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Comment by hansmayer | Hacker News Reader

Precisely, for all the talk of efficiency last few years, how do we even begin to measure the total waste of effort and energy of so many smart people that this was? All that effort and stress for effectively nothing, or perhaps even net negative effect.

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> Precisely, for all the talk of efficiency last few years, how do we even begin to measure the total waste of effort and energy of so many smart people that this was? All that effort and stress for effectively nothing, or perhaps even net negative effect.

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?

See further below please, I wrote just about this kind of tunnel-vision focus on DAU/MAU vs. a more holistic view ;)

If you're talking about this post:

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."

Sure mate, I am definitely the one with an axe to grind here ;) Now prove me stupid and show me and the HN readership how is a product which even it's own management sees as unprofitable for the next three-four quarters, producing any benefits at least to it's shareholders, not even talking about the society. Maybe lean into the argument with a pinch of how the latest Meta "free speech" policies augment it's positive contributions too ;)

Let us know how important a business is WhatsApp. Which has made about zero revenue for Meta in 15 years and yet is utterly dominant globally.

Again, the argument for overall net value is not based on a single KPI, be it DAU, MAU or unproven/unsourced "utter global dominance". By focusing on 'dominance', instead of value, you're missing the whole point. You know who also had total communication service dominance (we call that "monopoly" actually) for a good chunk of the 20th century in the US? A little company called AT&T. Look them up and why they were split up. The difference being, at least AT&T was highly profitable at the time. But even if we took your argument as valid, haven't all the MBAs been telling us that unprofitable 'cost centers' should not exist, and should be extinquished, surely you must have heard that argument at some point? So why then are we allowing VC capital to provide a lifeline to some of those utterly unprofitable "businesses" indefinitely? The quotation marks around "businesses" because that's another axiom from business schools - you have a business once you start turning profit. Isn't the point for market to promote the winners and defer the losers? I am afraid the way AirBnB, Uber & co. operate looks a lot like a capitalist version of communist central planning commitees, when we still had independent and free press it used to be called "crony capitalism".

Someone disputes your claim with actual data, then you move the goalposts and appeal to a "holistic" view.

Well the thing is, I never argued on the basis of revenue in the first place, and that second argument I wrote in response to someone else, not this person. But even if we did take revenue as sole metric of success (remember kids, revenue!=profits!), well, if the Meta CFO states that they dont see Threads as a driver of their revenue for the whole of 2025, who am I to dispute that really? But maybe you folks have some insider insights ;)

how is it net negative effect? they have Hundreds of millions of ACTIVE users

even if it was spun off to be stand alone product without Instagram it would still be worth billions

DAU is a very one-dimensional and misleading KPI, one that gave us ever-growing, VC-backed unprofitable companies. The Threads is definitely net-negative in the sense of wider impact and not just single-dimensional KPIs. Take as example Uber and AirBnB. Both have had millions of active users and one could argue their service is even useful to a lot of people. It's still quite easy to argue that they are are net-negative, because even by the narrow metric of revenue and profitability, they are not even returning value to their shareholders - they turn a profitable quarter like what, every few years or so? The effects on society such as traffic congestion, real-estate market etc. are also quite visible in many major cities in the western hemisphere these days (and beyond even...). Now specifically for the Threads: as it stands right now, they are not even driving revenue at Meta, in the corpo-speak of their own CFO: “Specifically, as it pertains to monetization, we don’t expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time,” said CFO Susan Li on the earnings call. “We’ve been just pleased with the growth trajectory and again, are really focused on introducing features that the community finds valuable.” (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/31/metas-threads-app-now-has-27...). As for the wider positive effects to the society at large, feel free to point out any. As far as I recall, they launched with the promise of sort of "sanitised" contents being promoted, kind of Pinterest 2.0 if you will, beyond that I am not aware of anything relevant coming out of that platform honestly.

> As for the wider positive effects to the society at large, feel free to point out any

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

Yeah but it ain’t Threads

what isn't threads?

If so many people are so smart and still working on these products at Meta then either these product matter as per smart people or they are just ordinary people working for their paychecks.

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