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.
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.