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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> but now the Bluesky app has exploded to 3.5 million daily active users, putting it just 1.5 times behind Meta’s Threads

Are they implying that Threads has just ~5 million daily active users? Adam Mosseri shared in the beginning of November that they have 275 million monthly active users. Bluesky meanwhile has 20 million total users. Considering the author hasn't shared a single source for their claim, I find it hard to believe. Realistically he is off by at least an order of magnitude.

Mashable used to be one of my go-to blogs, but I haven't been there in a while. Has it really fallen this far?

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I’d bet Meta is counting all the random Instagram users that accidentally interact with the forced threads clickbait posts in their feed.

Be interesting to see if they count people with the app or not. As far as I’m aware you need the app to view threads in their entirety. I tried it but uninstalled shortly after

Treads is accesible via the browser now too

But that doesn't really matter right? They got tricked into using it but they're still using it

It certainly matters as a bellwether for future traction.

It does. If all you do is tap on a post then immediately hit back you’re not really engaging with the platform. But I’m sure they’ll still count you as an active user.

The meaningful stats would be number of posts seen, engaged with, and number of posts the user made themselves.

Does Google do that for advertising? I always wonder if my little game of hitting SKIP ASAP shows up as a valid engagement or a user-bailed or something.

And the ads, I can't skip, I hate those MFers.

They have a general metric for it:

> An ad is counted as viewable if at least 50% of its area is visible for at least 1 second for display ads, or at least 2 seconds for video ads.

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7029393?hl=en

It's so transparent too, the way every single threads post shown in the Instagram widget ends halfway through with "..."

I've managed to never go there because I'm only on Instagram for the pretty pictures

Aha I see clearly now. So that is my Reddit make you reload a comment thread when you click the 'expand thread' sometimes. To get more add views? I just thought it was inline with all their other crappy ux choises.

In this case they want to increase some KPI instead.

Christ. Some people are willing to believe anything when it affirms their baseless beliefs. You’ve taken some reply that was about another situation entirely and let it convince you. I can think of multiple more likely explanations. Enough for this to at least be in the “who knows?” bucket.

Ye I had a revelation about something totally unrelated, when reading about one KPI hack, that the Reddit load new page upon clicking expand comment, also most likely is one.

What would be a good reason for that, that is not KPI hacking? The extra text is bogger all bandwidth wise.

Social networks hook users in with the one little trick ... click here to find out why you should be using it too.

You can't interact with that without creating a Threads account (manually) and without having Threads app installed at the moment of click on the Instagram embed. And if you did that, you are a proper user of Threads, so no double count happens.

I click on it randomly to see if anything is going on and usually close it pretty rapidly, so that is almost a false positive. I find bsky much more of of a time sink

This seems to be where they are getting the data from (as they get their data from FinancialTimes who get it from SimilarWeb)

I wonder how many of those 20 million BlueSky users are squatters that are registering every popular brand name, in the hope it becomes a lot more valuable in a year

You can use your domain as a handle, so apple.bsky.social is likely to be a fake, as the real Apple would have the account apple.com. Certainly you could fool some users, but it's not like Apple would want apple.bsky.social to use as their actual account.

Sure but if you are Jim you'd want to register jim.bsky.social, regardless of whether you intend to use the service or not.

that would defeat the purpose of a decentralized network if only one person was jim, jim.

There's an interesting dynamic because of the domains, I originally registered with `n1c.bsky.social` because like you say whether I intended to use the service or not it's nice to lock in the name. But then the next level is that it's actually more valuable or makes more sense for me to use it as `n1c.dev` as it's more closely tied to "me".

I am kinda sad that now someone else who isn't me is n1c.bsky but so be it.

I think this is a meaningful security problem. Most users won't know that the domain name matters. They'll learn eventually, but lots of opportunity for mischief in the medium term.

If you have `n1c.bsky` and then migrate to `n1c.dev`, Bluesky should set `n1c.bsky` as a redirect to your destination domain by default. If you ever choose to terminate that redirect, `n1c.bsky` can go back in rotation... but it should have an immutable record that you registered the name originally, migrated to `n1c.dev`, maintained a redirect, and released the redirect on <DATE>.

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