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Comment by operatingthetan | Hacker News Reader

This is being reported in a strange way. We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users as if they lost something by not getting 100% of them to engage. Do we even have numbers for what percent of twitter users actively engage versus total user base?

I don't think they are doing very bad considering it's mobile only right now.

View on HN

For how counter-cultural HN has always prided itself in being, I find it a bit hard to believe just how much the media has shaped the story here. There's a lot of reason to be skeptical... it's not that I like Musk but the media doesn't like him and that's no secret. I find it to be quite the opposite of what you're saying, that their press team has done a good job of shaping the story positively for Meta.

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...

>For how counter-cultural HN has always prided itself in being

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.

It’s also encumbant company solely owned by the worlds richest man versus enormous global corporation mostly owned by another one. There is no counter-culture here.

Right, and the closest thing I can recall to a counter-culture here is occasionally seeing the suggestion that software engineers should unionize. The rest is bread and butter tech culture (which loves obscure technical topics, psychedelic drugs, discussing money, various ways of accomplishing tasks in a clever way, statistics, design and so on).

The top-voted comment on any article is usually a comment claiming the article is wrong. We're definitely counter-something.

Contrarian fits the bill

Except for the articles and comments that are flagged and removed. So the "counterculture" is only the opinions everyone mostly agrees with.

Much to your point of media having an apparent dislike for Musk, I had noticed Business Insider dominating anti-Musk coverage. It was so much so that when they published a flattering article about him I was shellshocked.

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.

While I can’t deny that people, including the media, have a general disliking for him, there’s plenty of puff pieces to be found, especially by corporate friendly outlets.

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.

I would assume most of the blame here really lies with Meta.

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.

"Not getting 100%" is a bit of a straw man argument.

"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.

>"Not getting 100%" is a bit of a straw man argument.

Alright, forget the number. Let's focus on active users versus signups and how it's being reported for Threads.

>We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users as if they lost something by not getting 100% of them to engage.

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"

We don't expect the number of active users to ever fall in an startup.

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.

That's not accurate.

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.

That mostly only makes the number of users to fall if new people stop coming at some point. To some non-stablished service, people stopping to come is death.

People do in fact stop coming at some point.

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...>

So, did the number of active Facebook users ever go down before it was a dominant player on social networks? Or are you claiming that Threads is ok because it's as big as it is ever going to be and it is all downwards from now on?

What part of my comment exactly is wrong?

I'm saying that Facebook's specific history (the OG FB site/app) is not a great basis for comparison as it's such an extreme outlier. Launching new social networks is fraught, but an uneven start is not a necessary kiss of death. And even Facebook has seen growth plateaus.

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

Note that mean votes doubled from 2011 to 2020, and has held steady since. Mean comments doubled 2011--2017, though have continued to rise about 157% since (over the 2017 baseline). The overall site count has also increased, suggesting that submissions are more diverse.

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.

Since I called out "spiciness" in the chart above, here it is with that ratio (comments/votes) added:

  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

The low-water (or low-spice) mark was 2011, at 38.185. High-spice was 2007, though in the post-2010 world (after HN has more-or-less stabilised, and after the flamewar detector was implemented), it's reached in 2022.

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.

We have seen critical appraisals of past social media launches, e.g., "Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement" (2012)

<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.

>We have seen critical appraisals of past social media launches, e.g., "Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement" (2012) <https://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-new-google-stu...>

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...

I picked a particular item with significant HN discussion. The fact that it was data-backed (a 40k profile analysis) also means that it lags actual activity. As with all complex evolving situations, hard empirical data are not realtime.

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.

Way too much conflation with labels, timelines, types of project, recollections from 12 years ago, etc. for me. Also we're comparing Meta, a company with experience running two successful social networks against Google of ten plus years ago, with none.

Your original position was "We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users".

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 of a decade ago had launched 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).

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.

Could you just be specific about why the first example brought up doesn't apply, instead of letting the other person put themselves out there to advance the discussion and finding little details to accuse them of bad faith?

The idea that forgetting that Google failed horribly with Google Video before buying YouTube is a "smell" of bad faith is weird.

I did regarding the timelines, then they pivoted to including HN threads in the comparison when my original statement was about articles. I don't know what you're talking about regarding Google Video, I did not mention it.

To lift the kimono:

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.

Then s/launched/running successful social networks/, which again in this case was your original position.

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.

My comment was about news articles and you opened it up to HN threads and academic papers and whatever else. You hand waved away the fact that your timelines were vastly different, and are now complaining about pedantry when in several cases basic facts eluded you which changed your arguments when edited. You continually paraphrase my comment in an incomplete manner in order to serve your view.

No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.

Waze was an acquisition. It was launched by an Israeli company.

Fair enough, noted in edit above.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com