Threads Has Lost More Than 80% of Its Daily Active Users | Hacker News Reader

Threads Has Lost More Than 80% of Its Daily Active Users

gizmodo.com

78 pointsPaulHoule43 comments

Were they ever active in the first place? I only signed up to claim my account (which I later realized was pointless since the name is reserved by your Instagram handle anyway).

I'm perfectly willing to believe usage has flatlined, and that matches my personal experience where I've opened it maybe twice since installing it, only to see posts from mostly brands, celebrities, influencers and meme pages. There was an initial surge where I got a notification every time one of my Instagram followers also followed me on Threads, but that only lasted about a week and it's been quiet since then. I suspect a lot of people were behaving similarly to me, either signing up to claim their account or opening the app when they got a notification of a new follower.

But I'm skeptical of the utility of comparing the flatline to a baseline from the first week, and of using data from Sensor Tower and Similarweb, neither of which has much insight into usage data beyond what's publicly available through metrics like app installs, reviews and maybe DNS. It's not like Meta is using any analytics frameworks other than their own.

Well, I'm not too surprised. When a product launches in a massive way like this, activity tends to die down over time unless extra work is done to keep the hype going. That's true of everything from a forum to a Discord server to a social network or online multiplayer game. There's a big launch, a honeymoon period early on (a few days to a few weeks), then activity either falls off the face of the Earth or drops down to a more reasonable value with a core community.

The Threads honeymoon period is over, and now we're seeing whether a core community will stick around.

A text app where you can't write in devices which usually have physical keyboards (desktop computers)... why do they act surprised that they have lost users?

This.

I feel like a voice in the wilderness but I feel that smartphones were a giant step backwards. There was a movie trailer like this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge-x4mPuZ_4

where the minaturization went beyond the desktop all the way to a little phone and it used scenes from more classic movies but the shrinking screen left me with a tragic feeling and the slogan "go big or go home" was left more ambiguous (maybe you would go home).

You might say one great thing about the old Twitter was the ability to have parasocial relationships with brands and if you think that's important you want to put the experience of brand managers first and from that perspective the most important thing is a powerful desktop app aimed at the power user. If you get those users in they could make a site a destination for people, if it's just another way for people to screw around with their phones that's a really crowded field.

A big step backwards for what? I can hail a cab, watch shows, all sorts of things on-the-go.

If you’re claiming it’s a big step back for productivity, I’d argue that phones and tablets are devices of consumption, few things of worth are produced on a phone or tablet.

I can type just as fast (if not faster) on my phone as on desktop. I write almost all my HN comments from my phone, primarily because it's my leisure device and I try to use my desktop only for work (or at least "work") activities. My phone has a high DPI screen and a responsive touch interface that makes it easy to browse content and write comments. The main downside is that it's more immersive and usually can't display as much content on the screen as a desktop monitor, but for this I mostly blame responsive design and its tendency to favor single-column text rendering; reading sites in desktop mode on a high DPI phone screen actually isn't too bad, aside from the tiny buttons and links. But the reason this is a major downside is that it encourages doomscrolling as the screen typically only displays one "piece" of content at a time.

I have no idea of threads will succeed or fail, but this is overwrought.

1 - They launched an early product, missing many crucial features, but the features they shipped all worked. For any product this could be smart or could be dumb; the "dumb" case is when a product doesn't reach the threshold of "minimal" for an MVP. I do think the case that threads isn't yet MVP is a good one, but this article hangs everything on that point.

2 - But it can be good if you can get awareness and colonize adequate space in the market (there's only so much mindshare to go around). And in this case FB* has a huge advantage: simply because they are FB/IG they were able to get the app on 100MM phones. Which means as they keep adding features their barrier to pulling people back is lower than it would be for most new entrants. They can send you a notification (incredibly, most people don't disable them) and it's easier to hop on and take a look.

I don't care much either way, but I hate lazy takes like this one.

“Worked” only applies if you’re able-bodied.

By the definition of "work", the grandparent comment is valid and there is no need to adjust the language: (of a machine or system) operate or function, especially properly or effectively.

I think this person is suggesting there was a lack of accessibility features on launch, not that the word “worked” is intrinsically broken.

HN top comments when Threads was launched: Twitter killer

HN top comments when Threads loses 80%: this was obvious

This shows something I've enjoyed watching in online forums which are large. Everything is always obvious to someone so when the evidence is in favour, they tell you.

The resulting effect is that everything is obvious to any community large enough: the ones who disagree hide or are hidden.

This is a mechanism for the reduction of information in a sufficiently large forum because the interesting comments are usually from people who don't find something obvious.

Whats your definition of top comment?

Cause they certainly don't include the word "Twitter Killer" [1] with the first 2 not even talking about twitter and the third still talking about how people would use twitter.

Oh man and the 4th comment is complaining about a lack of web version and the 5th one outright says "My gut feeling no one will care about Threads, 6 months from now.".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580192

A lot of HN users are strongly biased towards one conclusion and just want see things fail (in this case Twitter) because it somehow (what?) validates their opinion.

I called that Threads would day one week from launching in one of the comment sections and what a surprise… nobody cares to use another Twitter clone.

This would be normal. A person who is not confident is very unlikely to make a comment making a prediction, so most of the comments you do get are very high in confidence, regardless of any actual facts or contexts.

This [0] did not age well:

>> "I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting."

It has been one month and it has not 'hollowed out' Twitter / X in "extremely rapid fashion". In fact, Threads is the one already 'plummeting' in 'extremely rapid fashion' of its daily active users and it did not surpass Twitter / X's daily active users either.

Both will co-exist, but Threads actually destroys the smaller 'competitors' such as T2, Hive.social, Post, etc rather than Twitter / X.

But this aged well, unsurprisingly [1].

>> The same people who incorrectly predicted Twitter's immediate collapse are now furious that didn't happen. Now we see them hastefully predicting the end of Twitter again. It is quite hilarious and this will age extremely poorly.

One again like I said before, the death of Twitter / X and its services has been greatly exaggerated, with the original commenter and many other no where to be found.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36582377

I distinctly remember the mindset of HN that the second comment linked describes, that Meta was doomed. Then many started cheering it on because they wanted Twitter to fail. Neither of which has happened so far.

I think HN users (myself included) have a blind spot for general social trends. We're technologists, not tastemakers.

thats a 2012 account, too. i think we need more of this, pointing out when people made comically wrong predictions. we see all these confidently wrong predictions and it just gets tiring. i think HN should have some ranking system for getting predictions right. it would incentivize people to comment less (needed) and it would allow people to filter out big mouths.

no cap

Oddly, the hordes tripping over each other predicting imminent rueage for Twitter, have all fallen silent.

not that odd.

they don’t know how to pronounce 𝕏.

Here lies the "twitter killer" 2023-2023. RIP

Even in its current state, Threads is currently the #2 "free" download according to one of the data analysis firms cited in the article.

https://app.sensortower.com/top-charts?os=ios&category=0&dev...

X is nowhere to be found. It's a dead app walking.

Presumably thats because everyone already has Twitter installed...

And apparently, a lot of them aren't using it.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/17/pew-60-of-u-s-twitter-user...

60% stepping away means 40% still use it, which is still a tremendous amount more than Threads.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I've stepped back a lot from all social media this past year. I think during COVID was a peak as many weren't working as much and just did whatever what worth doing wasting time. I also didn't get into TikTok at all either. In general, there are so many that turn out to be obvious bots and sock puppet accounts that it becomes less worth the time.

I don't think I'm the only one. I'm far more tech minded, and use/enjoy tech sites and have enjoyed social media. But the experience has shifted. The other day, my entire feed on FB was "suggested post" none directly from friends or family, which is my entire reason to use FB (along with Groups).

Even with mastadon, lemmy and the like, I think that smaller communities will start to grow stronger again, and that the large social media orgs will all start to lose ground. I'm tired of it.

Number 1 is literally an app (Temu) that spamming itself all over social media and is giving money away. Amazon and Walmart are nowhere to be found, so apparently Temu is destroying the top 2 retailers in the world. /s

Temu is pretty great TBH. You can get stuff for $1-$3 that would cost $15-$20 on Amazon, at the same low-mid quality (because both have imported wholesale Chinese products anyways). Perfect for non-essential or little niche stuff.

Didn't Twitter[1] actually die after Threads launched, though?

[1]: The brand, as Twitter Inc. was merged out of existence back in April.

from all I've read this was yet another social media product insisting that if you used it, it had to be in their way (mobile only, no feed customisation, needed to be tied to an instagram account). not surprised no one was particularly interested in putting up with that after a brief initial try.

I downloaded the app. I was welcomed with you need INSTAGRAM to log in. Ok bye.

Sure, but that means you were never a daily active user to begin with.

Surprise: Zero.

People checked it out, decided it wasn't that useful.

It’s only losing customers because it is bad, and always was bad. Just more shit from Zuck that nobody needs or wants.

More than 2/3rd of the posts they showed me didn’t come from friends.

Only reason 100% haven’t left is that you have to delete your Instagram account too.

We came in with big expectations, but it’s too bare bones to be useful yet. Main problem is lack of searchability (is us-east-1 down? How’s the Uber waits at the stadium? What was that loud sound just now?).

I have really tried to remain interested in it but at this point it seems like it's mostly brands and people cross posting the same stuff to Instagram.

Once more political nonsense started showing up on Threads, it lost even more interest. Unfortunately it's way too easy to run afoul of "Community Standards."

I think the honeymoon is solidly over.

Their active user count was artificially boosted via instagram.

This is the equivalent of putting Sirius satellite ratio in cars and counting 100% of them as active Sirius users when they turn it on once…

I couldn't even sign up since Threads told me to use a work email address. I was already thinking it's hardly worth my time but that solidified that sebtiment.

It wasn’t a twitter killer. It will be a the twitter survivor. Twitter is the twitter killer

I know they took a hit on advertising, but hasn’t the daily active user count of Twitter increased since the acquisition?

Nostr is better, doesn't need Instagram, no shadowbanning. Nostr wins.

Mark Zuckerberg will lose his fortune within 20 years. Watch.

it did not need to last.

it only needed to launch.

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