I think threads still has a lot of time for it to grow, as meta with its deep pockets can afford to keep it running. Also there is some hate around Elon's acquisition of twitter, and whatever elon is doing (remaining to X). It makes a strong case that threads can at least keep growing, even after the hype drop after launch.
No, it's dead. It has completely vanished from public conscience, I literally forgot it existed for weeks until I saw this post. People don't even bother linking to it as an alternate platform on Twitter anymore, even bsky is way more popular in that regard.
People claiming it would be a huge success and would replace Twitter when it launched were already clearly a bit out of touch, anyone claiming it still has a chance to grow now is straight up delusional.
If "it has high MAU" is your only metric for whether or not a social platform is doing well, then Facebook is also still extremely successful and not struggling at all. But in reality we all know this isn't true, they likely wouldn't even have made Threads if it was.
I have no data. All I know is personally, nobody I know uses it, nobody sends me links on it, and when I last visited it was all highly curated corporate or celebrity accounts. No thanks.
I’m not sure if this is true. I use Instagram a lot and the app keeps reminding me that it’s a thing. Whenever I open it I see a lot of content being posted. It does not feel dead.
What's your definition of "a lot of content"? I just logged into it and literally half of my feed was selfies of provocatively dressed women, and the other half was really generic and unfunny memes that I'd expect to see old people posting on facebook (I literally saw the "what color is this dress" image, I am not joking), and almost none of the text was in english. I didn't see a single post that I could say for sure was posted by a real person that was actually using threads.
Yes, everyone hates Twitter. Threads is dead. Mastodon is terrible and has no chance. Bluesky had a chance but their development team has proven they can't ship features, so it will die soon. There is currently no Twitter replacement contender.
Twitter’s “community notes” is one of two things: 1) if it is 100% community based, then exactly the same as most upvoted tweet reply; 2) if it is moderated additionally, then exactly the same as fact checker run by a company with its own bias.
there's a number of factors that goes into the rankings, like taking into account which other community note users rated it helpful and how they rated previous notes.
also simple usage of community notes would have revealed it was at least more sophisticated than the prison of two ideas you presented.
No need to be so dramatic. Looks like it’s in fact 100% community based, just the community is separate (the ‘community notes community’). The higher barrier to entry, compared to Twitter’s mainstream audience, is its saving grace (at least for now, as more time passes this seems susceptible to good old astroturphing, gaming, and eventually good faith contributors rage-quitting).
Such a high degree of certainty but without any actual argument is usually a certain sign of someone afflicted with Dunning-Krueger. Can you tell us anything about why you're so sure of all these things?
They only seem to support pixel, although pixels can be bought for cheap when compared to iphones, they're still expensive for countries which are still developing.
For example Im using a device which is 1/4th the price of cheapest first hand pixel that I can get
LineageOS is supported on a bit more devices, and works with microG if you're willing to sacrifice Google Pay for better battery life and less privacy violations: https://lineage.microg.org/
This worked ok, but wasn't as nice as grapheneos' solution so I ended up upgrading to a pixel once my cheap chinesium phone was sufficiently old and haven't looked back since. If you do the microg route you should be using a throw away gmail account you don't care about losing with the aurora store (if you need access to the google play store) because there is a non zero chance they ban your account.
> a throw away gmail account you don't care about losing with the aurora store
They also have a pool of accounts you can use by clicking “anonymous”. They do get banned frequently, and you have to re-login once in a while (for me it's almost every time I want to download something new again), but it is definitely usable.
It's a lot less usable lately because of the "Oops this account is rate limited" error unfortunately. Sometimes it takes me 10 tries. Updates are fine though, it's just searching for new apps that trigger it.
LineageOS unfortunately dropped support for my Moto G4 relatively quickly after I installed it and it only was supported up to Android 7.1. I have been running an unofficial build of 8.1 ever since, but that is also horribly outdated by now.
Maybe you can try getting DivestOS running. They only have 14.1 (Android 7.1.2) but unlike old LineageOS builds they patch security vulnerabilities and include some hardening.
Oh yes, more e-waste, more consumerism. We don't have enough of those. Sending text messages and viewing images requires a 90's supercomputer. It's fine.
Same here. I've benefited from hand me down devices for a long time, and I wish I could still be using the Samsung S3- so light, I have several spare batteries, it fit in most pockets, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack. The iPhone SE from 2015 that recently I gave to one of my parents was nice, too.
My laptop is also from more than a decade ago, and I'm happily running LMDE 6 on it.
Everyone doesn't have to live like this, but it's utterly valid, and no one has any right or justification to try to tell anyone else not to.
I can buy anything any time, but I miss swappable batteries, headphone jack, sd card. These were all basic utility features than made a device interoperable and more generally functional. Removing them only benefits the people selling new phones, wireless headphones, and cloud storage.
My old vaio 3 laptops ago is actually still perfectly fast enough at what I do today, it just only has usb2 ports, which eventually became too big of a pain point. But it also had a real docking station that you plop the machine into, not the stupid "docks" we have today that are not docks but just mega-dongle-hubs where you connect a usbc cable. I miss that dock every day since 5 years ago. I could easily still be using it today even though it must be 15 years old or more by now. And if I were, no one else would have any justification for trying to say that I shouldn't, and no software or service provider would have any justification for artificially creating some incompatibility that only serves their goals instead of mine.
It is for me. And there is nothing important on my phone so it is not a huge concern.
And why do we have to accept that phones just turn into garbage after a few years? Even my old 2009 laptop* still runs an up-to-date OS but my 2016 phone is obsolete after 2-3 years?
* but I have to admit that the hardware is quite slow
> And why do we have to accept that phones just turn into garbage after a few years? Even my old 2009 laptop* still runs an up-to-date OS but my 2016 phone is obsolete after 2-3 years?
It is because computers run one of a few available OS's. The OS is being maintained by the distributer (MS, Apple, Google) and your hardware is good as long as the drivers are still receiving updates.
Phones are different because even though everyone only uses iOS or Android, every Android manufacturer puts their own layer onto Android, so Google can continusously update it but the manufacturer might not. Most companies only maintain their phones for about 3 years, giving a significantly reduced lifetime than computers.
It still works fine, from from a security perspective, keeping the phone without patch support is a bad idea.
I mean, I know why it happens, but that doesn't mean I'm happy about accepting it.
It is really annoying how every vendor cobbles together a Frankenstein abomination of a kernel with just the right drivers and patches and good luck trying to run anything else. But I also understand that they (except maybe for Google) have no interest or incentive to clean up this mess.
Even if your phone really has no access to anything that you wouldn't want leaked (although most people would object to a third party having access to their phone calls, text messages, and location data), a compromised device is still a great way to launch attacks on other devices including taking part in botnets. None of this is an objection to old devices, mind; I'm a big proponent of running new software on old hardware, but the security patches are important.
Interesting, can I still use the Play Store with mircoG?
I already run LineageOS, but with Play services. I would like to be able to ditch Play services, but still need the Play store for things like my banking app, and an app to log in to government services.
You can install apps from Play Store with Aurora Store, which is in F-Droid.
I'd say it's a toss up whether specific apps will definitely work. But if they don't I'd recommending segmenting between different physical devices, and making the one that lives in your pocket as secure as possible. It's likely that you don't need to run banking and government apps on the same device that's privy to your movement.
In my country (Belgium), mobile payments are a big thing using the national payment network (Bancontact). Lots of small shops don't accept cards and only do mobile payments because of the lower transaction fees.
These mobile payments only work with your banks app or a dedicated app (Payconiq).
My current approach is to put all these apps in my work profile which I can turn off (using Insular from F-Droid). Only apps for which I need background activity or instant notifications (Signal, an open source podcast app, and sadly WhatsApp) are installed in the main profile.
Sadly, this approach still requires me to have Google services always running in the background for a functioning Play store in my work profile.
I've heard something about using Play Store proper with microG, but obviously that's very flaky. Aurora Store is the way to go.
And banking / government apps tend to work in Europe (at least the ones I have tried). Notable exceptions for me are Revolut (shame!) and McDonalds (who knew microG is the healthier option haha). Of course, in the US things might be vastly different.
Yeah. It's either that or state-supported systems (UPS in India, SBP and MirPay in Russia). Cryptocurrencies could be the answer but governments would never let that happen I think.
Even in the US, the limited hardware support is a barrier right now, especially with having to find a unit that has an unblockable bootloader.
But it's still doable for many people. I most recently bought a second-hand Pixel 6a for GrapheneOS, and BYOD it to an inexpensive no-contract plan.
Pixel 6a units with unlockable bootloaders are currently $235+ on US eBay, which is less than new current Pixels and iPhones bought outright, but more than many lower-end devices, and more upfront than people pay for contract plans that toss in a phone.
It's very interesting because 1/4 of Pixel 6a would be around 80 EUR... so I wonder about your environment and what workarounds you have for these problems.
So I'm in India, and pixel 6a seems to be of 30999 Rupees on Flipkart (amazon like online store)
The device I use regularly is moto g14 which is at about 8500 online, with discounts can go for 8000.
Honestly there is no work around as the moto g14 comes with a 4gb ram and 128 GB internal storage, 6.5 inch screen and 5k mah battery, it can do pretty much anything.
I've just started working full-time after college and now I earn more than enough to buy pixels or iphones but currently the money is going on other important things that were pending
but at the same time, we can say the same about doctors (or even lawyers?) AI is just getting better at predicting things in general, be it an answer to technical question or predicting a disease, so which field is safe from AI? anything involving physical work can be optimized to outperform humans if economic incentives support it, and mentally we won't be able to combat AI say after 20 years, so what then?
Which field are safe from AI overtake? now obviously AI wont take all doctors' jobs, but it'll reduce the value that a singular doctor provides today and that's my concern, we humans are all are getting devalued, is AI field itself safe or will they replace themselves first?
Demand for medicine is increasing this will probably make the lives of gp better and free them to do more enjoyable tasks. The law and medicine are closed fields with limited spaces on purpose so I expect them to be least affected.
Whatever job sounds great in a movie avoid, find something with a moat for entry that's what successful startups do.
I'm not convinced that scientists (researchers working on basic science domains) will not be so easy to replace. The typical work would involve an element of genius-ness that is foreign to an AI. Not saying one could never be replaced, just that it's not as straightforward.
Of course I do. Once you have an entity that is 100x cheaper and better why use a human? Is GPT-4 the one to do it? Probably not, but there is GPT-5,6,7,8...
I think in general large software organizations that do not act as a platform for AI will surely die, they will no longer provide anything of value.
Only way to be sure that you can have a job for now is to be a tradesman, I reckon you got at least a decade longer in that gig. After that it is game over obviously.
