Live data from Hacker News

Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

threads.net

291–300 of 356 posts

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#291
post #92

I feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem for Threads: it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account. Of course FB is going to do that otherwise they lose a massive edge against any competitor. But for me at least my Twitter is a very different social space to my Instagram and there’s very little crossover. So Threads looks like it’ll be text posts with your Instagram friends. Whic…

There's an important point you make. Google plus failed. But a few of us loved it, because of its interface and ease of managing for the large part, but also because we interacted differently with and with different people than on Facebook instagram etc. Whereas Facebook to your point is dominated by my friends and family (but less and less their original content and more and more with copied "memes), Google plus rap…

> google plus was a rich mine of unbelievably high quality content from fabulous people.

Naive question here from a non-user: With all that goodness, why did the product fail?

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#292

The permissions[1] the android app wants are rather terrifying. Think I'll pass. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.instagr...

Navigating to threads.net on Firefox Linux gets me only a swirling-galaxy animation, with a scan code drawn on top. Non-responsive to mouse clicks or key strokes.

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#293

yeah, and they've effectively trapped those 2M users, because when you go to delete your Threads account, it will say [0] that by doing so it will also delete your Instagram account as well... ouch [0] https://i.jollo.org/xNFu9Qvd.png

So you need a little browser extension that will delete all your posts for you.

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important point you make. Google plus failed. But a few of us loved it, because of its interface and ease of managing for the large part, but also because we interacted differently with and with different people than on Facebook instagram etc. Whereas Facebook to your point is dominated by my friends and family (but less and less their original content and more and more with copied "memes), Google plus rap…

> google plus was a rich mine of unbelievably high quality content from fabulous people. Naive question here from a non-user: With all that goodness, why did the product fail?

As a general rule of thumb: The general public is not interested in high quality content.

They're much more interested in instant gratification and mindless entertainment, which was sufficiently catered to on the original platforms, so the critical mass of people never switched over.

Another factor surely was that - at the time - reddit was another platform for high quality discussions on specific topics and made it much easier to find like minded people through the subreddit segmentation.

While the circle functionality worked decently in g+, you still had to actually create and join them, which meant it was too exclusionary and involved to really get going.

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#295
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pay for verification on Instagram as well. I had a blue checkmark last month when I kind of just paid for fun to see if it would increase engagement (I'm not an influencer or popular in the least, just have a few hundred followers). So I'd say Instagram/Threads' verification is equally worthless.

Did it work?

Not really, hah.

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an important point you make. Google plus failed. But a few of us loved it, because of its interface and ease of managing for the large part, but also because we interacted differently with and with different people than on Facebook instagram etc. Whereas Facebook to your point is dominated by my friends and family (but less and less their original content and more and more with copied "memes), Google plus rap…

> google plus was a rich mine of unbelievably high quality content from fabulous people. Naive question here from a non-user: With all that goodness, why did the product fail?

Because Google killed it, because it was not for normal people, my circles were mainly developers/researches. Normal people were already on fb and didn't see any value of trying something else.

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of platforms that start like that. You never saw them because they died.

Ok, I'll shoot: AOL Instant Messenger. Runaway success, 20ish year run. MySpace also started like that and so did Facebook itself. You had to add friends and visit their pages manually to see what they were up to, feeds came later.

AIM was 1:1 not broadcast, apples and oranges

Facebook was bootstrapped off existing IRL social networks (i.e. Harvard undergrads)

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#298

I signed up. And the first thing I saw was a whole bunch of posts from people I don't follow. They had the opportunity to learn directly from Twitter's mistakes, and they failed right from the start.

A friend of mine signed up for a quick glance to see what their feed would bring up, since there's no way to get just who you follow. The literal first handful of things she saw were transphobia, racism, misogyny, or conspiracy theories.

I’ve seen precisely zero of that. Scratching my head at this second hand anecdote and your motivation for sharing it

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#299
post #76

For comparison, "Google Plus had 10 million users two weeks after its launch on June 28, 2011."

Didn't expect this comment to get downvoted. This is just a comparable number that is closest to the definition in title we can get. There is no information on the "first two hours signup" in a social network app launched by a large technology company that has the means to push their existing user to signup the new service. There is nothing implied.

Re: Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see what elon did last week? I am not going to pay for a social media site which still gives me ads and has rate limits.

You don't have to pay and the rate limits are temporary, this was stated at the point they started. It's a big deal to the anti-Musk activists but from a user standpoint it's generally negligible.

We no longer able to believe what Elon say
Post reply on HN