It's pretty common that after a peak of new signups, most do not convert to long term active users. This doesn't even take into account that most "active users" tend to never post anything, they just leech. They still count as MAU. I'm sure that Meta has plenty of ways to boost that number in the long term but overall I find the entire thing underwhelming.
Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can very well include photos. It has exactly the same shallow culture as Instagram: commercial, flat, vain.
Meta has openly expressed that it's disinterested or even hostile to news/journalism making their way to the platform (which comes with a lot of political flame-wars), instead to focus on making it a "fun" platform. Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy.
Users may self-censor as on Threads the link to your real name is not very far away. Many users may have a real name Insta account linked up which in turn is linked to your Facebook account. Even if not visibility linked to your real name, internally you should assume it's there. So who knows what happens to all those accounts when you step over the line in Threads?
Hence, it's not Twitter which is defined by the culture war taking the main stage. Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. It also produces quite a lot of original content, whether they be memes or otherwise. You'll find none of that originating on Meta networks.
As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost. There is no longer a "cultural network" where you push a message and get reach. None of the alternatives work for this purpose either.
I have no idea what will become of Twitter, but I do know to keep an open mind as we live in wild times. Just because Musk is a chaos monkey does not mean that it will not eventually rebound or even surpass old Twitter.
It’s hard to say. What I see is a lot of people in my network really scaling back or dropping Twitter and maybe playing with the alternatives but not really embracing them. I suspect that for many it will be a case of “Social media was nice while it lasted.”
I think that's an excellent point. Social media fatigue seems at its peak in this time of transition, further accelerated by the COVID era.
People are becoming aware of their over-usage and the largely minimal or even negative benefits that come from social media altogether. Or just bored and indifferent about it. The fatigue is further strengthened when they soon learn that the alternatives are worse or at best just moving the problem.
I'd advocate for people to stop rather than cheer for any new potential winner. Just uninstall the app and walk away. It was all a lie anyway. You're not in a "community". You do not actually have followers. You did not learn anything new that you couldn't learn elsewhere.
They are lies we tell ourselves as we play the slot machine. Throw it in the trash.
I’m so unable to relate to perspectives like this on social media. I have Insta and my connections on there are almost entirely my real friends, we all post stuff we’re actually doing in our lives, and send messages to each other, etc… as in, we actually use it for socialising. I follow a small handful of celebrity accounts, and browse reels occasionally, but the main reason I like using it is to interact with my friends.
That’s how I used Instagram in the first half of the 2010s. It seemed like the app was designed for that use case back then. Now it seems like it’s designed primarily for watching ads, so I text my friends instead.
This seems like a very peculiar attempt at gate keeping to me. It’s a social network application that we use to share the content that we’ve created with each other. That’s what social media is, and the use case I’m describing is basically what it was initially created for.
If all you're doing is keeping up with a tight-nit group of friends, you could use a million other services. Group SMS, I-message, discord, Hangouts, even plain old email.
Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?
The key difference is that all those other services you list have UX that is mostly centred around active use ("Check this out: Your friend Joe is doing a thing right now!"), while Instagram's UX is mostly centred around passive use ("Now that you have some free time, let's catch up on what your friend Joe did last week").
Ultimately they can all be used for the same purpose, sure. At the end of the day you're pushing the same bits around. But UX can make all the difference.
The mechanics of something like Facebook are that you have your “friends” and people can engage as much or as little as they like or dip in and out. I find I’ll occasionally post something that relates to overlapping friends circles but people can easily ignore stuff that doesn’t really involve them. It’s a very different model from a much more deliberate mailing list or SMS chat.
I do have some group chats and email threads but there’s a broader that extends beyond that which social media apps can be useful for.
> Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?
It’s the media bit… Insta is created to share pictures and videos with your _own_ selection of followers. You couldn’t do that in WhatsApp without creating some horrific cartesian product of different groups chats for every node on your social graph. Even then the UX is designed around messaging, not as a content repository.
This has to be one of the most asinine takes I’ve ever seen.
Yeah you couldn't do it by whatsapp, but you could do it with discord, slack, teams, skype and a bunch of other services that you failed to mention to create a strawman.
That you get so defensive is really, and I mean REALLY, telling of the real reason.
You couldn’t create anything resembling the Instagram experience on any of those services, let alone using some of your other suggestion like email. If the only thing you think a substitute service requires is a way to send images, then you could replace Instagram with the postal service by that standard.
The most absurd part of this argument is that discord, WhatsApp, messenger, etc… are all also social media platforms. This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.
Discord is a social media platform. And you absolutely could. I’ve been in quite a few servers where channels were used as a dumping ground for whatever people were doing at a time and felt like showing off. It’s an extreme example, but one that works because ultimately Instagram’s ability to display this information is no different than anything else’s. You simply believe Instagram is some perfect solution that cannot be replicated and refuse to understand the basic definition of a social network.
You _could_ use email as an Insta replacement as well. But the suggestion that they deliver the same service or experience is rather contrived.
But that’s really besides the point, because as you said, they’re all social media platforms, and it’s social media when somebody posts content on them to their large public audience, and it’s social media when I post to my small audience of friends. It’s the suggestion that one of those scenarios is social media and the other isn’t that’s completely illogical.
Their point is that social media is an abstract concept that correlates with it's use; not the platform it's used on. What Kim Kardashian (as an extreme example) posts on Instagram/Twitter/etc is social media, because it's media broadcast out to be shared and commented on.
Having an Instagram account and messaging your friends is not social media, it's a social network using the same aforementioned platform.
In other words, a public Telegram channel can be as much social media as Instagram can be, and Instagram can be as much a social network as Telegram is. And exclusively inverse, as well.
We all produce content that we publish on the social media site platform (posts, stories, reels. Text posts now too if you count Threads…). This is quintessential social media content, and was the primary way that social media platforms were used in their early years. My content with a couple dozen likes isn’t somehow not-social-media-content just because my audience is limited to my actual social circle.
The point they were trying to make isn’t difficult to understand. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Since you admittedly have no understanding of what people are talking about when they refer to social media being toxic then you must not be in sync with the definition of social media that others have. Regardless of whether it makes sense to you, it makes sense to a lot of other people. It would be nice if you weren't so incredibly defensive about your need to express your conception of an idea so that you could try and understand what other people think as well.
What you’re talking about appears to be some particular subset of the content that appears on social media platforms, not the concept of social media itself.
Also before complaining about the toxicity of social media I’d suggest you take a look at the toxicity you’re choosing to contribute to this platform with how intentionally abrasive your comments appear to be.
Thanks for the personal attack but I haven't called anyone's perspective 'asinine' or treated people with outright disrespect on this thread, as you have.
Is there a reason you are so reactionary when people pose an alternative viewpoint to your own?
Why did you bother posting such a thing as "I don't understand why people think that social media is toxic" if you are just going to attack everyone who attempts to give a reason for it?
My impression as well. Though I'm biased, because it's also the case for me specifically, so I tend to see the world through that same lens.
In my case, I didn't give up social media entirely, but mostly shifted back to "web forums", which also seem to be experiencing some sort of renaissance (another data point). They have more of a local/semi-closed community feeling, as opposed to the "wide open sea" of major social media.
I consider HN to be one of those "forums", although it's more a bit of a hybrid between the two worlds, and of course it has been existing all along.
Lots of people used Twitter to keep in touch with professional peers and other non-outrage communities of interest. So that’s a cheap lazy take.
But I do think there’s some regret that is similar in nature to the Eternal September. Things were “fine” before the plebes and political interests found the platform.
I'll never deny being both cheap and lazy however the number of people injured each year walking across the street while looking at their phones suggests that social media like Twitter might actually be detrimental to one's health.
There are a lot of news articles about Twitter because journalists use twitter, and have come to depend on it to boost their readership.
Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers.
These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.
Most people of course are not on twitter at all (and could care less). Some use it as a group-chat service. Some use it as joke-of-the-day. But the biggest user base by far is journalists who have invested in it big time.
> These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.
No, journalists hate that Musk took away the digital caste system that they took advantage of, where they (blue checks) were an elite ruling class. Now they are on equal footing as, and are forced to engage with, whom they perceive as the "Dalit scum" of the platform, who bought their way in for a measly $8.
Twitter was one of the most segregated societies on the planet, and Musk upturned its power structure nearly overnight and made it a more democratic society (albeit one with a benevolent dictator). Yet we all sat and watched while celebrities and journalists threw public temper tantrums, reminiscing about a time when life was better in their online universe, during the digital apartheid days, and their followers who sympathized. Talk about disruptive.
Yes, journalists confuse (or confused) Twitter with what "the people" are thinking.
A prominent case: A few years ago, J.K. Rowling wrote an article on gender bathroom policy. I'm pretty sure most random people, when given the piece to read, would have judged it to be some rather moderate opinion. But on Twitter the author encounterd a massive wave of accusations and hostility. The journalists were probably sympathetic with those people, and moreover thought them to be in the majority among the general population (because the JKR criticisms were in the majority on Twitter).
So the journalists went out and wrote news pieces casually describing Rowling as being a transphobic, as if this was an uncontroversial description of fact, like the sky being blue, when it was really a serious accusation by the journalist. Their Twitter filter bubble confuses them about which views are common and which are fringe.
Yep, also comms/marketing people. I once had to explain to someone that nobody outside of Twitter has ever cared about anything that has ever happened on Twitter. It is a pure bubble of unimportant drivel.
The only people who would even know are other Twitter users, most real people in real life don't use it and they are not interested or affected at all.
And loudmouths with outrageous opinions love Twitter because they know their precious tweets will eventually get caught by some semi-popular website one day.
I am a lurker. I have zero followers, and as such writing the nth comment on a Tweet with often n>100 is pointless, even before Musk took over.
I also don't have the time or the energy to put out quality content. It is draining to put out good content and have a handful of moaners criticise it in a toxic manner.
It is even worse if they criticise your content, because 3 years ago you said something about Musk/Tesla that wasn't 100% positive.
The joys of lurking or being a low-volume is when you follow some people and they do something interesting that you may have done, or you might have the little interesting data point. It sometimes happens you have published a paper on the exact topic but in another field, or you're wondering whether there's a connection to something you know.
It's an amazing way to reach very interesting people doing very interesting things and to be amazed almost every day (if you like to learn, or just like human ingenuity). It needs curating, and liberal use of blocking, muting... but having (or watching) a short conversation with a security expert, programming language warrior, database benchmarker, or HPC researcher is something I feel I couldn't do elsewhere.
You can block people replying to other people. You can have an account and be a lurker (which mostly can be reduced to 'read-only'). You're not participating in any conversation, just filtering the content that is presented to you.
Yep. Leeching is mostly used in the context of torrents. Generally, while you're downloading, you're "leeching." But also, if you don't seed a file after you download it, you can call that leeching.
Lurking is when you frequent a forum but never post.
To leech, leeching and to be a leecher has been around since people used to download warez. It far predates torrents.
I remember a local sysop in the 80s who ran an Apple II ASCII Express download site with two 5.25” floppy drives. You’d write him a text message and save it as a file. He was a cab driver and he’d come back home once in awhile and check the messages. If you were lucky he’d put your requested software in the second drive and maybe you’d check back in time before he fulfilled someone else’s request.
That sounds like such an awesome experience. As inconvenient as it sounds sometimes I wish I grew up in the beginnings of computers.
My uncle told me a story of when he was at his first programming job carrying a box of at least 500 punch cards across a factory floor on his 2nd or 3rd day. Someone opened a garage door somewhere and a gust of wind came and blew every single punch card across the factory. They were everywhere he said. My uncle was terrified of losing his first job meanwhile these factory guys are pissing themselves laughing and almost literally rofl.
Turns out it's a prank they pull on everyone. There's only been a few that held onto the box and the cards are complete trash.
I've saw a prank like that on a small scale when I was a kid who liked to go play some old Trek game on a line-paper-printer-terminal — in a computer lab in a state college — that was dialed into a machine in a bigger city. Around me, meanwhile, were college students typing their programs into punch cards. I remember someone pretending to trip, spilling a stack, but then confessing that they were garbage.
I learned some English vocabulary with videogames. The first time I saw the word lurker was the lurker above in Nethack (or did rogue and hack already had it?) https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Trapper
> Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks.
Yeah, for the "chronically online". But twitter is also celebs and brands, and the "normals" following them. I think for those Threads will find an audience. It will be... Twitter, but for Instagram.
Twitter has always had an outside impact compared to it's actual userbase, mainly due to nailing the news media + politics segment. Threads could fail to pick up the same cultural impact, but still be a thriving business/website, especially if brands and advertisers prefer it over Twitter.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a deliberate strategy to lure only "normals" away from Twitter, so that the remaining faithful X users will be the loudest, edgiest, most politically polarized ones, speeding up the vicious cycle of X becoming nothing more than a toxic culture war battleground.
Hopefully a battleground that no one will care about because the normies got lured away. Twitter not being a cultural network is probably much better for society because these always online losers currently seem to have much higher influence on society than they should.
> As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost
People keep saying this, but I've been a daily Twitter user since long before the Musk timeline and if anything the platform's never felt more engaged. Perhaps particularly vocal complainers like Taylor Lorenz leaving the platform makes the exodus seem greater than it is, but in general it seems high-follower users are just as engaged as they were before.
The only exception seem to be characters like Lorenz whose conduct has been so poorly received by the community that they seemed to be looking for any good reason to leave while still saving face.
I'd say I'm surprised by the persistent pessimism regarding Twitter, but I'm not.
I don't think a sizable portion of people are even willing to entertain the idea that it might still having a place in the Internet ecosystem. Maybe not in exactly the same form as pre-Elon Twitter, but still a place.
Musk is using the For You feature to promote propaganda he approves of. My For You feed is full of paid climate change deniers, racists, mainstream far-right troll "journalists", and other people of questionable social value.
It's absolutely an example of political editorialising and narrative control.
I would argue that it was the other way around before. It was also people with non-progessive views actually being entirely banned from the site. What is worthy of banning can quickly turn subjective, when really there are limited things both sides should agree are not permissible on a platform.
It is achievable, but not always desirable. See, for example the ABC report of an ongoing firefight in Syria that turned out to be a gun range in Kentucky.
Random footage of some explosion is not useful news without accurate explanations of what you are seeing. It often takes time to sort out the facts of a story. Moving breathlessly ahead without facts is usually called gossip.
You make a good point and exactly why I would never in a million years sign into reddit with my Gmail account. I fear a cross platform ban somehow even if that is not how it works. My last account was banned for merely expressing my opinion and not doing so in an combative or nasty way just didn’t agree with the narrative and next thing I know I was permabanned.
…my last account was banned for merely expressing my opinion…
Nebulous anecdotes such as this always made him curious: opinion regarding what, precisely? “David Lane’s 14 words and 88 precepts, perhaps?” — he wondered to himself, unable to divert his eyes from their username.
Twitter might not be as important to the US as it is to a lot of other countries. A lot of content that is censored or blocked in countries by restrictive regimes rises on twitter organically. I think it plays a big role in dissemination of information from reporters etc. Take Pakistan for instance currently all the private channels are completely controlled by government it under quasi martial law. But because of twitter people are aware of 1000s of political prisoners including women and children, disappearances of reporters, harassment and threats by law enforcement to protestor families and relatives to control the protestors.
As someone who first created an IG account in 2010, then deleted it in 2019 after watching it decline, I like how simply this summed up my reasoning :
« commercial, flat, vain «
I just see a beat down not wild times. Meta is trying to clone twitter and the only win they have is the signup process and people seeing what the fuss is about.
There is no feature Twitter/X could bring to chat that would take users away from WhatsApp. It already covers 100% of it's users needs, is free, and has near complete market penetration in many regions. (If you are talking to anyone in Europe by text, you will always use WhatsApp)
Easy: End to end encryption that’s not controlled by Meta.
It could take a while, but look at all the social media messaging apps from the past: ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, My Space, GChat, Orkut, Tumblr, Snapchat, FB messages etc
They come and go. I sure don’t know what the ultimate chat/social media app looks like.
None of those services had even a fraction of the market penetration that WhatsApp has (in Europe and basically most places that are not North America.)
WhatsApp is used by teenagers, great-grandparents, businesses, everyone. When you give someone your number in Europe, they won't ask how to contact you, they will just send you a message on WhatsApp 100% of the time. Only tech nerds and small groups use Signal etc.
To be clear, I don't think this is a good thing. But it is simply the reality of the world. It's been like this for 10 years with no signs of changing. WhatsApp could of course die one day, but only if Meta does something categorically stupid or unpopular that forces people off the platform (eg, what Twitter is doing).
WhatsApp is not a social media platform and that's precisely why it is so universally used.
My 3 kids are teenagers. They don't use WhatsApp. They use iMessage or group chats on Instagram. No one I know uses WhatsApp, well they've never asked me for a WhatsApp username.
A super app presumably has a dedicated product manager with some sort of vision and control of what goes into what features are available. You could hardly say the same of iOS+AppStore or Android+Playstore.
Note that I'm not the least bit convinced we would benefit from a super app, but WeChat seems to fill a need for however many millions of users it has.
Could you elaborate on that? It sounds like you’re saying that Google and Apple have no product management and they’re just shipping random features every year, but that sounds bonkers so I must be misunderstanding.
Er, no, I specifically said iOS plus AppStore and Android plus PlayStore, as it's from there that users get the functionality that's not part of the core-OS, and even allowing for the apps Apple & Google publish themselves I don't believe there's any one product manager that decides what features the full set of such apps should offer.
That’s besides the point. Elon overpaid for a shitty social media company. So understandably he’s trying to make the money back. He’s not going to make it back just being another banal social media company.
Nothing has to be anything and I feel like I got down voted because people hate Elon now. I’m not asking you to like him. I’m only saying he’s going to try and create something and maybe it’s good.
What was good about Twitter before? Limited message size. Couldn't edit posts. Impossible to discuss anything with any nuance or civility. Full of echo chambers. Why was it better? Because they kicked off people you didn't like, and whose content you probably didn't follow anyway?
>At least it had a quite decent logo instead of as generic as it get X character.
It's just a logo. Companies come and go. Everyone needs to get over it.
Trying to duplicate WeChat is an objectively interesting strategy. At the very least, by integrating payments your social media platform doesn't have have to sell ads. You could buy items directly off a merchants Twitter/X page and Twitter/X can just take a merchant fee. You could have a market place with integrated payment methods rather than posting on Facebook and working out an intermediate payment method on the side.
oh.. I never personally liked Twitter. I was just thinking about the company itself rather than their products.
> It's just a logo
It also objectively sucks. I don't think we just handwave poor design instead of making fun of it and mocking it. The world is as already as ugly as it is..
> At the very least, by integrating payments your social media platform doesn't have have to sell ads
How much do they think they could get from these payments? 1-3%? Shopify's net revenue is lower than Twitter's was before they buyout and they are not even profitable. The interest payments alone on the debt Musk offloaded to Twitter as part of the acquisition are about equal to Shopify's quarterly revenue.
It's a very competitive field with basically no margins, I'm not quite sure what Twitters edge would be? They'd need to charge way more than their competitors if they wanted to use the revenue to fund the rest of the company after getting rid of ads...
> integrated payment methods rather than posting on Facebook
The lack of an integrated payment processor is not the reason Facebook Marketplace doesen't support direct payment payments. That's an insignificant problem compared to all the other stuff they would need to handle with huge costs due to significant overhead (just like at what Ebay does, also they charge 10%+ and they are not that profitable either).
Care to expound on that? Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics. Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.
> Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics.
Not at all. "Journalists" are as biased as they come. They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them. That hand is most often advertisers but may also be governments. Chances are the articles they produce are actually hidden advertisements or propaganda. How could anyone with such massive conflicts of interest bring credibility to literally anything? I want access to real information posted by real people, not agenda-pushing "credible authorities".
> Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.
What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site. Their particular brand of hot take is not automatically more valid than anyone else's. As far as I'm concerned their only purpose is to generate material for us to comment on.
There is exactly one site in the entire internet I have enough respect for to call them true journalists: LWN. It's just excellent in every way and they don't need to posture as authorities for everyone else to believe it. Everything else ranks lower than HN's comment sections to me.
I think a lot has to do with provenance. For journalists this is their day job, they post with their real name and usually under some larger entities name. They are perhaps as biased as everyone else, but it's easier to figure out the biases.
I probably misunderstand your point, but if your point is that a given journalist can never be reliable then I agree, but that is also not the idea perhaps. We cannot hope to have only unbiased views, we can only average them out by consuming from multiple sources with known biases.
This is a kind interpretation of what I meant. They all have some kind of bias angle, maybe by researching enough data can we hope to achieve a measure of accuracy.
If 50% of journalists are as you describe, does that mean effectively they are all as you describe? What about 30%, if 30% are as you describe is that the threshold where none of them are worth a damn?
There used to be a time where as a rule journalists were below that threshold unless they were specifically working for The National Enquirer writing stories about Elvis still being alive, but whatever the threshold is, we damn well got closer to it.
It's a fair question to ask, what's the threshold and where we stand regarding it. You cannot say they're all like that, but you can say TOO MANY journalists are like that. I'd even agree with the latter statement. Would the remaining journalists be more or less likely to be out there on Twitter, mostly unheard? How about after Elon Musk's takeover? My sense is that Elon is more likely to get rid of the good ones when they correctly call him out on his nonsense.
> What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site.
It's pretty ridiculous to compare someone who has a university degree, years of training and experience, professional qualifications, and maybe a strong reputation, with a "random" posting on an internet forum.
So, you got any other account posting behind a pseudonym, being more unbiased than a journalist posting to Twitter/X using their professional name and attached to their organization? At least with the journalist, you gain some insight into what their biases might be.
> They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them.
You say that as though every dev working professionally on HN is 100% of the time working on projects they want to work on, writing the features they want to add, and releasing on a schedule that ensures the code is at a quality that fully reflects their talent.
I'm not the previous commenter, but I certainly agree with it provided a small clarification: journalists leaving Twitter is an improvement for journalism.
I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen. Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed only and the algorithmic feed on Twitter made a lot of people skeptical of that. Throw in the phone-app-only interface and it’s not where my people want to be. It’s a chicken and egg problem to be sure, and I don’t know where the new writer bar is going to be. It might end up being Threads ultimately, but the big challenge is for whatever new platform to get the movement happening.
> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen.
First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't.
My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly revert back to their familiar network that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).
> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
Just about all the people whose opinions I'm interested in hearing are on Mastodon now. I don't really care if anyone else shows up. Maybe it's better that they don't.
Right. Hell, I wasn't among those saying Mastodon was going to be the "new place" or that Twitter was otherwise on its way out. Even with my proximity to tech circles, Mastodon seemed to me hardly a blip on most people's radars.
I only finally checked it out during all the Reddit protests and am thoroughly amazed to simply see content without all the cruft.
It is only now that I don't feel as sure; Twitter still has its login wall today. I reactivate my facebook account only when, say, I absolutely need to interact with a particular small page/business. I don't use Instagram. I have only since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following list and make a first pass at building my Fedifeed by seeing who's moved over (incidentally, most of the people I follow that are still active). This time, I might actually check my feed regularly while logged in, since I'm not seeing a sponsored submission or ad every other post.
you're here, and your old blog is about tech stuff, so there's a decent chance you follow a lot of tech people. there are plenty of _those_ on mastodon, because tech people will suffer through bad UX if the product has certain qualities that that community values (federation being the big one in this case)
that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols (most people) throw up their hands and leave at the first notion of needing to choose an instance or needing a JS bookmarklet to follow someone not on your instance
plenty of those people are experts in their field and write interesting content i wouldn't otherwise encounter, but they aren't migrating to mastodon because of that, and there's a decent chance they won't migrate anywhere and will return to sharing their work in niche walled garden academic journals and conferences
sure, mastodon maybe keeps out the garbage firstnamelastname9023285023 accounts that do nothing but send low-content replies and retweet inane celebrity(s' social media managers') posts, but it's keeping them out because only a very specific population will bother to get in, which is a bad filter
> that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols
It is a startup wisdom that it is better to have less users who love your product than many who merely like it. Tech-savy people often have a strong opinions (both positive and negative). By the mentioned startup wisdom, it can be very valuable to have them as users.
I don't go to Twitter to read takes by other programmers about a world which exists only online. I go to Twitter to discuss the world in front of us, a world which hasn't been so exciting and full of conflict for a very long time.
Mastodon is great if you want to read nerds talking with other nerds. For the rest of the population though, we need some takes from outside the nerd-cage.
Yeah, same here. For my purposes, Mastodon is superior to what Twitter was at its peak.
I only look at Xitter for Ukraine news - that community hasn't migrated elsewhere. But that's mostly on third-party pages, I don't log in anymore, so the site itself is useless to me.
I completely agree that Mastodon isn't the new place, and I am increasingly thinking Threads may not be either (at least not to Twitter level, or not for a few years), however I'm very convinced that Twitter is no longer the place either.
The technology is crumbling (see rate limiting, interaction counts), the product is moving further away from what people want not towards it (see Zuck's tweets about Threads to see what popular product direction looks like, even if it's not perfect), the ad quality has dropped very noticeably suggesting they've lost good top paying advertisers, the new ad payout program suggests that their ad inventory is low anyway (see also interaction numbers here too), and the culture has gone from pretty bad to openly hostile to large swathes of the population, at least among English speakers (see anti-trans trending topics, rise of hate speech).
I'd agree that reversion to the mean and people going back to what they know is the most likely course of action in most circumstances, but these are not most circumstances. Twitter can't recover from this, at least not without a change of leadership and many years to rebuild.
Mastodon (actually, the Fediverse as a whole) is still growing in a very healthy, organic rate. Threads just tried to buy its way into a bootstrapped network.
Last year Mastodon went through a hype cycle. Everyone was declaring Twitter over. You had people stating they were leaving for good, dual-posting, etc. Funnily enough many of those same people are back on Twitter today with little mention of Mastodon.
It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave.
Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be the most avid hardcore fans.
It’s so funny to me watching everyone debate about what is or isn’t going to be the next ultimate single massive platform.
I, and many Fediverse people, are on the Fedi explicitly hoping it isn’t in that list. Mastodon is a success to me because of the thousands of people on it and that I interact with, and that it is precisely not containing the masses.
So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter.
Mastodon and Lemmy/etc are a smash success to me. They have more traffic, users and activity than the other comparable options combined (citation needed). And most importantly, they did it without becoming the next big thing.
Plus if, god forbid, it does become the next big thing - It can still isolate and be a small forum. That alone is lovely to me.
The Mastodon "hype cycle" was jam packed with people saying "this isn't it"[1]. The choice of server, account migration issues (partly resolved), and just some aesthetic reasons made it obvious it wasn't going to be the thing. There was a strong, I would say majority sentiment that everyone was waiting for some more Twitter-like competitor.
"Everyone was declaring Twitter over."
I mean...Twitter is very much over. References to Twitter, or Twitter being the canonical source, has utterly disappeared. Whole media spheres have made Twitter just another place, not the place. Whole fields have dried up on Twitter.
If you're hardcore into culture wars, Twitter is probably your place. Probably feels as alive as ever. In virtually any other field (sports, media, tech), while some people with big accounts are still trying to hang on -- for obvious reasons as other platforms just set them back -- engagement and "the crowd" has absolutely dissolved. Governments, agencies and groups used Twitter as a public space, and not only have many pulled back, I cannot fathom anyone making that choice today.
And that doesn't mean one needs to cite where someone replaced their "Twitter-like" activity. Many people just took it as an opportunity to assess the joy that sort of site was bringing them and decoupled. In the same way that the decline of blogger didn't mean that other sites grew the same amount...many people just stopped blogging.
[1] isn't it for a "general public, all topics" solution. Mastodon absolutely is a technical solution for niche spaces and groups and is absolutely flourishing in those realms.
> It (mastodon) peaked in November. Musk's antics might prop it (Mastodon) up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good.
At least that's what I think you mean. Lots of ambiguous "it" in the text above.
Not accurate according to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/ or my subjective experience. mastodon is fine. mastodon is growing. Mastodon is fundamentally not a business that needs to "get big fast or die trying" so that VCs can make their big ROI back. Slow, steady improvement is fine. Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in decline. (1)
I'd say - to write the above in a clearer way: "Twitter peaked in November 2022 and then went into decline. Musk's antics might prop twitter up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users of twitter will be the most avid hardcore fans."
People keep claiming this but it isn’t reality. Not one of the programmers I follow have posted on mastodons in the last couple of months.
There was a huge rush of most of the people I follow going to mastodon. But even those who still has their mastodons links in their name or profile haven’t posted in months.
The fact is that discussions happen on Twitter. Not mastodon.
Saying "Not one of the programmers I follow have posted on mastodons in months" we can't argue with, I don't know who those people are, that's your subjective experience and YMMV, you do you.
But this is not my subjective experience actually. And yes I follow "programmers" and other IT people in the mix. I'm not here to tell you what's true _for you_ but you appear to be telling me that what I experience isn't "reality". On the contrary, it works fine for me, as I said above.
"Discussions happen only on X not Y" is a binary, absolutist, black or white thinking. If taken literally, it is ridiculous. I suppose you would also say that this here isn't a discussion, because that's "only on twitter"?
Discussions and communities are going to happen in different places. It's almost like there's a use for a protocol that lets them interoperate in some kind of "loose association".
It did peak in December last year, but then it "declined" and stabilized at more than double the active users it had before Elon bought Twitter: https://mastodon-analytics.com/
That chart is missing the big late-june/early-july burst that came when Twitter locked out non-registered users and put a cap on read tweets. Big bump in new registrations and since then activity has been up a bunch as well. Not as big as December, but mostly because it was short lived.
> ...As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave...
But, i would posit that there is a rhetorical currency exchange at play here. The "value" that one might assign to a silo like Facebook or Threads is not the same "value" one might assign to various software stacks and/or networks on the Fediverse. Like, its not enough for me to state that they're different/like comparing apples vs oranges. I mean, for example, if I only have a single kid/offspring, does that mean that i have not grown the "value" of my family, because i have not maximized my partner's reproductive capabilities, or resorted to adoption to extend that, etc.? That's sill of course. Well, i assure you, the intent of networks on the Fediverse is NOT the same as the goals and intent of silos like Facebook, twitter, threads, etc.
I think @unshavedyak stated it great with their comments, but this is my favorite of theirs: "...So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter..."
For me mastodon is where I get my cybersecurity and infosec chat from now. HN is my generic techy stuff Reddit replacement, insta for mountain biking and twitter is for lower league Scottish football- it’s very well setup on there.
I’m not sure where threads sat for me, it was all the same folk who I follow on instagram but only posting text, now they post pics on thread and their reels on insta.
I’m not fully up on all the fedoverse stuff but I think that’s just due to a lack of effort so far.
People are certainly going somewhere (outside?), what isn't happening is for all of them going to the same place. IMO, that's a very good thing, but it does break any ambition of social world domination large companies may have.
Xitter has moved from offering 50% off ad purchases of $250k a couple months ago to threatening removal of "gold checks" from companies that don't spend $1k.
That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.
The thing is that what matters is not the total number of users but who those users are. Anecdotally, there has been a slow exodus of people in my writer circles from Twitter, either deleting their accounts or just not using them as much. I’ve found less to bring me back each day. There might be people engaging more to make up for it, but they’re not the people in my circles.
Mastodon was really never going to be that place where most of the internet moved. It would've been nice in a perfect world, but it's simply not set up as an advertiser-friendly social networking site that would attract celebrities and brands, and quite frankly I think the vast majority of its userbase considers that a feature and not a bug.
Still, I believe that BlueSky and Threads remain a looming existential threat to Twitter. One important role that Twitter filled was being the de-facto centralized RSS feed. It is by far the thing that I see that Twitter is still used for, even by ex-Twitter users and people like me who never used the site in the first place.
To be the centralized RSS feed, you need a web-facing interface, so you can pass links around over the clearnet. Threads doesn't have one. BlueSky isn't even open to the greater public yet. But either one of those could change overnight.
I'm getting regular bluesky invites, and people use them. It looks like the most "correct" implementation to me at this stage, although the having to jump through hoops to share videos is frustrating.
That tracks with what I'm seeing - BlueSky is where most of my twitter-addict friends have either already ended up or are angling to get into. A few of them have Mastodon accounts too.
Mastodon has been really cool recently. It was bare at first, but I've been back since November and there's a critical mass of awesome shit and cool people imo.
> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
Mastodon is chugging along, still growing steadily, unglamorously. I don't see a boom and bust there. It is unbacked by VC "get big or die trying" money, not buoyed by big tech or media hype. Don't write it off in a week or a month.
VC money is tight right now, and Twitter was never profitable. If I were an investor, you'd have to have some kind of revenue story if you were selling me a Twitter killer.
Mastodon works for the people who are willing to "pay" (in social labor or hosting money) the startup costs. Threads very likely has the limitations it has because that's what Meta thinks will generate useful advertising data — their bread and butter.
For tech people, I think the most likely way to get a Twitter killer in the near-medium term would be to convince Microsoft to add that feature to Github. As usual, you're the product.
A. Attention-seekers have gone to Threads or stayed on Twitter
B. People who are into niche interests and not part of group A are very active on Mastodon.
Mastodon to me very much feels like early-days Twitter. I truly I hope it stays like this. Threads might even be blessing in disguise for Mastodon network when it develops into a network similar to Instagram (content creators, brands, attention-seekers).
> I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are
For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe.
"But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing my responses are effectively zero.
That was his excuse, there are some alternative theories that say that he put the rate limits only to cut his AWS bills.
Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be surprised if the archive.org people came up with some browser extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.
While Twitter hosts some services on its own servers, the company has long contracted with Google and Amazon to complement its infrastructure. Prior to Musk buying Twitter last year, the company signed a multi-year contract with Google to host services related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things.
No they have contracts with all of them because of acquisitions and attempts to be less reliant on just the data centers. Google cloud was another attempt to move some workloads or extend into it. But like I said earlier, nothing significant. Real work is done on the data center machines
> Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed
That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting with people you care more about.
A common complaint with Threads was that, no after who you blocked or muted, it's near impossible to get away from a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip nonsense. That seems to be part of the ongoing design intent - not just an aspect of how they wanted to bootstrap the service.
Agree, they rolled out the "Following" tab and it's a ghost town. Shipping it with the algorithmic feed at least made it look like a lively, if somehwat chaotic place.
People have spent years getting followers and algorithmic advantage based on previous engagement. Social media is not a shopping app - content creators will not just bolt for something better as they are invested.
Do they want to? Definitely, but it's not a simple lift and shift. It will only happen once Musk either terminally runs Twitter into the ground (bankruptcy), or makes it completely unbearable.
The feed could be somewhat overlooked, at least for the time being, if hashtags and searching were properly implemented. If no interesting conversations appear in my feed then there's no way for me to spend more time on Threads. Open, Look, Close. Repeat that a few times and give up. I gave it a chance but there's just so little to do.
You can switch to a following-only view, but it resets whenever the app is re-launched, which is a real scummy pattern.
Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app.
Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.
Yeah, that's exactly the "Cold Start Problem". You must get the "hard side" of the network (drivers for Uber, content creator for social networks) asap and they must be happy to use your platform, otherwise your product is going to be a failure
One thing that’s impossible to ignore is that Twitter now forces you to read bad replies. Before, it would rank the most popular replies near the top, but now you have to scroll past lots of low-quality replies from people who are boosted just because they pay for the privilege.
I use Twitter daily and unless you're looking at major threads (like an Elon tweet) it's rarely more than a single verified user (if at all). And they are rarely better/worse than the average Tweet normally is in those mega threads.
It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO
Bad replies aren't necessarily the least popular. Any number of people would prefer blue check (basically signed) replies than pseudonymous drivebys whose entire participation in twitter is sharp replies that get massively upvoted.
Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts can only improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)
The chaos monkeys aren’t Twitter users, they’re changes to the site that Musk dictates.
A not implausible theory I’ve seen bandied about is that Musk isn’t happy about having been forced into buying Twitter so he’s trashing the place out of spite.
It seems a rather expensive bit of spite, but it makes as much sense as anything else.
The X Window System allows applications to present bitmap images on a display, and receive mouse and keyboard input. The main implementation is X.Org, shepherded by the X.Org Foundation: https://x.org/. Originally for Unix-like systems, it is now available on many other architectures, such as Microsoft Windows: I find ssh's X forwarding feature especially useful there.
If I had to guess what the indicator of where the new writer bar ends up, it will be wherever Joyce Carol Oates goes. Not because people like her or her tweets necessarily, but that she’s kind of like the black hole at the center of a galaxy, you don’t want to get too close (she’s the queen of the bizarre takes, not to mention her post with a rather disturbing picture of her feet), and yet everything kind of ineluctably ends up orbiting around her anyway.
I'd like to see some semi centralized but social benefit Corp create a Twitter that utilizes the h factor score that scientific researchers have.
ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are accurate.
Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more respected the brighter the blue color.
> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk
Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death.
You use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?
It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty underwhelming.
I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has been successful and earned a decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.
Based on the most recent estimates of Twitter's value, Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars.
You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.
I never made the claim that a user should. The guy I was replying to said "Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions" and I was responding to that.
It doesn’t usually matter to the user “why” a product is no longer appealing.
Financial woes though will usually produce change that impacts the user, for better or worse (a good kick in the ass, or craven desperation may follow).
It couldn’t be more fundamentally different for people who just want to read content without an account. Previously, Twitter was a thing that existed, now it’s not a thing that exists.
99.9% of people will just click the google login button and continue on as if nothing had happened. i sympathize with you. i had to make a throwaway google account. but it's not even close to relevant to the vast majority of users. not saying that's a good thing but it's reality.
And if you don't pay for twitter blue you can't DM people anymore unless they know to explicitly turn off that new filter. You also are limited in how many tweets you can view in a day, and without paying your reach is also shortened.
At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.
If you're using twitter web, the Control Panel for Twitter browser extension takes the 'for you' abomination behind the back of the barn and gives it both barrels.
The network Twitter has will be hard to break for sure. But I think it's already worth much less than what he paid. Musk needs to be careful here, it is possible to lose.
I had hit the rate limit a few trimes when it was new, but never since then. I think the limit has been either removed or vastly reduced from that experience. I don't see any of the people I follow complaining about it either.
I'm pretty sure the limit was one of his experiments that he's since rolled back on. It may even have been an emergency measure to mitigate the worst effects of another bug, but I'm not sure if he's ever been openly honest about any of this. There was certainly a weekend where the limit was imposed, then raised, then—I think—raised again... and I don't think we've really heard anything about it since.
It’s super funny to see people framing that as Threads failing.
They totally may fail. But even after that initial drop (which is expected, for something that managed to get so much hype) they’re likely still the biggest app in the history in terms of DAU in few weeks after the launch.
And if there’s one thing Meta knows how to do is to copy successful idea and slowly grind the growth till it dominates market.
First of all, I doubt the premise of this entirely, e.g. Pokémon Go almost certainly had higher DAU weeks after it launched (and it was growing rather than shrinking).
But secondly, I'm skeptical that it's even fair to talk about Threads stats using the same measurements as any "new" app, since it's really an extension of Instagram. You don't make a new account for Threads, you just use your Instagram account. They are one and the same, the only difference being which app you use to access which features. It's most closely analogous to Facebook and the Messenger app - do you count the users of each of those separately?
> I'm skeptical that it's even fair to talk about Threads stats using the same measurements as any "new" app, since it's really an extension of Instagram.
If you think like this you're engineerbrained and don't live in the real world.
The account linking was a quick fix, the app was released early, and the accounts will not be forcibly linked later on. You won't need an Instagram account to sign up to Threads. But still, if you don't have one, just sign up to Instagram as you would Threads, and you already have your account made.
If a structural engineer points out that a bridge is unsafe, you don't call them "engineerbrained" and gesture at all the motorists still using the bridge. Why do we accept this bollocks in software engineering? Meta are not trustworthy and it's reasonable to want nothing to do with them.
I should have said developerbrained. Most developers do not think like engineers. They nitpick specific implementation details because they personally prefer one of the thousands of other ways it could have been implemented. And they fail to understand why this one was chosen, as well as the bigger picture of the project, and then imply that whoever worked on it is an idiot.
> Meta are not trustworthy and it's reasonable to want nothing to do with them.
I agree, but will that prevent the majority of the public from signing up? A bridge will collapse regardless of what the motorists think, but people being ignorant of Meta's misdeeds does mean that Meta's untrustworthiness won't—can't—factor into their decision regarding signups. Maybe Meta will make the news again with another scummy decision, and maybe that'll drive users away—but how many? I suspect it's a small fraction.
'Course, one might be able to make the argument about "the most important N% of users who create most of the content", who are also unusually savvy... I don't know empirical details here.
>You don't make a new account for Threads, you just use your Instagram account.
If I implement Google oauth into my app, it doesn't make my app an extention of Google. It just reduces the friction of people making a new account for my app.
Does instagram give you the right social graph for a twitter replacement though? It seems to me that you want to follow pretty different kinds of people on different forms of social media.
Hmm, not for me. I’m a pretty casual IG user, but I am following 500+ accounts, all of which I enjoy. My first experience with Threads (despite importing my IG profile) was a feed full of accounts I had never heard of before, and almost nothing from the accounts I follow. Granted, that’s probably because the accounts I follow weren’t posting Threads yet, but but even now things haven’t changed much in that regard.
Additionally, 90+% of my Threads feed is photos, so, like, what’s the point?
I’ve opened it a couple of times and scrolled for maybe 30 seconds and lost interest.
I’m sure if I put a little effort into it I could find more interesting accounts to follow, but at least in my experience the “bootstrapping” hasn’t really worked.
There seems to be a desire to watch Meta fail, and that's reflected in the media coverage around Threads. This is broadly true of many large tech companies, but particularly Meta/Facebook.
Well yeah. The honeymoon is over and we've seen how morally bankrupt these companies are. Twitter has someone who posted child abuse images (as a warning or something) but doesn't ban them because they create engagement. Meta bought a VPN company and paid people (I think in some cases kids/teens) to use it so they can slurp up their entire internet browsing. Amazon has people pissing into water bottles so the founder can ride a giant dick into space.
These are awful companies (not all awful employees) with awful leadership.
Yea, this is a truly impressive launch. If even 25% of people who logged in just to see the new shiny thing stuck around and became a DAU that’s utterly remarkable. This framing is absurdist.
It would be remarkable for a lot of businesses, but given that it’s just a new Instagram feature, double digit million users long term would be an abject failure for Meta. Other new-ish Instagram features like Stories and Reels now have DAUs into the billions. Still time to right the ship, of course.
Also, keep in mind this is Threads “2.0”. Threads was first launched in 2019[1]. As such, it may even be a stretch to call it new. They have taken several years to test the market and iterate on that earlier MVP to finally find a fit that found up to ~100 million users. Not exactly an overnight success.
Facebook Marketplace seems to have totally replaced Craiglist as well, where I live, for buying/selling. Facebook Messenger took over e.g. MSN for a lot of people, the News Feed replaced a dedicated news site for a lot of people, and so forth. Events replaced Evite I think (or similar?), FB Photos basically replaced Flickr back in the day...
MySpace? Most of the other pre-Facebook social media sites too. It's not about being an exact copy, but sharing enough features that it can subsume those roles.
Twitter/threads is (or should be) a highly viral application.
New users should find themselves compelled to use the product and compelled to encourage others to use it.
With a 100 million user head start, if they were succeeding this shoukd have immediately resulted in the viral loop being triggered into explosive growth.
It’s a huge failure.
Not necessarily unrecoverable, but absolutely a gargantuan fail.
100,000,000 signups should ignite your viral engine and blast into orbit. Enough functionality to be viral was the MV part of “Minimum Viable” for Threads.
I honestly think this is a very silly take. I don't think any of this is how any of this works.
Threads attracted two kinds of people: 1. People coming mostly from instagram / tiktok who had never considered using Twitter because it had an established reputation and they knew it wasn't the kind of product for them, and 2. People switching from Twitter because they love Twitter-the-idea but can no longer stand Twitter-the-actual-product-today.
Most of people from group #1 tried it and concluded that yep, it wasn't for them. There is zero surprising about that, and it's where the giant initial numbers came from. But if any of those people stuck around, that's pure bonus.
The more interesting question is what's going on with group #2. Certainly lots of them decided there were too many missing features at launch and kept using Twitter mostly. But that is not a "they'll never check back", those people are still in play for any of Twitter to keep or its competitors to win eventually. But the current DAUs wouldn't be where they are if a significant portion of this group hadn't decided to actually stick around. And that's pretty surprising.
For years the conventional wisdom has been that you can't actually convert users from one social network to another in the exact same niche. You can cut off growth - like instagram adding stories corresponding to Snapchat's growth plateau - but people stay where their existing networks are.
I think a key strategic weapon that Meta has that no other social media will be able to match is its existing userbase on FB and Insta (i.e. basically all of the 7B+ human population). This can indefinitely be tapped as an audience for Thread content creators and advertisers.
Whereas most social media apps have the cold start problem (the stars need to align such that creators and users show up at the exact same time), Zuckerberg has solved it for Meta.
Threads doesn't need to be a hit on day 1 or even 100 because it has the existing Meta user base that counted on to consume Thread content (whether they like it or not).
For example, I have a FB account but am too lazy/old to sign up for Instagram but I did/do see a lot of Instagram reels that are converted into FB reels - particularly as Instagram reels was starting to take off. I am sure when it is monetizing those views for content creators and advertisers the converted reels get counted.
So while the power Instagram/Thread creaters will likely only push/consume the content in the corresponding app, Meta has the unique platform level ability to push the content to users of all 3 apps (i.e. FB/Insta/Threads).
That second group includes people who post to both and most fall into this group. To someone selling a product this is just another market. To others now is the time to get followers.
What percentage have left twitter for threads? Unknown.
It's common startup knowledge at this point that a splashy launch will always lead to subsequent declines in usage, because huge numbers of non-ideal users are attracted by the initial press event.
The viral growth you're talking about pretty much never occurs after a huge launch event like this, and is reserved for more methodical releases and/or lower initial starting user counts, e.g. Instagram testing Stories, Facebook growing from college to college.
Building products and slowly grinding away at improving DAU is Meta's bread and butter. This has been the case with IG Stories vs Snap, now IG Reels vs Tiktok (IG Reels rev set to exceed tiktok as early as 2024 https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/meta2q23/). Meta is setting up the exact same playbook for Threads, and given their track record, I wouldn't bet against them.
> Yet not only is Twitter not growing but it’s shrinking.
Source? Musk just tweeted about a new all-time monthly user record. It's not impossible that he would lie, but my impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
There's a whole lot of discussion about Twitter shrinking and high profile people leaving, but they don't. Stephen king comes to mind as a big critic that threatened over and over to leave, but he hasn't.
> Musk just tweeted about a new all-time monthly user record. It's not impossible that he would lie
On the rare occasion he makes non-trivial, falsifiable claims, its pretty common that they turn out to be other-than-accurate, yes.
> but my impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
My impression is that the set of advertisers (not regular Blue users, though they are a different kind of advertiser paying for reach) are narrowing and moving downmarket in a way which would take truly enormous numbers of Blue users to compensate for.
Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the point.
It wouldn't surprise me if Twitter revenue is down. It also wouldn't surprise me if Twitter revenue is up. Unfortunately, with it being private I don't think we'll ever know.
> Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the point.
In a thread entirely about Twitter/threads user count, whether it's shrinking is the entire point.
I clicked through from the sibling link to Elon's profile, and only see posts from last April and older? The reach of the site is.. not reaching. It is pulling back.
It’s a failure but I think it leads to a better outcome, both for threads and Twitter. Even if it’s #2, that will put pressure on Twitter to improve and vice versa.
I think one datapoint that people are missing is celebrities on instagram creating threads account and carrying their followers. For example this thread by mr beast: https://www.threads.net/@mrbeast/post/Cucz2pARLyA/?igshid=MT... (10k replies and 60k likes)
It's dumb to pass this kind of judgement so quickly. Nobody should expect massive habit changes from one day to the next. All that a viral product needs is some foothold to grow from, and by that measure threads still has a fantastic foothold.
Oh no no, in my reading of the sentiments here they are emotionally invested in seeing the whole xthreads things crash and burn. I’m buying popcorn.
For all it’s faults I quite enjoyed pre-musky Twitter, but I completely abandoned the s...show even before the insane rename. I was an early FB user but left that many years ago around the time of the CA scandal.
Mastrodon is too quirky and challenging to go mainstream which is why I think it will remain great and I’m loving it there.
This is being reported in a strange way. We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users as if they lost something by not getting 100% of them to engage. Do we even have numbers for what percent of twitter users actively engage versus total user base?
I don't think they are doing very bad considering it's mobile only right now.
For how counter-cultural HN has always prided itself in being, I find it a bit hard to believe just how much the media has shaped the story here. There's a lot of reason to be skeptical... it's not that I like Musk but the media doesn't like him and that's no secret. I find it to be quite the opposite of what you're saying, that their press team has done a good job of shaping the story positively for Meta.
The puff piece in the WSJ combined with the all the positive press over the success of Threads, with now a quite rosy view of how it has played out since. I'm personally not a believer that they internally think Threads is a success, but to each their own. I constantly hear from my engineering co-workers about how much Twitter has changed and how the sky is falling, but the user numbers don't back that up and my user experience seems to be much the same.
>For how counter-cultural HN has always prided itself in being
Really? A bunch of engineering types who work for big corporations and who also dream and or do start their own hopefully big corporations prides themselves as being "counter-cultural?" That seems like a tough generalization to support.
It’s also encumbant company solely owned by the worlds richest man versus enormous global corporation mostly owned by another one. There is no counter-culture here.
Right, and the closest thing I can recall to a counter-culture here is occasionally seeing the suggestion that software engineers should unionize. The rest is bread and butter tech culture (which loves obscure technical topics, psychedelic drugs, discussing money, various ways of accomplishing tasks in a clever way, statistics, design and so on).
Much to your point of media having an apparent dislike for Musk, I had noticed Business Insider dominating anti-Musk coverage. It was so much so that when they published a flattering article about him I was shellshocked.
I think people assume that because Musk is highly successful that he is a normal person, worthy of being judged by such a standard. From the outside nothing seems normal about him to me. He is almost certainly on the spectrum, yet fairly highly functional.
I attribute half of the hatred for him not because of his behavior, but because of the general anger towards the billionaire class.
I think the sharp divide in perception of him shows that polarization within America has reached unhealthy levels. I won't invoke the terms used to describe people believed to be pro or anti Musk here, but I think most know them. I wish we could get to a point where we discuss less about people and more about their individual actions.
While I can’t deny that people, including the media, have a general disliking for him, there’s plenty of puff pieces to be found, especially by corporate friendly outlets.
Business Insider in particular likes to publish articles that are either outright shameless puff pieces or occasionally contain thinly veiled attempts at spinning things in his favor.
As for the disliking or hatred towards him, I’m not sure why this puzzles you.
He is simply an unlikable person, doing unlikable things.
Yeah sure it doesn’t help that he’s wealthy in this time and age and it also doesn’t help that he’s attributed accomplishments of mythical proportions that are mostly veneer, nor does it help that he seemingly has taken it upon himself to disprove the business acumen that people attribute to him, but all of those are just cherries on top.
Certainly not half the reason people dislike him.
Gates, Zuckerberg and Bezos are in the same order of magnitude as Musk (at least from the perspective of most people) and don’t nearly get as much hate, because they don’t act like utter tools at every single chance they get.
That’s it, that’s the reason. It’s not rocket science.
Which is why it’s weird that you seem to yearn for a time where people will judge him on his individual actions, when they already do so.
"Not getting 100%" is a bit of a straw man argument.
"Less than half" is significant, particularly when the CEO (to his credit) is calling it out as something that must improve. And it matters to balance the existing narrative from the Verge, which seems to just regurgitate Meta's VP's language about it being a runaway success.
>We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users as if they lost something by not getting 100% of them to engage.
I mean, we should? Startup valuations are full of MAU pumping and straight bullshit, so why shouldn't we judge their numbers with a cynical eye? Meta claimed a number of users the first few days, well, half of them aren't using it anymore, so they aren't "Users"
We don't expect the number of active users to ever fall in an startup.
You are correct in that this was unavoidable because the original number was artificially inflated in a non-sustainable way. But well, that would be a huge red flag for a startup too. It is less so for a giant company like Meta, as they can eat the loss from forcing the market, but it is still ridiculous, even for a company as large as Meta.
There's often an early "tyre kicker" phase, with people signing up to explore a service. Or to ensure that others don't misappropriate well-known account handles.
User attrition / retention rates for sites, services, and apps are well-studied and closely watched.
E.g., "Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app installs worldwide in 3rd quarter 2022, by category"
That mostly only makes the number of users to fall if new people stop coming at some point. To some non-stablished service, people stopping to come is death.
As an example, Facebook (the site, distinguished from other aquisitions) has seen stagnant or falling usage in certain markets, notably the US and EU, as of about 5--6 years ago:
So, did the number of active Facebook users ever go down before it was a dominant player on social networks? Or are you claiming that Threads is ok because it's as big as it is ever going to be and it is all downwards from now on?
I'm saying that Facebook's specific history (the OG FB site/app) is not a great basis for comparison as it's such an extreme outlier. Launching new social networks is fraught, but an uneven start is not a necessary kiss of death. And even Facebook has seen growth plateaus.
Facebook is one case, and is still the largest (or among: TikTok and a few newer entrants may be giving it a run for its money).
But if you want to look at multiple platforms over time, it helps to ... well, consider other cases.
I've been something of a purveyor of niche and smaller social networks, from the beginning (Usenet). What I've observed of these is that even among those which continue for a considerable period as a viable option there is the tyre-kicker uptake, a fade back, and then ... several possible trajectories. One of those is straight to the floor, but another is to have either a steady base or a longer and slower growth.
Sure, both of those are death for a venture-backed site or service. But if that's not the foundation, then steady-state or long-steady-growth is a viable option.
And I've seen the pattern:
- On Google+: there was an initial excitement, then the site got stale (2011--2013 or so), then I (and from what I can tell, others) came back. The forced integration with YouTube annoyed a lot of people (on G+, on YouTube, and of course, Not On Either). After about 2015 things seemed to go into a long slow fade, which turned into a race for the exits after the planned shutdown was announced in 2018.
- On Diasapora*: Similar pattern, though I'd participated early on (2011-ish), after leaving G+ for a spell (around 2013--14), and then returned to the site with the G+ shutdown announcement. Some long-standing gripes and personal hardware failures had me lose interest about a year ago, though there quite honestly still is a good community there.
- Ello: It was (somewhat poisonously) plastered with the "Facebook Killer" label in 2015, and saw a few periods of excitement buzz. The site remained small (a few hundred thousand MAU, low millions of total accounts, by my own guess, verified in person with Ello staff), but had a vibrant community. The killer was sale of the site to a VC with the original staff gagged as part of the agreement. Various protections (B-Corp organisation and highly member-friendly policies) seemed to disappear at that point, and most of the small crowd I'd followed there drifted elsewhere.
- Mastodon: I'd joined in 2016/7, participated a bit, faded off, then came back. After HN it's my most active online presence. Mastodon's long-term growth has shown numerous large-influx phases where a significant influx of new members arrive, some of whom remain active. The trend is episodic but positive.
- Tildes.net: Launched by an ex-Reddit staffer, deimos, the site's been ticking along as an invite-only beta since 2016. I've given more invites in the past three months than the previous seven years, so far as I can recall. As with other sites, it seems to gain and lose activity on phases, though overall seems to be growing.
- Imzy: An ill-fated venture which followed the "crater rapidly" phase. It remains the most socially-dysfunctional online network I've ever participated in directly, strongly at odds with its "kinder, gentler Reddit" labeling.
- Hacker News: The site has seen a long steady slow growth since opening to the public in 2007. I've been studying front-page activity for the past few months, one element of which is looking at total activity (votes and comments) on those front-page stories and how that's changed over time. It's an interesting dataset as there are a fixed number of items per year (10,950, 10,980 in a leap year, based on 30 per day), but as participation increases we'll see more activity on the page, and metrics such as distinct sites and distinct submitters can vary. Votes per story have actually held relatively constant for 2020--2022 (most recent full years), comment activity continues to rise, see below. According to dang, MAUs have held steady at about 5 million for years, as have other indicia of site activity (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146958> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150721> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140>).
Hacker News isn't dying. Sites such as Metafilter remain not only reasonably vital (in terms of on-site activity), but have high quality discussion, as opposed to the plunge to the bottom of Reddit and Twitter. Diaspora* ... continues to tick along. Mastodon and the Fediverse are growing fairly rapidly (particularly for a non-venture-funded platform). Ello succeeded ... for a while. Google+ made it to just shy of the 8-year mark, and for much of that time did have quality discussions and engagements in my experience. Sometimes small scale is a virtue.
HN runs on a single server and with a single public moderator. I suspect it's pressing the edge of viability with both, but the results are ... pretty good.
As with another thread I'd participated in yesterday, one challenge is that there aren't a whole lot of major social network initiatives, most especially not by existing major players. Facebook's Threads is the first sui generis effort by that company since its original The Harvard Facebook launch (all others have been acquisitions). Last year's Bluesky launch by ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was the first significant new launch in years. The most recent major launch by an established company before that, so far as I'm aware, was Google+ itself. There've been other social media efforts, obviously, but most of those were not by an incumbent major player in the field, and were instead new ventures.
Among prominent mentions, with "name" (affiliation) YYYY:
- Google+ itself (Google) 2011
- "Hello" (Orkut) 2018
- "Friended" (?) 2019
- "Slyde" (?) 2020
- "So.cl" (Microsoft) (2012)
- "Inside.com" (Jason Calacanis) 2022
- "WT.social" (Jimmy Wales) (2021)
- Entries named or by: Hipstamatic, Frontpile, and Coccoon, on the first results page.
- LinkedIn, Skype, Pinterest, WeWork, and Slack are all mentioned.
Overall, though, I'd say my characterisation is accurate: there aren't many new large entrants, especially not by incumbents, and those that do emerge tend to see a rapid initial "testing the waters" bump, followed by some subsequent trajectory either up or down.
On Hacker News front-page story activity 2007--2022:
Note that mean votes doubled from 2011 to 2020, and has held steady since. Mean comments doubled 2011--2017, though have continued to rise about 157% since (over the 2017 baseline). The overall site count has also increased, suggesting that submissions are more diverse.
Per HN's "flamewar" metric (or what I prefer to call "spiciness"), that would suggest that spice has increased especially 2020--2022, that is, the ratio of comments to votes is up. HN views that as a possible sign of discord, though it could be more interest in discussion.
The low-water (or low-spice) mark was 2011, at 38.185. High-spice was 2007, though in the post-2010 world (after HN has more-or-less stabilised, and after the flamewar detector was implemented), it's reached in 2022.
For those who think discussion's getting more heated, there's some evidence of that.
Note that HN's "flamewar detector" is triggered for comments > 40 and comments/votes > 1 (or 100 as I calculate it above), best as I understand.
I did my own assessment of G+ later, after there was much discussion of Google's own "engagement" numbers for the platform meeting open skepticism. (I used the platform heavily myself and appreciated elements of it.)
I think we're seeing more and deserved skepticism generally in accepting statements of activity at face value, which is a Good Thing in my view.
This was nearly a year after G+ launched. The article in question here is about three weeks after the launch of threads. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me...
I picked a particular item with significant HN discussion. The fact that it was data-backed (a 40k profile analysis) also means that it lags actual activity. As with all complex evolving situations, hard empirical data are not realtime.
The "ghost town" label had been stuck on G+ within the first few weeks, yes.
HN discussion from September 2011 (G+ launched in July):
Way too much conflation with labels, timelines, types of project, recollections from 12 years ago, etc. for me. Also we're comparing Meta, a company with experience running two successful social networks against Google of ten plus years ago, with none.
Your original position was "We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users".
I've given multiple examples of just such a comparison being made over a decade ago.
In both cases, the new launch was by an existing giant in the sector, with claimed performance being not entirely credible.
Google of a decade ago had launched [edit: or aquired, but in either event, run] Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).
The Social space is immensely fickle, and the ability of even an established industry giant to succeed with a new venture is fairly thin. Facebook has largely bought rather than made its own follow-on successes to date (as did Google in buying YouTube).
Note edit above. Poor language choice around pedants.
>Google of a decade ago had launched Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).
Google didn't "launch" youtube. They purchased it. It was big before they purchased it. Regarding Reader, calling something "small but quite significant" is nonsensical. Additionally you're propping up a failed application which wasn't even a social network as a success.
As I said, your comparisons included far too much conflation of several varieties for me to take them seriously.
Could you just be specific about why the first example brought up doesn't apply, instead of letting the other person put themselves out there to advance the discussion and finding little details to accuse them of bad faith?
The idea that forgetting that Google failed horribly with Google Video before buying YouTube is a "smell" of bad faith is weird.
I did regarding the timelines, then they pivoted to including HN threads in the comparison when my original statement was about articles. I don't know what you're talking about regarding Google Video, I did not mention it.
It's often easier to search within a specific timeframe on Hacker News itself given Algolia search's excellent date-range functions, and the fact that HN itself is strongly time-oriented. There are doubtless other stories elsewhere, but it would be more tedious to track those down and verify that they actually came from the period under consideration.
It's also possible to search via comments, with one useful set of terms being "Google+" and "ghost town", an assessment which was being thrown about early on.
And we can link directly to the HN threads and see what contemporaneous discussions were like and how they characterised the issue at the time.
By contrast, date-ranged General Web Search on, say, DuckDuckGo or Google is often confounded by Web pages which have inaccurate date indicia, or have been misclassified as to time by search engines. It's much more tedious to try to find specific content matching time criteria, though the universe of total such articles is obviously larger. Fortunately for this case, Google+ was of sufficient interest to HN that there were numerous submissions concerning it submitted early on, many of course highly syncophantic, but also concerning the rather fumbling rollout and weak adoption.
Amongst other possible archives, Google+ itself is no longer extant, and so cannot be searched. Its own search features did not afford date-ranged search, though I'm well aware that there was much early hand-wringing over the "brutally unfair" stories (in the framing of G+ advocates) circulating at the time.
Reddit might be another useful trove, though I'm avoiding that for the time being. Search there is limited to only the initial story title and, in a limited number of cases, the "self-text" content of text-based posts. Pointedly, comments aren't searchable on Reddit itself, and so the potential match space is far more constrained than it is on Hacker News.
Despite those limitations, in answering your own historically uninformed vague hand wave that the response to Facebook's Threads launch is exceptional, I'd given numerous specific and quantified examples from a roughly comparable time period for Google's G+ launch strongly suggesting otherwise.
Yes, the data I brought to bear are subject to a strong availability heuristic. But the evidence presented is rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.
My comment was about news articles and you opened it up to HN threads and academic papers and whatever else. You hand waved away the fact that your timelines were vastly different, and are now complaining about pedantry when in several cases basic facts eluded you which changed your arguments when edited. You continually paraphrase my comment in an incomplete manner in order to serve your view.
No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.
If you want an example of "inside the bubble" it's thinking any of the social media channels, private or not for profit represent a realistic cohort of community engagement comparable to "the people have spoken"
It's some people, sometimes, in some contexts, saying some things which go to opinion. It's no better or worse than a radio or TV "vox pop" and equally biassed. Or that eternal source of truth "the man in the street you met in the pub that time" or a taxi driver.
I think it's social cancer and I regret ever participating and taking it seriously. It certainly caused me harm, to my own sense of self and to personal relations and trust.
Do yourself a favour and drop out. By all means stay if you enjoy it, but at least drop out of any belief and claim its a true expression of public views in the wide.
Your argument appears incomplete. Either there is some method of obtaining "a true expression of public views in the wide", in which case: What is it?
Or there is no such method, in which case: Why do you specifically advise to drop social media channels? What makes them less valuable as a method of gauging public views than, say, talking to a taxi driver, or an opinion poll? You are suggesting that I drop every belief that each one of these parts accurately represents the whole, but then why specifically ask us to drop out of one of these methods over any other?
Nothing makes them less valuable. They're mostly just as valuable. The problem is belief they're more representative, more "real"
I advise to drop because of cumulative deleterious effects on my mental health and real world social relationships. Some people may have more resilience. I think most people become trapped in mostly narcissistic behaviour.
Most people just don't want to shout things, and the ones that do are a tiny unrepresentative minority. Imho it's that simple, and has been from the get-go
What you say just seems to be a general property of humans exchanging information. Not an intrinsic problem to social media.
Where can we find "A true expression of public views in the wide"?
I've been using social media all my life and for me the benefits far outweigh the negatives.
I never believed it should be my sole source of information just as much as gossiping or talking to my hairdresser shouldn't be my sole source of information. If I want to have a nuanced opinion.
Good outlook. You weigh it comparable to other channels. Media at large places greater weight on it, what's said on it, and it's relative importance.
If we treated all tweets as comparable to spitballing over drinks or hairdresser gossip the world would be a better place.
I am unsure there is any true expression of popular sentiment, ever. My problem again here is inflated beliefs to Twitter as reflective of some wider community view. Quite apart from being anything but random sample, it's riddled with both bots and trolls.
Perhaps I have a weak line of argument. It does cause widespread harm, if not to you certainly to others. At root it shouldn't matter. But, it seems it does. It's like dope. Why all the furore when mature reasonable adults can self police their use and avoid trouble? It's everyone else, who overdo it, who become lost in psychosis, who turn to crime. Sure, decriminalise it. But... look how the Dutch are saying it's far more complex than just open slather. I chose dope as a comparison because it's absolutely not addictive in strict sense and is most definitely socially habituated, as twitter is.
Society isn't better because of social media. Maybe you're OK. Society at large isn't.
Would you eg say teenage girls are not at risk? That people with mental health issues are not at risk? Not that it defines it as "ban it now" but "where's the harm" seems disinegenuous. There's harm. How much, what remediates, unclear. For me, it's avoid. You differ.
I might add my immediate family is also split on this. So I don't believe I am in the majority on this.
Would you eg say teenage girls are not at risk? That people with mental health issues are not at risk? Not that it defines it as "ban it now" but "where's the harm" seems disinegenuous. There's harm. How much, what remediates, unclear. For me, it's avoid. You differ.
Every piece of information that is transmitted between humans carries the risk of harming someone.
I genuinely believe that society at large is better due to social media.
They launched it at a very opportune time when Twitter was having massive technical issues.
That was enough to get millions of people to kick the tires and more importantly, create awareness.
The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now, people will again flock to Threads and notice that it got a little better. Twitter will get fixed again, and a lower percentage of Threads users go back again.
> The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now
People have been saying this since the day Elon took over... but has it really gone down that much? More than other tech products? E.g. how many outages have the big cloud providers had in the last year? When I hear people say 'any day now' it reads like they are looking for any excuse to say 'mars man bad'.
I don't know about outages, but Twitter's website has become completely erratic for me. Sometime it will load replies, sometimes it won't. Sometimes it will login-wall content, sometimes it won't. Sometimes I just get an error page. Clicking on a Twitter link today is like rolling the dice on whether you'll actually see anything or not.
And when it hits the E.U market Threads will gain more popularity. If they can just sort out the 'privacy problem' they apparently have. I don't understand the delay here. FB & Insta already has E.U people's data.
If I understand correctly, the DMA says you can’t leverage one social network to support another (ie, you can’t drive Threads signups via the IG Network).
Everything that people were complaining about on Twitter is also true of Threads, other than that Musk doesn't own Threads. The solution to DMs being limited or filtered on Twitter can't be to move to a platform without DMs at all. Various trolls are already partying on Threads, and targeting people that used to get them banned on Twitter. Commercial people and celebrities are seeing no engagement.
Also, the idea that Threads will be better than Twitter is simply a promise based on nothing. The concept I heard is that they were going to mod out politics, but that's a) impossible at scale, ask China, and b) Facebook couldn't care less about politics; the reason they censored anything other than nipples was by government demand, and Facebook has promised to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee that it was hiding documents from until a few days ago under pain of contempt of Congress, personally, against Zuckerberg.
I don't think he's hero enough to go to prison for the sake of this administration, especially since he started censoring for the last administration. He doesn't care about the politics at all, so who would he be going to prison on behalf of? Movement Democrats will certainly make him a hero, like Cheney, Comey, etc., but what will that get him if the Democrats go down in the next general? All this is to say is that he's motivated to govern Threads with a light touch.
I tried using Threads religiously for few days alongside Twitter:
* The feed is chaotic & no guarantees people (and by extension, Topics) whom you followed will show up primarily. Seeing a machine learning thread between a Barbie post & scantily clad influencer is bizarre.
* The feed is jumpy with tiny accidental refreshes. You could be reading the thread and do a deep dive, and come out to find the timeline slightly/significantly different.
* No message/DM. No bookmark feature. No topic suggestions - Just pure Instagram-like scrolling.
The good part is no ads. But that could be a matter of time. Overtaking Twitter in engagement will be hard. Social networks have some inertia & needs some key users to remain successful (I forget the paper name - but it describes growth/implosion of network graphs when some key community members used/left. Like a hole in the graph. If any HNer knows about it - It came about 7-8 years ago.)
>The feed is chaotic & no guarantees people (and by extension, Topics) whom you followed will show up primarily. Seeing a machine learning thread between a Barbie post & scantily clad influencer is bizarre.
I follow some local weather sources. The algorithm decided that I'm really big into weather and started feeding me weather sources in other cities. Thanks, Threads. Good job trying to guess what I want instead of just listening to what I've clearly opted into.
I'll never figure out why it turned my entire feed into NBA players and teams, I didn't follow a single one. I had to mute dozens of accounts to get it to show me something else. I actually found it kind of entertaining though, they could make the mute button a little more satisfying and then you'd have a game there.
The reason Threads is failing is that, for whatever reason, they chose to launch without a desktop experience. I can't imagine how many users went to threads.net, clicked around for a few minutes while being extremely confused on how to sign up or access the product, then left permanently. No, I'm not going to download your mobile app, and most people won't either.
What % of users do you think care about a desktop experience? I expect the vast majority of users would be mobile-only. I'm sure you can find relevant statistics about Twitters desktop vs mobile usage.
"Users" yes, but that's not why Twitter was "big" (in quotes because, by user base, Twitter wasn't big at all).
Twitter's cultural cachet was because you could link and embed Tweets. Whatever platform you're on, viewing things on Twitter "just works" if you have a URL. That means journalists can point to things on Twitter, post things on Twitter, and the normal mechanisms of internet virality mean they can spread through basically any medium (i.e. how many times are Twitter links shown on other platforms?)
It's also worth noting that "influencer" types don't - or didn't - use Twitter directly. They used various bits of API management software to curate their appearance.
Threads has none of that: without a web browser experience, you can't share and link things on Threads in other mediums. There's no possibility of embedded Threads posts being a thing. And that means, fundamentally, Threads can never actually pull sign-ups by organic virality - or pull views from it either. It's notable the big sign up wave happened right as it looked like Twitter was going to block viewing Tweets for users without an account - that was (correctly) interpreted as the final nail in the coffin (and was rolled back).
That data is biased by the small minority of super active users who spend 4-5 hours/day on Twitter.
The relevant number would be to condition on only the 20th to 80th percentile users (by time spent/day) and see their breakdown. I am going to bet that number is more biased towards desktop, while both the 0-20% (occasional users) and 80-100% percentiles will be mobile focused.
The other confounding effect is the bots and the pseudo-bots (humans operating many accounts). I don't know how they change these numbers.
I don't know a single person who willingly prefers a limited, bogged-down experience of any product (social media or otherwise) over a full-fledged desktop client.
Of course I prefer doing all of my computing on my desktop computer. But I don't take my desktop computer with me to the grocery store. And I use Twitter to entertain myself when I'm waiting in line at the grocery store, for example. When I am at my desktop computer, I'm much less likely to be interested in using Twitter.
That said, one of many reasons I didn't bother creating a Threads account is precisely that reason: no desktop client. Unless forced, I won't use anything that is exclusively available on mobile devices.
I have mod rights on a general subreddit (a city), and I see that mobile is consistently 75-80% of the traffic. That seems consistent with the numbers above.
I know I gave up on it anyway without desktop. But what I really gave up on was lack of discovery on how to get my twitter network replicated. I was at least able to do that with Mastodon for all its UX sins.
You do realize that even after the initial drop (which is expected, for something that managed to get so much hype) they’re likely still the biggest app in the history in terms of DAU in few weeks after the lunch?
Threads launched without the ability to only see the people you follow.
To me that marked it as doomed from the start. Most people use Twitter to follow specific niches or topic areas, not as a general conversational platform. If I follow even one account that's posting low quality content at any sort of frequency, it seriously degrades the experience.
It's really a headscratcher how they launched without that. I guess the idea is that ad placing is easier if you have an algorithmic feed instead?
Ironically, the people who refuse to use the "Following" tab on Twitter are, I expect, the same people who are most dissatisfied with Twitter. If you use the Following tab, Twitter remains pretty damn great. It's when you allow an algorithm to feed you stuff that the experience can become something between unsatisfactory and toxic.
The "following" tab inserts algorithmic posts, and has for years now. Tossing in likes and other recommendation experiments. This means that even if you carefully only follow people you specifically want to see on your feed, if they start liking stuff that interests them but does not fit their feed, you now see it.
Some of these aspects have changed, but again, they are part of a larger recommendation experiment that twitter constantly pushes because a strict following feed = less money less engagement.
You cannot curate twitter as well as you think you can. It would be nice if that was possible though.
I was enjoying the first few days and went on a campaign to mute as many of these low quality accounts that had been ported in from Instagram as possible.
Then I just got bored, and realized it was just reclaiming the time that I had gained by quitting Instagram in the first place.
It seems to have enough people that it has some legs. I am really looking forward to a web version of it, but otherwise enjoy it, despite some growing pains.
Edit2 If I think about it some, the biggest drawback about Threads for me is swapping one egocentric billionaire who is rapidly going off the rails for another who is, for the moment, more stable, but has still accumulated a godawful amount of wealth and power. Mastodon seems like the alternative if you really hate that kind of setup, but... it doesn't seem to have much traction.
>Mastodon seems like the alternative if you really hate that kind of setup, but... it doesn't seem to have much traction.
People keep saying this as if the only "success" mastadon can have is by being in everyone's pocket. It's not an SV unicorn startup, it's not trying to buy out some investors. It's doing exactly what it is designed to do: be a user owned platform. Not everyone will want that all the time, and some people will never want that, and that's fine, not everyone spent 24/7 on the forums of the old web either.
We could stop considering "Everyone is using it all the time" as the desired end goal maybe?
for social media though that's a pretty important end goal. If the people I want to follow aren't using it, then I don't want to use it either. It's like with messenger apps - the one that everyone else is using is the one that wins. And if they aren't using it and I am, then part of my use of the platform becomes trying to get the people I want to talk to onto the platform. It's not a silicon valley thing - it's a communications thing. "everyone is using it all the time" was an important end goal for the post office too, and highways and other shared infrastructure with network effects.
I would be awestruck if they made a web version. Instagram goes through great pains to screw web users. Apps have more control and collect more data after all.
> It seems to have enough people that it has some legs.
My view too. Not the best service ever offered, but allows me to continue distancing myself from Twitter.
Would I much prefer it if Twitter was a public company and/or ran by anyone else? Sure, but that isn't happening, so, I'll take Mastodon and any other reasonable alternative. We'll see how the market pans out.
An aspect of me wants Mastodon to win... but there's a deep cynicism in it ever working at Twitter scale (which may be the point, in the end).
I kind of doubt it will get an API. Seems like Reddit and Twitter have come to regret how much power an API gives to users to sidesteps or whatever they don't like about the platform.
This is a relatively common phenomenon in multiplayer games. The most famous (infamous?) recent case is probably New World, which peaked at 900k+ concurrent users and lately peaks at ~20k every day [1]
I can’t see how threads can be “launched” without a desktop client.
That’s not even an MVP, it’s non existent.
Some of these supposed genius tech leaders are really showing themselves to have very questionable decision making capability.
It was also extremely off putting that it was so tightly linked to instagram.
They also made a mistake by not leveraging peoples desire to get their own Twitter handle on threads.
Failing also to launch is Europe.
Honestly it doesn’t seem that hard, if you weird the resources that Zuckerberg does. You say to them “clone Twitter”. It’s not like Twitter is the biggest technical challenge in the world to clone… why couldn’t Meta do that?
The outcome looks like what you’d expect - the Meta equivalent of a Musk Starship launch.
Meta has a history of churning out MVPs and doubling down on what works. Launching with a desktop client, EU, etc are in direct opposition to a lean MVP. Meta definitely has some missteps but not sure this is one.
Tying in to Instagram was what made it resonate with such a large audience vs all the other Twitter clones. Carrying over the social graph was a wise decision imho.
The Starship analogy makes little sense as well. Starship is not an MVP and well on track to continue to push forward the state of the art of rocket engineering.
> Tying in to Instagram was what made it resonate with such a large audience
Resonate, or was simply them leveraging their current user base? I don’t think the use of an Instagram login and having your current contacts imported made it “resonate” with anyone. It was just a growth hack.
Yes and their web presence only very recently allowed you to upload from your computer. It was half baked on the web for a very, very long time.
Also, WhatsApp and Instagram still don’t have an iPad app. Given the scale of their users and the company’s resources it is unfathomable to me that they haven’t tried to make their products more seamless experiences across the devices users use. But then I remember it is Meta and I would be hard pressed to think of a more user-hostile company.
>They also made a mistake by not leveraging peoples desire to get their own Twitter handle on threads.
Not sure this outweighs people's desire to actually obtain the handle they've always wanted but was already taken on Twitter, which is a substantial reason to sign up for any new platform at this point. Either way both of these groups were ignored by not allowing custom handles in the first place.
They launched their MVP 3 weeks ago and scaled to 100M users on the first weekend. That is a world first. Maybe give them a bit to get the house in order before demanding features?
All the features you've mentioned are on the roadmap, as they've outlined many times. Software at this scale is non-trivial.
Adam Mosseri mentioned their intentions to get an MVP going. It actually runs smoothly and iterating quickly. Web version probably coming in few weeks.
It's already surpassed Mastodon and Bluesky easily.
There's plenty of alt-right and right wing accounts that are attacking LGBTQIA+ folks and making it unsafe on threads.
Due to the nature of things being linked to Instagram it is making it easier for people to hate on transgender folks and I've seen it first hand multiple times. Reporting also leads to no action on certain "large" accounts.
Saying there no white nationalists on Threads is false.
A part of these users might be europeans? Initially it worked here if you created a US App Store account, but after 10 days they disabled it based on VPN & IP. Like everybody in my European network had the app installed and is not using it anymore because of this.
Most complaints I've read is that thread's content is just boring.
Most instagram influencers are visually oriented and don't translate well to textual thread.
If they would have been able to get that right from the start, they could have kept a lot more. Either through collabrations, or pushed influencers who get engangement on long text posts.
> Meta has since added new features, such as separate "following" and "for you"' feeds
I haven't used Threads, but it's 2023. People have years of experience and expectations using social media, also probably shorter attention spans. I'm fairly sure that an launch ready MVP in 2023 should be WAY more feature full than 5-10 years ago.
I know there are other factors at play here as well regarding retention, but I don't think one can easily recover from a highly popular lauch with uncompetitive features.
I tried it during the first week and just found all of the posting to be unbearably milquetoast. I understand that people have a problem with some of the more extreme elements of Twitter, it's a reasonable concern. But the last thing I need is an aggressively Disneyfied algorithm picking posts for me.
I mean it's fairly simple, I don't know why so much news is being generated by this the past few days and discussions too?
They shoehorned a new service/app ontop of there existing user base, a huge amount of people went to check it out because it was forced down their throats and then a reasonable amount decided it was a waste of time and a few people are still playing with it, likely a lot of wannabe influences seeing it as a chance to get an early lead on a new platform.
It will likely die further, except facebook and social media being as toxic as they are and as this interview suggests, facebook are going to add more 'hooks' to get people addicted or dark patterns etc to drive usage.
Everything here is what you would expect, so who cares?
My beef with threads is that it’s just like IG. I was promised a text based social but lo and behold, I open it and find more sexy people posting short form videos. It’s so boring.
My initial experience was I had to access through an app on my phone. No thanks, I am not interested in contributing to the surveillance economy anymore. No data-vacuuming apps, no WEI.
I followed people who post yet when I open the app my first 2 posts (the only posts visible) are from accounts I'd never follow (right now Paris Hilton and ESPN) and could care less about. I don't want to scroll through their suggested bullshit trying to get to what I actually want to read. Maybe this works when you are following no one.
Meta has no ability to not try to control your attention and divert it toward ads. They are institutionally incapable of anything other than control and divert. It is why I didn’t sign up for Threads and wouldn’t use Oculus if I were given one for free. The only Meta product I have access to is Facebook because my community is obsessed with FB Marketplace and posting upcoming IRL events on FB rather than email. I hate how Meta infiltrated our lives and now cannot be excised.
This is what killed it for me. There was also no obvious way for me to "train" their recommendations, even if I was willing to tolerate an algorithmic-only feed.
> Not letting you see just posts from your follows sucked
This is why I stopped using Instagram. I have been there since around 2010. Moment when I realized it's waste of time was when feed contained content I did not followed while missing some that I followed.
Irony is that pre-2010 I was proponent of algorithmic feed. Young and naive.
they've added a Following feed (only posts from your follows). it's pretty nifty and best of all there's no toxic users from Twitter (qanon, conspiracy theorists, extremists, white nationalists, taliban)
Only by half? I thought traffic on Threads was off by 90% a week after the launch when "one hundred million people joined"... then again they probably joined just to see what it was, were unimpressed, and went back to Mastodon or Twitter.
Contrarian opinion. I don't think the microblogging concept holds much relevance for the bulk of internet users, especially not in 2023. The best Meta could hope for is to convert a percentage of existing Twitter users. Shallow platitudes of kindness aren't going to help either, especially not from someone who once referred to his userbase as dumbfucks, among other unkind words.
I view this entire saga more as an unbundling of microblog topics. One website had all the microblog topics, and now they will be spread across N websites.
If you're viewing this as a king of the hill scenario, you've got the wrong metaphor. This is humpty dumpty having a great fall. It won't ever be put back together. Not by Meta, not by Twitter, not by anyone.
With all the money Meta has (even more if they didn't blew so much on Metaverse) they should have built some kind of monetization opportunities for the users from the get go. Something like Twitter is doing now.
Nothing attracts people more than money. Give 1/10/100 USD per month to super active users that attract views and engagement.
Interesting that even without the ability to really use it on the web, Threads already has a better anonymous-user web view than Twitter.
Since the recent changes, on Twitter you can't see replies if you're linked to a tweet while not logged in, and you don't even have any indicator that replies exist and that you could see them with an account. The whole implementation of the changes in that area is a real baffler.
I'm just pointing out that it's been broken to a state where even an app-centric thing like Threads, spun off from web- and anonymous-hostile Instagram no less, is a better experience to link to.
I've seen threads posts linked from Instagram stories. I think that's the main sharing use case right now. I don't know because I haven't bothered signing up for threads.
That's the problem: if you don't sign up (as I haven't), you can remain blissfully unaware of Threads. The same isn't true of Twitter.
I stand corrected on other Meta properties linking it, but, of course, they have to get links outside of that sphere to compete with Twitter on mindshare.
Huh? I see them all the time. And even without that, HN and reddit still link twitter or snapshot it. I have no idea what the Threads app looks like still!
It's still fine, they created an escape outlet for journalists and public figures in various communities to escape to if they finally get pushed out of Twitter. A lot of them haven't left yet because they're attached to their current following, but if it starts becoming unbearable or they start to lose reach they may pull over enough communities that it can supplant the role in the culture Twitter used to have. As far as I know the reasons people use twitter are different, there's tech twitter, and art twitter, and media twitter, and corporate twitter and people engage with them for different reasons. Threads would need to replace those reasons.
So 100M+ Threads accounts created with 50M+ active users still sticking around on Threads after the media hype and fanfare? Compare that to the rest of the other so-called 'alternatives' other than Twitter / X that is a much better result especially in less than a month and the closest to a proper alternative to Twitter / X.
This is even without launching in the EU, so as soon as Threads is available in the EU, they can get another 100M+ easily anyway.
This is what I call 'early days'. We'll see what happens in 6 months or a year whether if people want to continue using Threads rather than initial sign ups. Retention is what matters.
As the dust is settling on the last 15 years of this insanity, and the monopolies are being cemented, is Zuck not the only one left standing independently? Of the big guys, the early "wizkid founder" types, who else is left towing the line and controlling the destiny of their company? And who else is maintaining that techno-utopianist optimism publicly? I sort of admire the guy, if only for how every time he speaks, it feels like a time portal to 2009.
So far out of all the Twitter / X alternatives and competitors, Threads is the clear serious contender. Especially one that has 50M+ active users (as admitted by Zuck) out of the gate in less than a month with 100M+ registered users even without launching in the EU.
The rest don't have a chance at all and are as good as dead or cannot handle the amount of users that both Twitter/X or Threads has.
It is clear that both of them will co-exist and retention always matters, with any so-called 'exodus'. For Threads it is early days. On the other hand over at Twitter / X [0] it seems far from 'dying', from the months of nonsense from the media who exaggerated the immediate collapse of Twitter / X last year which never happened.
Perhaps it is time to admit that you have been manipulated by the doomsayers who's only mission is to post clickbait and attract your eyeballs to their articles spreading nonsense to grift for affiliate links.
It's easy to see why the user churn in Threads is on a spiral. A simple measure is trying to follow a timeline for the Women's World Cup happening now. Crickets.
The Instagram easy sign-up got Threads its users and it's the same feed algorithm which will churn the users. If nothing changes by the start of the NFL season, Threads will be niche. It's a darn shame.
I want threads to succeed so badly. It's the only app I've ever actually liked the UI of. I've tried numerous Mastodon apps (Ivory included), BlueSky, Twitter, and all of their web variants. I find myself returning to Threads even if the functionality is limited, because it's just that enjoyable. I'm rooting for 'em!
In other news, man-child wars between tech bros end with both failing to find product fit and alienating all their customers.
Facebooks growth was because it was where your friends were posting. Twitter growth was because of where influential people posted that you were interested in their (brief) thoughts. X was a failed payments platform that eventually became PayPal and sold to eBay (due to eBay being their only true partner at the time). Facebook/Meta keeps buying their way into the cool club only to realize they’re not cool. The bodies of friendstr, MySpace, phpbb, and even reddit now, as the tech bros learn that “features” aren’t what bring people in. People do. Make it friendly to people like the growth days. Not friendly to corporations so you can milk more advertising dollars. I’ll stay on the “I deleted my meta and I’m not coming back” fence.
> I’ll stay on the “I deleted my meta and I’m not coming back” fence.
I deleted it and, so far, no noticeable impact on my life (and that's in a country where almost everyone who has a smartphone is guaranteed to be on Facebook). Almost nothing of worth is being posted on them.
The pitfall of social media is that they don't reflect social interactions. The algorithm process is unnatural. I only want to hear about my friends and a selection of people and institutions I choose. I don't need to hear about LeBron James because I watched a video clip. Or be shown ads for some weird games, as I've not played on my phone or computers for ages. The simplified interaction mechanism missing downvote/dislike/hate is another thing I dislike. If I can approve, I should be able to disapprove. That's why I prefer Reddit to Twitter. What's at the top is either something useful or echoing the culture of the community.
I've been interacting with forums more these days, and it's a breath of fresh air. No engagement, only discussions and information. Some are showing ads, but I don't mind as it's always pertaining to the subject of the forum.
It is incredibly frustrating that people seem to be operating and commenting from a place of:
1. Twitter is going to fail quickly.
2. Threads is going to succeed quickly.
Neither is true, and constantly re-checking the narrative against those binary outcomes (complete failure! Unmistakable success!) is ludicrous and distracting.
Wasn't at all, they couldn't even get a desktop client in place, why would they want to play with GDPR?
This is ChatGPT again, over all Europe will be increasingly isolated from the rest of the internet because their politicians were tricked into thinking they had more influence over the forefront technology than they actually do: You can't be a steward of good policy from the back of the train, you'll just get kicked off the train.
I wouldn't call 'Threads' the forefront of technology. And I'm sure people in Europe have no regrets over their decision to better control their data. Not over a product from Meta anyway.
A tool I made got a lot of traction in a very specific niche of knowledge workers: 10,000 people a week doing what was a 10 hour task in 90 seconds.
It felt great blocking the EU instead of adding a cookie banner. Weirdly enough California adopted privacy legislation in a less braindead way so they get to own their data and use my product.
Maybe it'd have done better if it launched worldwide. I still haven't seen the app and I do use twitter. A lot of people I follow are from Europe so threads won't have most of the content I'd want anyway.
I don't know why this is even newsworthy, except for propaganda reasons.
Strong increase at the start, then a relatively quick drop, slowly declining to un-hyped levels of participation. This isn't news, this is common.
Strong initial growth is usually based on hype. There was tons of hype. The user count dropping so quickly means that the people, who joined because of hype (whatever sub-reason covered by the term), are leaving.
Given that it's facebook, the hype and potential participation rate was gigantic. It's a bubble. Bubbles pop.
Like most things, speculators soaked up all the potentially valuable names to resell, so not really using the service anyways, and the minimal few that use it realized already it's a ghost town.
What's the point switching from Twitter to this? Threads looks like a carbon copy without all of the engaging conversations, monetization and with all of the same censorship problems.
I don't utilize either, but presumably because it's not run by a man-child who changes the rules at his own whim? Elon's attempts at monetization aren't just driving advertisers away. My buddy who has been addicted to Twitter for years has almost entirely dumped it after all the recent limits placed on direct messages recently.
He's not going to pay for blue, and he and his buddy's would rather move their conversations to discord or text messages (or Threads) than deal with Twitter.
Facebook has done enough feature launches that they train their teams to look for and expect a huge initial engagement peak as people explore the product. It's Deltoid 101.
The best thing about (maybe this didn't make it to deltoid) was that they counted degrees of freedom for the t stats based on the number of days the experiment was running, which was incredibly effective in stopping people launching broken crap.
I sure hope it does not become another Twitter. Having Twitter as the source of truth people went to for everything was not great, and when you only have 256 characters to express something I feel that leads to very shallow and low quality content. Threads would be just the same thing except owned by Meta now.
I would rather see Mastodon and federated services succeed, but it is not the most user friendly. Then again, just because something is big doesn't mean it's the best.
It pushed a bunch of sponsored ad content that wasn’t targeted correctly, and never really showed me anything from my friends. It got annoying fast, so it got deleted.
If they don’t continue to iterate on the product it’s gonna die. I see no reason to post on Threads, it’s like Twitter but only for my friends, and no hashtags.
People I spoke too are super happy Threads appeared and as their favorite accounts are gradually making their way there - feel they can now consume the content they like without Twitter’s ever-present toxic shit.
There was no popular and populated alternative to Twitter. Now there is.
As I watch this unfold - I think that Twitter is now worth half of what it was a month ago. And Threads soaked in all that value. Not sure how anyone would call it a failure.
We already have a thing where everyone on the internet can congregate, then split off and find sub-communities of interest (such as this excellent one right here) to participate in.
It's called The Internet.
I don't see the attraction of turning that into a massive, homogenised, centralised commercial product under private control. Never have.
Forcing engagement is in Meta’s culture. Out of the blue, suddenly I have started seeing friends notifications from my contacts list. 9 out of 10 times, people on Instagram will generally accept this. But Twitter/Threads users are different. Instagram culture may not necessarily work for Theeads.
A very short time with TikTok showed me I need to delete it instantly. It was too good at delivering crack. Twitter is pretty good, mixing up my follows and some random stuff that I enjoy. Threads is useless at figuring me out. Inane self promotion, all noise and no signal whatsoever.
I tried it again today. The feed seemed improved (people I follow) for five minutes, then it was pure garbage again (random awful accounts I don’t follow).
I am not worried about Facebook’s AI anymore, it’s clear they can't infer anything about me even after I blocked 100+ accounts.
In my experience, which I hope is not that unusual, it's pretty typical for at least half the people who sign up on launch to not come back. A lot of people just want to check it out. I do notice that we are not told how much less than half of the people stayed, though...
I don't know how funny a social network is that to be part of it you have to have an instagram account. I didn't find anything misleading on this social network I signed up to take a look as a programmer and I already regretted it
- Give me a timeline that shows only the people I follow.
- Give me an "explore" section so I can find new people.
- That's right, exactly like Instagram does it.
Threads badly needs search and trending topics. Once they have those features, it will do much better. The product as it currently exists makes it exceedingly difficult to find conversations you are interested in about current events.
This is expected as the insane growth and usage as it was released in tandem with Typical Crazy Elon Moves was clearly unsustainable for years, much less even a few months. As for success, ask me again in 2024.
I think, in retrospect, they made a mistake in launching quickly before having core features. There was a desire to capitalize on twitter technical issues.
> Mr Zuckerberg [...] described the situation as "normal" and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.
I think if it was normal, they wouldn't have publicly spiked the football after the admittedly incredible signup numbers. They would have been a bit more humble, said they expected most users to leave soon after, but that this is an encouraging sign (or something to that effect). Maybe a bit more celebratory, but playing with expectations a bit more. They started off with INCREDIBLY humble talking points about likelihood of failure and then I think just got too excited.
None of this is to suggest they have no chance. They still have a ton of users and I'd still consider the launch a success overall.
It'd be a lot more compelling to me if it had a "people I follow" feed. I get that they didn't want it to be empty on launch, but at least giving me the option would mean I could at least have a chance of seeing mainly people I know on there.
Ironically, most complaints I see about Threads (as a still-active user) is that it has too many users (chronological feeds pushing content too far down, overwhelmed by advertisers already, and little to no sense of community).
Its inevitable that online social media platforms will split in two types.
The type I that attracts those with something authentic to say.
And the type II that attracts those with something to sell.
The first type is the future fediverse. Its the 15%. The art house cinema. The colorful city center street. Flexible, innovative, human centric, low budget, soul nourishing.
The second type is Meta-stasized and coming in X number of mutations. Its the 85%. The strip mall. The plastic, fake, mass consumption machine. Lucrative, manipulative, exhausting yet unavoidable for the titillation addicted masses.
There is no way you can eliminate either one of the two types in the short term. Type I was created against incredible odds. The future will be a bit easier. Type II is, alas, the embodiment of dazed and confused, unsettled society that is unlikely to heal anytime soon.
Thank you, that’s how I see it too -maybe with different ratios-, and that’s why I’m happy to see the traditional corporate sponsored social media platforms are crumbling like Twitter/Reddit/threads, it’s overall and in the long term better for societies.
It doesn't work for me :( I can see the feed but pretty much anything else I try to do results in an error message. Can't post, can't reply, can't see anything on my Threads and Replies tabs,..
I don't think launching an MVP (which this was) works when there is such a large established monopoly your trying to disrupt. Especially as the MVP offers nothing new?
Is there a metric for how fast your new account gets banned from: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Reddit, Threads and Twitter. I'm asking for a friend /s
I signed up on Threads shortly after launch to reserve my username, haven't been on much since. If it takes off I have the username I want, if not, meh.
Reading at the comments here, I'm baffled to see all the people trying to find a reasonable justification for why they are not using it. (They didn't launch a web app, they didn't launch in Europe, they didn't do X, they should've done Y)
It should be a lot simpler. We should all have learned by now that any and every product from Facebook is radioactive waste.
Hopefully Threads is indeed DOA. Anyway, we should have been asking ourselves why is it that 100M people even managed to sign up in the first place and how to make sure they don't even try again.
There's Bluesky the platform, and then there are Bluesky's users. The platform itself still looks promising, but bsky.social is captured by some of the worst people on the Internet. At the end of the day, I don't think it's realistic for normal people to bring their own network.
They've probably built something no one wanted and their launch success makes it hard to see between the lines. This is always been a problem with tech giants coming out with new products.
I sometimes even wonder if it's better to launch products like these under a different name/umbrella so that they can get some real users.
The app is missing so many core components, no DMs, no web interface, no trends, it's hard to find people. This absolutely has a market; but honestly given how half-baked it is, they probably should have waited for another Musk crucial mistake, which is inevitable.
It's missing everything necessary to make it for you and your interests; instead, you get what Zuck wants you to see. No hashtags (needed to build an audience if you want to post about things or find interesting people to follow), and it's not on the web (given how completely shitty the Instagram web interface is, they could care less about the web). I think they released it to capitalize on Elon's stupidity but with something that barely works. I'm not interested in some generic stream of celebrities and influencers I could care less about.
Yeah, its just a popularity thing. You would get greyed into oblivion suggesting him or tesla were any less than god sent 5 years ago here. Its sad so much kneeJerk emotion gets attached to services based on users or owners. Im not a fan of either platform or owner, but I can relate to your interpretation.
It was a reaction against Elon Musk, and the desire to find a Twitter-like social network that's more human focused with less news, etc. But it's very bare bones right now. You can't do a lot of the common things that made Twitter so good, such as searching to see if AWS us-east-1 is down by people posting tweets.
I have a particular problem with Threads/Instagram and Tiktok, that I feel I don't have with either Youtube or Twitter; region base recommendations after signing in.
I can understand that if you are not signed in, the recommendations are based on which country you are in, so that's understandable. But once I log in, if you continue to recommend content based on the region as my default option, and NOT based on my following/watching habits, it becomes annoying.
Most region based content is boring (I do NOT care about sports or entertainment gossip or whatever), but the local content in my region is especially cringe inducing, that I feel physically repulsed. On Youtube and Twitter, I rarely encounter such content, it mostly what I follow and things extending from that.
But for some reason, I cannot, despite my best efforts, seem to curate my feed on Threads/instagram nor on tiktok; it heavily seems to weight the locally popular content on my recommended feed, and moreover makes it the default view.
It even makes it difficult to switch to a following tab, there is an air of "no, don't you dare pick and choose what you want to read/watch, WE will pick what you will view and you will like it".
There are so many tiktokers who I like, but I only follow on their youtube shorts channel, because watching on tiktok or instagram makes me ill.
Threads is no better, I will be reading a thread from some one I like and one swipe and dammit, another cringe worthy thread about some repulsive nonsense, and I close the app.
We are told that social media apps are supposed to entertaining and addictive; youtube and twitter are catering to my addiction, the other apps don't, and if I feel repulsed rather than drawing in, I shan't visit their site and they can't serve me ads to make money.
____
I am not sure if it's because I got into youtube/ twitter early and was able to spend time shifting through dirt to find gold (time I don't seem to be willing to tiktok, I presume)...
or something about algorithms each company uses, because I never really liked facebook/instagram and I have closed my facebook account long ago, not because of some moral stand but because I found the app so boring.
I only keep instagram because of my old highschool fellows are there, and I like to be able to congratulate them on the birth of their babies, otherwise I rarely interact with the damn app, it never recommends me anything nice to watch, despite the years facebook spent collecting my data.
If you are going to invade my privacy and collect my data, why don't I get something useful out of it?
you know which popular accounts I follow and which segments my likes fall into, and I spent weeks trying to nudge you into things I like and avoid things I don't like, why don't you learn, dammit?
I run a Mastodon server. It respects the 1st amendment: I say anything I want there, and you can go make your own server if you want to say something different. And in no known cases has the US government told anyone they're not allowed to talk there, which is the only way the 1st amendment would be relevant to a social media platform.
So wait, using an alternative social media platform just because the bourgeoisie doesn’t like the market leader‘s owner’s politics isn’t as convincing for the plebs as it is for the bourgeoisie? who would’ve thought?
BlueSky is going to win. Domain verification and custom feeds (user-generated firehose filters) are its killer features. It's already better than Twitter, and it's still behind invite codes as they refine it.
Once brands realize that they can utilize custom feeds to reach potential customers granularly instead of -- or in addition to -- paying for advertising, it's going to be over for Twitter. Twitter could introduce something similar to compete, but they shit-canned all of their talent, and in the process hamstrung their ability to innovate.
Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can very well include photos. It has exactly the same shallow culture as Instagram: commercial, flat, vain.
Meta has openly expressed that it's disinterested or even hostile to news/journalism making their way to the platform (which comes with a lot of political flame-wars), instead to focus on making it a "fun" platform. Quite obviously because advertisers prefer networks without controversy.
Users may self-censor as on Threads the link to your real name is not very far away. Many users may have a real name Insta account linked up which in turn is linked to your Facebook account. Even if not visibility linked to your real name, internally you should assume it's there. So who knows what happens to all those accounts when you step over the line in Threads?
Hence, it's not Twitter which is defined by the culture war taking the main stage. Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. It also produces quite a lot of original content, whether they be memes or otherwise. You'll find none of that originating on Meta networks.
As Twitter seems on its way down, especially high follower users (such as journalists) are lost. There is no longer a "cultural network" where you push a message and get reach. None of the alternatives work for this purpose either.
I have no idea what will become of Twitter, but I do know to keep an open mind as we live in wild times. Just because Musk is a chaos monkey does not mean that it will not eventually rebound or even surpass old Twitter.