This seems consistent with my own experience. After using threads for a bit I do not really see a purpose for it. No hashtags… isn’t ordered by date or sortable by new…
The app seems to be focused on just putting celebrity nonsense and corporate sponsored content in front of the user in an endless scroll.
No feel of discussion, no feel of exploration. Just another algorithmic infinite feed designed to make the user just a passive recipient.
There was some hype during the first few days, but they're failed to iterate quickly on the app by providing a non-algorithmic timeline. Everyone I know was posting for the first few days but interest quickly died out. Now the only people who are posting are large influencers and brands, and even those people aren't getting that much engagement as compared to Twitter.
Feels like they were aiming to become Tiktok the text edition. All the advantages of monetization, with none of the user control that could derail the ad serving AI.
The difference is that on TikTok most of the celebrity, brand, and cringe grindfluencer posts can be avoided or easily ignored, whereas on Threads it seemingly endlessly lives in your home page.
Sounds pretty terrible : ( i really thought they might have a chance with this... Out of 10k's of people who are still working and making crazy bucks there, isn't there anybody who could stand up and say, let's stop propagating these stupid patterns and try to make a non-intrusive, usable product for once?
Hashtags have fallen out of use on Twitter, so not sure that's the key, although having "rooms" of some sort would've been useful. They should iterate on it. So far it's not quite there, but I hope they evolve it fast to meet needs.
The moment they tied it to Instagram it became useless for many people. It overlooks that people have different reasons for engaging in each of the social media networks. Plus - the UI was instantly off-putting. What the heck was all this crap in my feed and now I have to figure out how to get rid of it and reset to something I might actually find interesting? And mobile only? Check please...
The only reason I use FB and Instagram are because for people whose businesses interact with the public, it's an unfortunate necessity. Twitter is just fun - for me it actually feels a lot like the pre-www days, where you would encounter scholars and interesting people from around the world and they would speak candidly. So by tying Threads to Instagram (which for me means work) it failed to produce a solution for my Twitter use case.
I saw a bunch of headlines about the rapid user growth, but I don't see anybody linking to it. Still only see Twitter links in places like HN and Reddit, and never to Threads. This kind of reminds me of Google Plus. Quick massive signups driven from a preexisting platform, but having trouble generating actual user activity. Network effects are incredibly powerful.
edit: Twitter posts to HN over the last week outnumber Threads by 110-7. And of those 7 only 2 are not meta to the Threads vs Twitter situation.
The silly limitations don't help. There's no way to just show accounts you're following, you're stuck with the algorithm at the moment. That doesn't exactly drive interesting engagement, the system is more oriented at a battle of the brands.
How much of that rapid initial growth was a land rush?
I’m assuming all major companies and media personalities raced to signup to ensure they have a presence on Threads just in case it does manage to take off.
Prediction markets reflect folk psychology which is "elastic", it's like a pendulum of emotion. After initial period of unreasonable hype, it's currently swinging into the other extreme of extreme fatigue.
And with that in mind if the range of extreme fatigue to hype is 24-49, I'd say Threads is in a good place.
The ball is in Mark's hands. They need to keep updating the app and doing marketing to attract people and spread the news.
Most people are already overly fatigued by Mark and Meta in general. I don't think marketing will help much. Very few people trust the company anymore.
It's a fair point, I guess it's now the lesser of two evils? I supposed some people are so addicted to twitter, they will just go for one or the other just to have their text based social media itch satisfied.
Absolutely it’s a choice between the lesser of two evils.
It sounds kinda silly, but I’ve personally found a lot of value in the fact that Threads feels largely like a total reset.
I started a personal twitter account about 4 years ago and had a really hard time getting traction. Threads has been much easier in this regard since it’s less crowded. Whether it stays that way or not, there’s something refreshing about it. I guess I’m way more interested in what Threads could be tomorrow than I am about what Twitter is today.
Probably too late now, but if someone did make a Twitter / Threads alternative, who wasn't a dickhead...who was trustworthy and cared about users, they would probably kill it right now.
Maybe, but unfortunately I see the adoption of Threads as further proof that owning the social graph is key to rapid adoption of a competitor platform. There’s no one else on the planet that could get to 100M users in a matter of days and Zuckerberg knows this very well. Threads was an opportunity for him to do what knows best: capturing a user base. Hard to see how anyone seriously competes on that front.
I know that’s the general feeling on HN, but the numbers don’t seem to bear that out. Facebook has over 3B monthly active users, and instagram and WhatsApp are getting up there too
In a really evil way: they have the internet.org and "Free basics" initiative where in some countries they pay mobile phone providers to not rate limit access to Facebook&Co (and Wikipedia) which makes access to them free, but for all else of the internet people have to pay.
When I was in Indonesia quite many years back, the strategy worked in the regard that all communication with landlords for apartments, taxi drivers, ... went via WhatsApp. As that was free. (If it worked for Facebook to make profit via ads I doubt).
Some countries, like India, created regulation to prevent that.
Those "zero rating" programs (which aren't allowed in EU) still require a subscription fee. In internet.org Land, you have to get a device somehow and activate a sim card and then never pay a thing (unless you want phone calls (besides WhatsApp calls), SMS or "true" internet) It's a massive project to lock in a society disguised like a NGO doing development aid programs. ("Internet access is a human right" - Zuckerberg)
Most people in HN/Reddit bubbles. Most people IRL couldn't tell you anything more about Mark Zuckerberg than that he is the CEO of Facebook. A lot of people don't even know that Instagram is owned by Facebook (or actually Meta, but that's another thing that most people don't know or care about).
edit: and to be clear, I'm not insulting these people for not knowing. I actually think it's much better not to care about CEO drama.
Anecdotal, but the only people I know who use prediction markets are diehard twitter fans.
I’ve said before, in my opinion Twitter has to fix the problems that they’re having with regressions allowing massive crypto scam spam, pushing of blue users to the top, and the lack of moderation or community notes.
It’s just become quite shit in my experience. Threads has been nice so far, but needs to open up to EU to thrive.
I agree, it’s been shocking to see the unforced errors that Twitter has committed since the Musk takeover.
Threads doesn’t need to match or beat Twitter in terms of feature parity. They just need to keep Threads stable while Twitter bleeds out. Twitter is now cash flow negative and Musk is starting to cut checks to content creators to stay, it’s hard to see them surviving this in the long-term.
A lot of people in the rationalist community are pretty obsessed with prediction markets, but I haven't seen clear evidence that they're actually useful or effective. In particular, I often see examples of prediction markets getting things incredibly wrong in areas where I know better, but I have little interest in playing games for monopoly money and imaginary internet points.
Some prediction markets actually deal in either cryptocurrency or real money. Though these have the additional disadvantage, beyond all the other problems with prediction markets, that, as generally poorly rated financial markets, they’re very vulnerable to market manipulation (and there’s a strong incentive for market manipulation).
That is not how the vast majority of people use Twitter. What really matters for a social network is the user experience of the majority; if you have a niche usage pattern not directly impacted by the experience of the majority breaking, the social network will still crumble around you as the majority are impacted.
Somehow it seems to me Twitter will just die and nothing will “overtake” it. People might randomly disperse to multiple new places, as they did from Google+, for example. Twitter had a good decade, little point now to try to reproduce the experience.
It is likely it will bleed out, but comparing to G+ doesn't work. G+ wasn't successful outside some niche groups which moved elsewhere.
Twitter managed to become a central hub for all of Media. Any celebrity, politician, ... with some announcement? - Put it on Twitter. Any gossip? - it makes its circles on Twitter. And from there wit goes into media (as all media authors are on Twitter) and from media back onto Twitter. Will be interesting to see how that develops, as large parts of media replaced their news gathering with tweetdeck or some other tool on Twitter.
Yeah, the proper timing for free consumer internet services was in the noughties and early 2010s. Now you have to grab consumers attention with huge marketing campaigns and that can only produce a good return if the service charges consumers in some way
For me, Twitter has died. Because Twitter has refused to present the login page for me for several weeks. Tried several browsers, including the latest ones.
- I didn't want Twitter to fail. I wanted it to improve.
- I didn't want Elon Musk to fail. I wanted him to show us an innovative bold vision and excel at it.
- After seeing Elon Musk run Twitter for 9 months, I believe in a universe that makes sense, Twitter must fail. Spectacularly. Hence I want Elon Musk's Twitter to fail to confirm the universe makes sense.
I wonder how does that figure into your question and worldview.
Do you think a company that fired 80% of its employees haphazardly and then threatens to sue anyone who hires them, which owes billions in salaries, rent, bills, where the CEO makes controversial often bigoted remarks frequently, where rash decisions towards harsh censorship are attempted regularly (and currently Threads search/trends are censored, which is illegal in EU), where careless changes are made and reverted within days leaving users confused, where borderline fraud is used to promote and market subscription revenue etc. ...do you think such a company should fail? Or should it thrive?
I think it should fail. And I think it's failing. Twitter is losing billions per annum right now, and Musk can't stop the leak he opened after 9 months of stupidity. But at this scale failing is slower than we're used to and it takes a few years.
The app seems to be focused on just putting celebrity nonsense and corporate sponsored content in front of the user in an endless scroll.
No feel of discussion, no feel of exploration. Just another algorithmic infinite feed designed to make the user just a passive recipient.