell (around 2013--14), and then returned to the site with the G+ shutdown announcement. Some long-standing gripes and personal hardware failures had me lose interest about a year ago, though there quite honestly still is a good community there.
- Ello: It was (somewhat poisonously) plastered with the "Facebook Killer" label in 2015, and saw a few periods of excitement buzz. The site remained small (a few hundred thousand MAU, low millions of total accounts, by my own guess, verified in person with Ello staff), but had a vibrant community. The killer was sale of the site to a VC with the original staff gagged as part of the agreement. Various protections (B-Corp organisation and highly member-friendly policies) seemed to disappear at that point, and most of the small crowd I'd followed there drifted elsewhere.
- Mastodon: I'd joined in 2016/7, participated a bit, faded off, then came back. After HN it's my most active online presence. Mastodon's long-term growth has shown numerous large-influx phases where a significant influx of new members arrive, some of whom remain active. The trend is episodic but positive.
- Tildes.net: Launched by an ex-Reddit staffer, deimos, the site's been ticking along as an invite-only beta since 2016. I've given more invites in the past three months than the previous seven years, so far as I can recall. As with other sites, it seems to gain and lose activity on phases, though overall seems to be growing.
- Imzy: An ill-fated venture which followed the "crater rapidly" phase. It remains the most socially-dysfunctional online network I've ever participated in directly, strongly at odds with its "kinder, gentler Reddit" labeling.
- Hacker News: The site has seen a long steady slow growth since opening to the public in 2007. I've been studying front-page activity for the past few months, one element of which is looking at total activity (votes and comments) on those front-page stories and how that's changed over time. It's an interesting dataset as there are a fixed number of items per year (10,950, 10,980 in a leap year, based on 30 per day), but as participation increases we'll see more activity on the page, and metrics such as distinct sites and distinct submitters can vary. Votes per story have actually held relatively constant for 2020--2022 (most recent full years), comment activity continues to rise, see below. According to dang, MAUs have held steady at about 5 million for years, as have other indicia of site activity (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146958> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150721> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140>).
Hacker News isn't dying. Sites such as Metafilter remain not only reasonably vital (in terms of on-site activity), but have high quality discussion, as opposed to the plunge to the bottom of Reddit and Twitter. Diaspora* ... continues to tick along. Mastodon and the Fediverse are growing fairly rapidly (particularly for a non-venture-funded platform). Ello succeeded ... for a while. Google+ made it to just shy of the 8-year mark, and for much of that time did have quality discussions and engagements in my experience. Sometimes small scale is a virtue.
HN runs on a single server and with a single public moderator. I suspect it's pressing the edge of viability with both, but the results are ... pretty good.
As with another thread I'd participated in yesterday, one challenge is that there aren't a whole lot of major social network initiatives, most especially not by existing major players. Facebook's Threads is the first sui generis effort by that company since its original The Harvard Facebook launch (all others have been acquisitions). Last year's Bluesky launch by ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was the first significant new launch in years. The most recent major launch by an established company before that, so far as I'm aware, was Google+ itself. There've been other social media efforts, obviously, but most of those were not by an incumbent major player in the field, and were instead new ventures.
Checking myself, HN search lists 677 results for "new social network": <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
Among prominent mentions, with "name" (affiliation) YYYY:
- Google+ itself (Google) 2011
- "Hello" (Orkut) 2018
- "Friended" (?) 2019
- "Slyde" (?) 2020
- "So.cl" (Microsoft) (2012)
- "Inside.com" (Jason Calacanis) 2022
- "WT.social" (Jimmy Wales) (2021)
- Entries named or by: Hipstamatic, Frontpile, and Coccoon, on the first results page.
- LinkedIn, Skype, Pinterest, WeWork, and Slack are all mentioned.
Overall, though, I'd say my characterisation is accurate: there aren't many new large entrants, especially not by incumbents, and those that do emerge tend to see a rapid initial "testing the waters" bump, followed by some subsequent trajectory either up or down.
On Hacker News front-page story activity 2007--2022:
Year Stories Points ( mean ) Comments ( mean ) Sites Submitters
---- ------- ------ --------- -------- --------- ----- ----------
2007 9382 92264 ( 9.83 ) 61207 ( 6.52 ) 2644 1163
2008 10980 294775 ( 26.85 ) 186339 ( 16.97 ) 3458 2021
2009 10950 608603 ( 55.58 ) 303962 ( 27.76 ) 4157 3017
2010 10950 1062763 ( 97.06 ) 491718 ( 44.91 ) 4397 3987
2011 10949 1657004 ( 151.34 ) 632724 ( 57.79 ) 4830 4889
2012 10980 1829402 ( 166.61 ) 778634 ( 70.91 ) 5047 5537
2013 10950 2132819 ( 194.78 ) 998387 ( 91.18 ) 5250 5975
2014 10905 2057628 ( 188.69 ) 916438 ( 84.04 ) 5338 5920
2015 10950 2001269 ( 182.76 ) 845719 ( 77.23 ) 5301 5313
2016 10977 2521394 ( 229.70 ) 1137575 ( 103.63 ) 5238 5341
2017 10950 2776064 ( 253.52 ) 1259899 ( 115.06 ) 5236 5274
2018 10950 2762928 ( 252.32 ) 1262654 ( 115.31 ) 4986 5038
2019 10950 3051011 ( 278.63 ) 1447141 ( 132.16 ) 5302 5123
2020 10980 3338150 ( 304.02 ) 1734703 ( 157.99 ) 5938 5564
2021 10950 3376829 ( 308.39 ) 1859933 ( 169.86 ) 6178 5339
2022 10950 3308025 ( 302.10 ) 1986265 ( 181.39 ) 6446 5443
Per HN's "flamewar" metric (or what I prefer to call "spiciness"), that would suggest that spice has increased especially 2020--2022, that is, the ratio of comments to votes is up. HN views that as a possible sign of discord, though it could be more interest in discussion.
Year Stories Points ( mean ) Comments ( mean ) Sites Submitters Spice
---- ------- ------ --------- -------- --------- ----- ---------- ------
2007 9382 92264 ( 9.83 ) 61207 ( 6.52 ) 2644 1163 66.339
2008 10980 294775 ( 26.85 ) 186339 ( 16.97 ) 3458 2021 63.214
2009 10950 608603 ( 55.58 ) 303962 ( 27.76 ) 4157 3017 49.944
2010 10950 1062763 ( 97.06 ) 491718 ( 44.91 ) 4397 3987 46.268
2011 10949 1657004 ( 151.34 ) 632724 ( 57.79 ) 4830 4889 38.185
2012 10980 1829402 ( 166.61 ) 778634 ( 70.91 ) 5047 5537 42.562
2013 10950 2132819 ( 194.78 ) 998387 ( 91.18 ) 5250 5975 46.811
2014 10905 2057628 ( 188.69 ) 916438 ( 84.04 ) 5338 5920 44.539
2015 10950 2001269 ( 182.76 ) 845719 ( 77.23 ) 5301 5313 42.259
2016 10977 2521394 ( 229.70 ) 1137575 ( 103.63 ) 5238 5341 45.117
2017 10950 2776064 ( 253.52 ) 1259899 ( 115.06 ) 5236 5274 45.384
2018 10950 2762928 ( 252.32 ) 1262654 ( 115.31 ) 4986 5038 45.700
2019 10950 3051011 ( 278.63 ) 1447141 ( 132.16 ) 5302 5123 47.432
2020 10980 3338150 ( 304.02 ) 1734703 ( 157.99 ) 5938 5564 51.966
2021 10950 3376829 ( 308.39 ) 1859933 ( 169.86 ) 6178 5339 55.079
2022 10950 3308025 ( 302.10 ) 1986265 ( 181.39 ) 6446 5443 60.044
For those who think discussion's getting more heated, there's some evidence of that.
Note that HN's "flamewar detector" is triggered for comments > 40 and comments/votes > 1 (or 100 as I calculate it above), best as I understand.
It's some people, sometimes, in some contexts, saying some things which go to opinion. It's no better or worse than a radio or TV "vox pop" and equally biassed. Or that eternal source of truth "the man in the street you met in the pub that time" or a taxi driver.
I think it's social cancer and I regret ever participating and taking it seriously. It certainly caused me harm, to my own sense of self and to personal relations and trust.
Do yourself a favour and drop out. By all means stay if you enjoy it, but at least drop out of any belief and claim its a true expression of public views in the wide.
Or there is no such method, in which case: Why do you specifically advise to drop social media channels? What makes them less valuable as a method of gauging public views than, say, talking to a taxi driver, or an opinion poll? You are suggesting that I drop every belief that each one of these parts accurately represents the whole, but then why specifically ask us to drop out of one of these methods over any other?
I advise to drop because of cumulative deleterious effects on my mental health and real world social relationships. Some people may have more resilience. I think most people become trapped in mostly narcissistic behaviour.
Where can we find "A true expression of public views in the wide"?
I've been using social media all my life and for me the benefits far outweigh the negatives.
I never believed it should be my sole source of information just as much as gossiping or talking to my hairdresser shouldn't be my sole source of information. If I want to have a nuanced opinion.
If we treated all tweets as comparable to spitballing over drinks or hairdresser gossip the world would be a better place.
I am unsure there is any true expression of popular sentiment, ever. My problem again here is inflated beliefs to Twitter as reflective of some wider community view. Quite apart from being anything but random sample, it's riddled with both bots and trolls.
I weigh a news article in a tabloid newspaper less than I would an article in the New York Times for example.
Why do we need to make a blanket statement about social media being untrustworthy? Information without context can't be trusted no matter the medium.
Society isn't better because of social media. Maybe you're OK. Society at large isn't.
Would you eg say teenage girls are not at risk? That people with mental health issues are not at risk? Not that it defines it as "ban it now" but "where's the harm" seems disinegenuous. There's harm. How much, what remediates, unclear. For me, it's avoid. You differ.
I might add my immediate family is also split on this. So I don't believe I am in the majority on this.
Every piece of information that is transmitted between humans carries the risk of harming someone.
I genuinely believe that society at large is better due to social media.
They launched it at a very opportune time when Twitter was having massive technical issues.
That was enough to get millions of people to kick the tires and more importantly, create awareness.
The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now, people will again flock to Threads and notice that it got a little better. Twitter will get fixed again, and a lower percentage of Threads users go back again.
And repeat.
Meta chose quick growth over European users.
People have been saying this since the day Elon took over... but has it really gone down that much? More than other tech products? E.g. how many outages have the big cloud providers had in the last year? When I hear people say 'any day now' it reads like they are looking for any excuse to say 'mars man bad'.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/01/tech/twitter-rate-limit-excee...
rather than cloud providers it would probably be more useful to compare to eg Instagram or TikTok
And high-volume users are who create content for the site.
Also, the idea that Threads will be better than Twitter is simply a promise based on nothing. The concept I heard is that they were going to mod out politics, but that's a) impossible at scale, ask China, and b) Facebook couldn't care less about politics; the reason they censored anything other than nipples was by government demand, and Facebook has promised to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee that it was hiding documents from until a few days ago under pain of contempt of Congress, personally, against Zuckerberg.
I don't think he's hero enough to go to prison for the sake of this administration, especially since he started censoring for the last administration. He doesn't care about the politics at all, so who would he be going to prison on behalf of? Movement Democrats will certainly make him a hero, like Cheney, Comey, etc., but what will that get him if the Democrats go down in the next general? All this is to say is that he's motivated to govern Threads with a light touch.
That's how Telegram have 700 million active users.
* The feed is chaotic & no guarantees people (and by extension, Topics) whom you followed will show up primarily. Seeing a machine learning thread between a Barbie post & scantily clad influencer is bizarre.
* The feed is jumpy with tiny accidental refreshes. You could be reading the thread and do a deep dive, and come out to find the timeline slightly/significantly different.
* No message/DM. No bookmark feature. No topic suggestions - Just pure Instagram-like scrolling.
The good part is no ads. But that could be a matter of time. Overtaking Twitter in engagement will be hard. Social networks have some inertia & needs some key users to remain successful (I forget the paper name - but it describes growth/implosion of network graphs when some key community members used/left. Like a hole in the graph. If any HNer knows about it - It came about 7-8 years ago.)
I follow some local weather sources. The algorithm decided that I'm really big into weather and started feeding me weather sources in other cities. Thanks, Threads. Good job trying to guess what I want instead of just listening to what I've clearly opted into.
Would've expected closer to 70/30 personally.
I don't know a single person who willingly prefers a limited, bogged-down experience of any product (social media or otherwise) over a full-fledged desktop client.
Of course I prefer doing all of my computing on my desktop computer. But I don't take my desktop computer with me to the grocery store. And I use Twitter to entertain myself when I'm waiting in line at the grocery store, for example. When I am at my desktop computer, I'm much less likely to be interested in using Twitter.
That said, one of many reasons I didn't bother creating a Threads account is precisely that reason: no desktop client. Unless forced, I won't use anything that is exclusively available on mobile devices.
81% of Facebook users interact only by mobile phone: https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-of-f...
The relevant number would be to condition on only the 20th to 80th percentile users (by time spent/day) and see their breakdown. I am going to bet that number is more biased towards desktop, while both the 0-20% (occasional users) and 80-100% percentiles will be mobile focused.
The other confounding effect is the bots and the pseudo-bots (humans operating many accounts). I don't know how they change these numbers.
Twitter's cultural cachet was because you could link and embed Tweets. Whatever platform you're on, viewing things on Twitter "just works" if you have a URL. That means journalists can point to things on Twitter, post things on Twitter, and the normal mechanisms of internet virality mean they can spread through basically any medium (i.e. how many times are Twitter links shown on other platforms?)
It's also worth noting that "influencer" types don't - or didn't - use Twitter directly. They used various bits of API management software to curate their appearance.
Threads has none of that: without a web browser experience, you can't share and link things on Threads in other mediums. There's no possibility of embedded Threads posts being a thing. And that means, fundamentally, Threads can never actually pull sign-ups by organic virality - or pull views from it either. It's notable the big sign up wave happened right as it looked like Twitter was going to block viewing Tweets for users without an account - that was (correctly) interpreted as the final nail in the coffin (and was rolled back).
You do realize that even after the initial drop (which is expected, for something that managed to get so much hype) they’re likely still the biggest app in the history in terms of DAU in few weeks after the lunch?
To me that marked it as doomed from the start. Most people use Twitter to follow specific niches or topic areas, not as a general conversational platform. If I follow even one account that's posting low quality content at any sort of frequency, it seriously degrades the experience.
It's really a headscratcher how they launched without that. I guess the idea is that ad placing is easier if you have an algorithmic feed instead?
Ironically, the people who refuse to use the "Following" tab on Twitter are, I expect, the same people who are most dissatisfied with Twitter. If you use the Following tab, Twitter remains pretty damn great. It's when you allow an algorithm to feed you stuff that the experience can become something between unsatisfactory and toxic.
Some of these aspects have changed, but again, they are part of a larger recommendation experiment that twitter constantly pushes because a strict following feed = less money less engagement.
You cannot curate twitter as well as you think you can. It would be nice if that was possible though.
Then I just got bored, and realized it was just reclaiming the time that I had gained by quitting Instagram in the first place.
Edit I'm here: https://www.threads.net/@davidnwelton
Edit2 If I think about it some, the biggest drawback about Threads for me is swapping one egocentric billionaire who is rapidly going off the rails for another who is, for the moment, more stable, but has still accumulated a godawful amount of wealth and power. Mastodon seems like the alternative if you really hate that kind of setup, but... it doesn't seem to have much traction.
People keep saying this as if the only "success" mastadon can have is by being in everyone's pocket. It's not an SV unicorn startup, it's not trying to buy out some investors. It's doing exactly what it is designed to do: be a user owned platform. Not everyone will want that all the time, and some people will never want that, and that's fine, not everyone spent 24/7 on the forums of the old web either.
We could stop considering "Everyone is using it all the time" as the desired end goal maybe?
My view too. Not the best service ever offered, but allows me to continue distancing myself from Twitter.
Would I much prefer it if Twitter was a public company and/or ran by anyone else? Sure, but that isn't happening, so, I'll take Mastodon and any other reasonable alternative. We'll see how the market pans out.
An aspect of me wants Mastodon to win... but there's a deep cynicism in it ever working at Twitter scale (which may be the point, in the end).
That’s not even an MVP, it’s non existent.
Some of these supposed genius tech leaders are really showing themselves to have very questionable decision making capability.
It was also extremely off putting that it was so tightly linked to instagram.
They also made a mistake by not leveraging peoples desire to get their own Twitter handle on threads.
Failing also to launch is Europe.
Honestly it doesn’t seem that hard, if you weird the resources that Zuckerberg does. You say to them “clone Twitter”. It’s not like Twitter is the biggest technical challenge in the world to clone… why couldn’t Meta do that?
The outcome looks like what you’d expect - the Meta equivalent of a Musk Starship launch.
Also, WhatsApp and Instagram still don’t have an iPad app. Given the scale of their users and the company’s resources it is unfathomable to me that they haven’t tried to make their products more seamless experiences across the devices users use. But then I remember it is Meta and I would be hard pressed to think of a more user-hostile company.
It's already surpassed Mastodon and Bluesky easily.
and there's no conspiracy theorists on there.. like qanon or white nationalists. https://www.axios.com/2022/10/30/elon-musk-paul-pelosi-tweet...
Due to the nature of things being linked to Instagram it is making it easier for people to hate on transgender folks and I've seen it first hand multiple times. Reporting also leads to no action on certain "large" accounts.
Saying there no white nationalists on Threads is false.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/09/meta-thre...
For those of us in the LGBTQIA+ community Threads is simply not safe.
Not sure this outweighs people's desire to actually obtain the handle they've always wanted but was already taken on Twitter, which is a substantial reason to sign up for any new platform at this point. Either way both of these groups were ignored by not allowing custom handles in the first place.
Tying in to Instagram was what made it resonate with such a large audience vs all the other Twitter clones. Carrying over the social graph was a wise decision imho.
The Starship analogy makes little sense as well. Starship is not an MVP and well on track to continue to push forward the state of the art of rocket engineering.
Resonate, or was simply them leveraging their current user base? I don’t think the use of an Instagram login and having your current contacts imported made it “resonate” with anyone. It was just a growth hack.
This is false.
All the features you've mentioned are on the roadmap, as they've outlined many times. Software at this scale is non-trivial.
Most complaints I've read is that thread's content is just boring.
Most instagram influencers are visually oriented and don't translate well to textual thread.
If they would have been able to get that right from the start, they could have kept a lot more. Either through collabrations, or pushed influencers who get engangement on long text posts.
I haven't used Threads, but it's 2023. People have years of experience and expectations using social media, also probably shorter attention spans. I'm fairly sure that an launch ready MVP in 2023 should be WAY more feature full than 5-10 years ago.
I know there are other factors at play here as well regarding retention, but I don't think one can easily recover from a highly popular lauch with uncompetitive features.
They shoehorned a new service/app ontop of there existing user base, a huge amount of people went to check it out because it was forced down their throats and then a reasonable amount decided it was a waste of time and a few people are still playing with it, likely a lot of wannabe influences seeing it as a chance to get an early lead on a new platform.
It will likely die further, except facebook and social media being as toxic as they are and as this interview suggests, facebook are going to add more 'hooks' to get people addicted or dark patterns etc to drive usage.
Everything here is what you would expect, so who cares?
- Building up a good group of people to follow takes a long time
- A lot of the people who I follow on Instagram I do not want to follow on Twitter.
- Just felt like an inorganic extension of Instagram. Like the difference between a fake real estate developer created neighborhood and a real one.
This is why I stopped using Instagram. I have been there since around 2010. Moment when I realized it's waste of time was when feed contained content I did not followed while missing some that I followed.
Irony is that pre-2010 I was proponent of algorithmic feed. Young and naive.
Don't try to resurrect the horse from the greasy spot on the ground where it was formerly beaten to death.
It's all a cancerous detriment to society.
If you wanna talk to people online... Discord, irc, forums.
Let social media die... Let the trash fire burn itself out instead of lighting new dumpsters on fire in hopes of it being the next big thing.
That sort of thing (social media) is bad, and we (human beings) just need to let them go away.
It's all a hives of propagandists, "influencers", shit posting and lonely people seeking external validation shouting into the void.
Threads is like a fake internet.
If you're viewing this as a king of the hill scenario, you've got the wrong metaphor. This is humpty dumpty having a great fall. It won't ever be put back together. Not by Meta, not by Twitter, not by anyone.
Nothing attracts people more than money. Give 1/10/100 USD per month to super active users that attract views and engagement.
I have yet to see a single Threads post get linked anywhere -- not here, not Reddit, not even from Facebook.
(Edit: Or at least, I'm too ignorant to realize what such a post would look like, in which case, branding fail.)
I stand corrected on other Meta properties linking it, but, of course, they have to get links outside of that sphere to compete with Twitter on mindshare.
https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/CvPrxHdr4Y2/?igsh...
Since the recent changes, on Twitter you can't see replies if you're linked to a tweet while not logged in, and you don't even have any indicator that replies exist and that you could see them with an account. The whole implementation of the changes in that area is a real baffler.
Seriously dude. It takes more effort to break the web than just use it.
This is even without launching in the EU, so as soon as Threads is available in the EU, they can get another 100M+ easily anyway.
This is what I call 'early days'. We'll see what happens in 6 months or a year whether if people want to continue using Threads rather than initial sign ups. Retention is what matters.
And he was much, much younger than the Google founders who are the only real comparison (in that they consistently make money).
The rest don't have a chance at all and are as good as dead or cannot handle the amount of users that both Twitter/X or Threads has.
It is clear that both of them will co-exist and retention always matters, with any so-called 'exodus'. For Threads it is early days. On the other hand over at Twitter / X [0] it seems far from 'dying', from the months of nonsense from the media who exaggerated the immediate collapse of Twitter / X last year which never happened.
Perhaps it is time to admit that you have been manipulated by the doomsayers who's only mission is to post clickbait and attract your eyeballs to their articles spreading nonsense to grift for affiliate links.
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684978651857596429/phot...
The Instagram easy sign-up got Threads its users and it's the same feed algorithm which will churn the users. If nothing changes by the start of the NFL season, Threads will be niche. It's a darn shame.
Facebooks growth was because it was where your friends were posting. Twitter growth was because of where influential people posted that you were interested in their (brief) thoughts. X was a failed payments platform that eventually became PayPal and sold to eBay (due to eBay being their only true partner at the time). Facebook/Meta keeps buying their way into the cool club only to realize they’re not cool. The bodies of friendstr, MySpace, phpbb, and even reddit now, as the tech bros learn that “features” aren’t what bring people in. People do. Make it friendly to people like the growth days. Not friendly to corporations so you can milk more advertising dollars. I’ll stay on the “I deleted my meta and I’m not coming back” fence.
I deleted it and, so far, no noticeable impact on my life (and that's in a country where almost everyone who has a smartphone is guaranteed to be on Facebook). Almost nothing of worth is being posted on them.
The pitfall of social media is that they don't reflect social interactions. The algorithm process is unnatural. I only want to hear about my friends and a selection of people and institutions I choose. I don't need to hear about LeBron James because I watched a video clip. Or be shown ads for some weird games, as I've not played on my phone or computers for ages. The simplified interaction mechanism missing downvote/dislike/hate is another thing I dislike. If I can approve, I should be able to disapprove. That's why I prefer Reddit to Twitter. What's at the top is either something useful or echoing the culture of the community.
I've been interacting with forums more these days, and it's a breath of fresh air. No engagement, only discussions and information. Some are showing ads, but I don't mind as it's always pertaining to the subject of the forum.
1. Twitter is going to fail quickly. 2. Threads is going to succeed quickly.
Neither is true, and constantly re-checking the narrative against those binary outcomes (complete failure! Unmistakable success!) is ludicrous and distracting.
Cannot search by hashtag. Not sorted by time … cannot post on news / politics.
It’s really just a generated text / pic thread for content consumption featuring mostly ads and payed celebrity marketing.
I used it for a few days and honestly cannot think of any upside.
This is ChatGPT again, over all Europe will be increasingly isolated from the rest of the internet because their politicians were tricked into thinking they had more influence over the forefront technology than they actually do: You can't be a steward of good policy from the back of the train, you'll just get kicked off the train.
A tool I made got a lot of traction in a very specific niche of knowledge workers: 10,000 people a week doing what was a 10 hour task in 90 seconds.
It felt great blocking the EU instead of adding a cookie banner. Weirdly enough California adopted privacy legislation in a less braindead way so they get to own their data and use my product.
Strong increase at the start, then a relatively quick drop, slowly declining to un-hyped levels of participation. This isn't news, this is common.
Strong initial growth is usually based on hype. There was tons of hype. The user count dropping so quickly means that the people, who joined because of hype (whatever sub-reason covered by the term), are leaving.
Given that it's facebook, the hype and potential participation rate was gigantic. It's a bubble. Bubbles pop.
More news at 11.
He's not going to pay for blue, and he and his buddy's would rather move their conversations to discord or text messages (or Threads) than deal with Twitter.
I would rather see Mastodon and federated services succeed, but it is not the most user friendly. Then again, just because something is big doesn't mean it's the best.
There was no popular and populated alternative to Twitter. Now there is.
As I watch this unfold - I think that Twitter is now worth half of what it was a month ago. And Threads soaked in all that value. Not sure how anyone would call it a failure.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=...
It's kind of interesting to see stuff like that.
It's called The Internet.
I don't see the attraction of turning that into a massive, homogenised, centralised commercial product under private control. Never have.
I am not worried about Facebook’s AI anymore, it’s clear they can't infer anything about me even after I blocked 100+ accounts.
- Give me a timeline that shows only the people I follow. - Give me an "explore" section so I can find new people. - That's right, exactly like Instagram does it.
I'll use it if you do this. I know I'm not alone.
> Mr Zuckerberg [...] described the situation as "normal" and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.
I think if it was normal, they wouldn't have publicly spiked the football after the admittedly incredible signup numbers. They would have been a bit more humble, said they expected most users to leave soon after, but that this is an encouraging sign (or something to that effect). Maybe a bit more celebratory, but playing with expectations a bit more. They started off with INCREDIBLY humble talking points about likelihood of failure and then I think just got too excited.
None of this is to suggest they have no chance. They still have a ton of users and I'd still consider the launch a success overall.
The type I that attracts those with something authentic to say.
And the type II that attracts those with something to sell.
The first type is the future fediverse. Its the 15%. The art house cinema. The colorful city center street. Flexible, innovative, human centric, low budget, soul nourishing.
The second type is Meta-stasized and coming in X number of mutations. Its the 85%. The strip mall. The plastic, fake, mass consumption machine. Lucrative, manipulative, exhausting yet unavoidable for the titillation addicted masses.
There is no way you can eliminate either one of the two types in the short term. Type I was created against incredible odds. The future will be a bit easier. Type II is, alas, the embodiment of dazed and confused, unsettled society that is unlikely to heal anytime soon.
So let us part ways and live in peace.
You know for a fact that it it slowly grew from 0 to 50M over 6 months it would have been considered a smashing success.
I keep seeing tweets embedded in web pages and referenced on TV. No mention of Threads after the launch.
It should be a lot simpler. We should all have learned by now that any and every product from Facebook is radioactive waste.
Hopefully Threads is indeed DOA. Anyway, we should have been asking ourselves why is it that 100M people even managed to sign up in the first place and how to make sure they don't even try again.
I am earnestly trying to go all in on ActivityPub these days.
I know that they'd be mostly false, but we get those about that other site, so why not about Threads?
I can understand that if you are not signed in, the recommendations are based on which country you are in, so that's understandable. But once I log in, if you continue to recommend content based on the region as my default option, and NOT based on my following/watching habits, it becomes annoying.
Most region based content is boring (I do NOT care about sports or entertainment gossip or whatever), but the local content in my region is especially cringe inducing, that I feel physically repulsed. On Youtube and Twitter, I rarely encounter such content, it mostly what I follow and things extending from that.
But for some reason, I cannot, despite my best efforts, seem to curate my feed on Threads/instagram nor on tiktok; it heavily seems to weight the locally popular content on my recommended feed, and moreover makes it the default view.
It even makes it difficult to switch to a following tab, there is an air of "no, don't you dare pick and choose what you want to read/watch, WE will pick what you will view and you will like it".
There are so many tiktokers who I like, but I only follow on their youtube shorts channel, because watching on tiktok or instagram makes me ill.
Threads is no better, I will be reading a thread from some one I like and one swipe and dammit, another cringe worthy thread about some repulsive nonsense, and I close the app.
We are told that social media apps are supposed to entertaining and addictive; youtube and twitter are catering to my addiction, the other apps don't, and if I feel repulsed rather than drawing in, I shan't visit their site and they can't serve me ads to make money.
____
I am not sure if it's because I got into youtube/ twitter early and was able to spend time shifting through dirt to find gold (time I don't seem to be willing to tiktok, I presume)...
or something about algorithms each company uses, because I never really liked facebook/instagram and I have closed my facebook account long ago, not because of some moral stand but because I found the app so boring.
I only keep instagram because of my old highschool fellows are there, and I like to be able to congratulate them on the birth of their babies, otherwise I rarely interact with the damn app, it never recommends me anything nice to watch, despite the years facebook spent collecting my data.
If you are going to invade my privacy and collect my data, why don't I get something useful out of it?
you know which popular accounts I follow and which segments my likes fall into, and I spent weeks trying to nudge you into things I like and avoid things I don't like, why don't you learn, dammit?
Once brands realize that they can utilize custom feeds to reach potential customers granularly instead of -- or in addition to -- paying for advertising, it's going to be over for Twitter. Twitter could introduce something similar to compete, but they shit-canned all of their talent, and in the process hamstrung their ability to innovate.