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Comment by joduplessis | Hacker News Reader

Threads was a dumb idea, clearly pushed by non-product executives. If there were any product people, then wtf were you thinking? You can't expect to waltz in to that arena, zero plan and expect your "Meta" backing to carry you. Especially given that FB has become an absolute mess of a product.

Addendum: I recently re-signed-up for FB in 2020 & 3 years later killed my account because of the sheer amount of irrelevant content. Felt like I was watching bad TV.

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> You can't expect to waltz in to that arena, zero plan and expect your "Meta" backing to carry you

Are you still talking about the name choice, or the business in general? Copying a very popular product is not a bad idea, and having a lot of capital to back it certainly does help.

> Copying a very popular product is not a bad idea, and having a lot of capital to back is certainly does help.

Copying a very popular product.... that doesn't depend on a social aspect. Copying social products is way different to copying Excel, etc.

Threads user count immediately completely dwarfed any other Twitter clones. Same with number of active users, which is already half of Twitter's count, according to one article: https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23890592/threads-meta-mon...

Even if these numbers are moderately inaccurate, Threads is still a smashing success given the time frame. The copying seems to have gone very well. Don't forget they were piggy backing off their own successful social media app, Instagram.

Reddit coppied and replaced digg a popular product that depends on social aspect. Excel is still Excel.

After the initial release, they dropped down to a more stable 100 million DAU, but they've been steadily growing and twitter has been steadily bleeding users. It's a successful product, it's just not a "facebook scale" successful product.

100 million? Care to share how you got that number? Last I read it was down to just below 10m.

https://gizmodo.com/threads-has-lost-more-than-80-of-daily-a...

It was announced by Zuckerberg in a shareholders call last week.

Care to share a link perhaps?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/25/23932473/mark-zuckerberg...

Its the new AOL, seems to appeal to the same people.

> You can't expect to waltz in to that arena, zero plan and expect your "Meta" backing to carry you.

Why not?

Because it just doesn't work that way with relational networks. A user is on FB because their friends are - same with Insta & X. You're not building the next best fridge, you're building a community - and that takes time, effort & appeal. It is exactly why social is so hard & takes so long.

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