Threads now reaches more than 130M monthly users, up 30M from Q3 | Hacker News Reader

Threads now reaches more than 130M monthly users, up 30M from Q3

techcrunch.com

67 pointssamaysharma48 comments

It’s gotta be the in-feed Threads carousels in Instagram, I have to give Meta credit, that’s a great way to get people into the threads app. I’m also finding more of the people I liked from Twitter on Threads now. It’s nice to have that corner of the internet back again.

It’s such brazen click grubbing, though. They’ll show most of the post except for the last few words, so you click through to see what it says. I guess it helps some PM at Meta meet their KPIs, but those clicks are not real threads users. They’re not going to open the app otherwise.

I wouldn’t have opened the app, but I find I stay browsing around even after I view the post. Threads really does seem to be alive in the same way twitter was. I haven’t yet naturally opened threads yet, but I’ll probably hit that point soon.

I am limping along on the last gasp of nitter until threads is big enough I can get breaking news from there. Hopefully we reach the tipping point before nitter gives out forever.

They just announced Trending Topics rolling out. should help with breaking news https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/12/in-battle-with-x-threads-g...

Is Facebook really better than Twitter? Why not just mastodon?

I don't think Mastadon will ever take off without a major change in the tech, because content is way too hard to find due to the lack of centralization. I am signed up but basically never use it for this reason.

It's very common to see news organically shared on Fedi as well. I get a ton of Boston local news shared via users I follow on the Boston instances.

I forget completely about Threads, until about every 3 months when an article about it pops up on HN.

I don’t know where these 30M users are, but none of them are anybody in my work/family/friends circle.

And very little chatter about it here on HN either.

I know literally zero people using it, or at the very least talking about using it or sharing stories from it.

HN users have long been calling Facebook a dead platform because none of their contacts are there. Yet FB has 130M dau in north America. Threads will be fine too.

not only that, they just posted a great quarter and their stock's taken a jump on that news.

That's just 10% of China's population though-- not much.

One US & Canada user is worth 3x a European user and 15x ROW (rest of the world) user to Facebook.

Source: ARPU from Meta's Q4'23 earnings announcement.

I'm not sure the relevance of the population of China, to the number of US Facebook users.

Hank Green tried cross-posting content to his Threads and Twitter accounts and found similar levels of engagement (replies and likes) on both platforms.

What are all those people doing? Because I sure don't see that kind of activity in the engagement metrics. Very few posts get thousands of likes, most languish in the double digits.

I see a lot of empty generated profiles connected to instagram

I think upvotes should be capped at 10 (if 10 people like your post, you win), so this metric isn't of interest to me. I guess it would be to professionals, though?

has threads fully adopted activitypub? wonder how they are controlling bad instances from flooding the feed, maybe they just do not federate?

Also last time I checked, most of the popular mastodon (and Lemmy?) instances were planning to block threads all together. Not sure what became of it though.

Here's Adam Mosseri's (Threads Head) update from 7 weeks ago: https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/C046LSmPAuN

Threads would be much better if it had the algorithm of TikTok.

Basic things like I scroll through Threads on my iPhone (while logged into my account) and then I do the same on my iPad and it shows me the same posts. WTF?!? Keeping track of what I've read (or at least scrolled past) is really basic and has been part of email, newsgroups, etc. for decades.

TikTok does this pretty well but it is also pathologically good at picking new things based on your viewing habits. It has a huge advantage over Threads (and Facebook, Instagram, X, etc) in that TikTok only presents one thing at a time to the user. If I flick it away in a fraction of a second, it shows that something has triggered me (boredom, disgust, etc) to move to the next thing. If I watch one clip multiple times and/or dig into the comments or other clips from the same creator, or even follow a creator, chances are I want to see more of that and/or more like that. I'm sure it's more complex, but there's a lot of feedback to the algorithm there. Facebook and Instagram try to learn from the "more..." buttons that expand comments, but it's not really the same level of information.

As it stands, the discovery process on Threads is no where near as compelling as it is on TikTok.

> TikTok does this pretty well but it is also pathologically good at picking new things based on your viewing habits. It has a huge advantage over Threads (and Facebook, Instagram, X, etc) in that TikTok only presents one thing at a time to the user.

I'm glad someone else gets this. Fundamentally, TikTok are solving a much, much easier ML problem than FB/IG/Twitter et al. They can classify every post you see much more easily than the others.

This is presumably (maybe) because they were built as products with ML in mind, rather than having it tacked on at the end.

Threads hasn't built the better misinformation machine/dopamine generator/rage inducer, you say?

Maybe I should sign up.

Forced down our throats via Instagram, a few people trying it out just to get away from Twitter, and the rest that have 'latched' onto it seem like grifters and terribly low quality content. Mixed engagement. And then there's all the weird UI quirks and failings on 'network effect'/reachability that impact daily use. Maybe it works for some but it just ends up being another separate thing like all the mastodon servers, siloed, and missing that broader eclectic reach that twitter still somehow is affording in some ways (debatable I know). Everytime I give it a chance I'm away within hours/days thinking its DOA just like bluesky.

Their only chance now is to buy Farcaster

Threadbare

Hanging by a thread

Its all ennui to me

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