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.
