They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product.
All form and no function.
All form and no function.
It’s certainly not a flop. It’s almost as big as X globally.
There’s a tremendous locality bias around Meta’s products. Social media use is very localized by geography and age. So if all your friends stopped using Facebook ten years ago, you assume that’s probably true everywhere, while in fact they’ve added several billion users on FB since then.
I've seen several interesting posts from Bluesky referenced elsewhere already, but literally nothing from Threads despite it having had more users for longer.
(She's 20 years old, her father is the richest man in the world, and he regularly does interviews saying his child is literally dead to him. Enough drama for an Orson Welles script and a second-tier social media service.)
It retains important bubbles like Silicon Valley VCs and media people, but globally it’s just not significant with its single-digit market share.
If it's got that level of usage, and not just people clicking on the occasional recommendation from Facebook/Instagram, it's remarkably insular.
At least that's what Meta tells advertisers and shareholders.
Zuck has a long history of fudging the numbers.
What this leaves out is that the real customers, advertisers, already have a fully-functional hyperscale system creeping on users and pushing ads in their face. It's akin to crowing about how fast you can put up new billboard ads when the billboards are already built--someone else has already put in the power/network lines, poles, screens, routing, etc, and you just hooked up your existing ad feeds to it. Facebook doesn't give two shits if the billboards were in the middle of nowhere, as long as they can charge their advertisers some $$, they'd deliver seizure-inducing hallucinogenic drugs right into users' veins.
threads as a product was DOA when that didn't work. you need a network of interesting important people for it to be useful. when the migration didn't happen, you ended up with a bunch of instagram meme influencers reposting their content across two apps instead
I think their strategy combined with an open offer exclusivity bonus could have given them the stickiness. up front 5k, 10k, 15k, etc to a twitter user that matches their follower of at least 25k, 50k, 75k, etc count on threads and agrees to exclusively post there for a year. people weren't getting paid on twitter so this would have been alluring
"our new feature reached 100m users in 5 days" sounds a little less impressive (especially given meta has multiple billions of users to start with).
even if it was spun off to be stand alone product without Instagram it would still be worth billions
It's pretty cool to have a version of Twitter to communicate with the world, which isn't run by a literal sieg-heiling nazi
This comment is perplexing.
Reportedly Threads has 130 million monthly active users (and growing) vs. 550 million accessing X (and shrinking). This alone already places Threads as one of the top social media services in the world. It's projected revenue for 2026 is over $10B.
What exactly are you talking about?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43010781
You wrote a wall of text saying and refuting absolutely nothing.
The only remotely tangible argument you made was the blurb on “Specifically, as it pertains to monetization, we don’t expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time,”. Considering Meta reports revenue around $40B and Threads, considering the EU snag, was basically launched last year, this is far from being the failure you are trying to spin it.
But if you had any point worth making, and you didn't had an axe to grind, you wouldn't grasped at straws such as the "As for the wider positive effects to the society at large, feel free to point out any."
I don't think I've ever seen a viral Threads post that escaped the network?
Meanwhile Facebook screenshots still circulate as memes (derisive, but hey, the motto of the modern era is that the world hating you is better than them not noticing you). And Instagram is fairly entrenched as a marketing channel.
Is Threads the new Google+?
BlueSky feels a lot more adult.
Threads also has a huge oversupply of fragile mediocrities who love the drama and/or haven't worked out it's a terrible medium for self-promotion, and has generated some of the most jaw-droppingly stupid takes I've ever seen online.
(And I used to be on AOL...)
A good few people left Threads when the censorship started to become too obvious, and a lot more will leave when the ads become too heavy-handed.
I'm sure Meta has some internal reputation metric for Insta accounts, and it would have been trivial to give all accounts above a threshold immediate access to threads.
But nope, you have to create a threads account to view threads.