Live data from Hacker News

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

threads.net

311–320 of 356 posts

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

#312

I was surprised to see the invitation to follow all my Instagram friends. Now I’m getting follow requests for my friends. I use Instagram to network with friends “outside of work” and largely outside of the political sphere, and scroll through memes and silly content. It’s kind of like “friends + America’s funniest home videos”. Twitter is all about politics, current events, thought influencers, and work networking.…

> Twitter is all about politics, current events, thought influencers, and work networking. This is a rather narrow view of what the site is used for. It's also about media, art, and live music -- things that overlap heavily with Instagram. For example, I've found that you unfortunately can't avoid Twitter when keeping up with the underground electronic music scene in the US. Discord and Reddit have made some strides…

Interested in underground electronic music in general. Any recommendations for artists or accounts to follow?

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

#313
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 million users in 2 hours is incomparable to any social network growth rate I've seen. Where as the entire Fediverse has 11 million registered users in 7 years. I don't know how that 2M in 2 hours is 'oddly low' but at that rate, Threads will surpass the entire Fediverse in less than 24 hours and will be centralizing the Fediverse when it turns on ActivityPub.

Firefox, a desktop app in the era of desktop apps when the entire Internet was like 2 billion people got 8 million full downloads in a single day. That was about 15 years ago. FB/Insta/Meta getting about that, or certainly less than an order of magnitude more, is kind of joke, IMO.

> Firefox, a desktop app in the era of desktop apps when the entire Internet was like 2 billion people

False. 2 billion people weren't using the internet 15 years ago. [0]

10 million users in 7 hours already surpasses that [1] Firefox statistic. The rapid growth of Threads is no joke.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...

[1] https://www.threads.net/t/CuWGPjwrfq9

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

#314

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?

I'd argue different to the other replies so far. The reasons were:

First and foremost, it's a Google product. Google's own internal structural failings are predisposed to create and then kill products.

https://killedbygoogle.com

It had a different usage model ("Circles") to the things people already had and understood. Twitter, Facebook etc. And it didn't map clearly to those existing understood structures.

It was more complicated for end users, was unintuitive and badly explained. I didn't "get it" until someone either on HN or Reddit explained how it was supposed to work.

Google tried to use Google+ to replace YouTube comments. Something YouTube users didn't want, something it wasn't good at, and something that was badly communicated and extremely badly received. People actively resented the product as a result.

Google mishandled some big issues. Requiring "real names" went down like a lead balloon, something they had to walk back years later, but not before using it to replace YouTube comments.

It could have been lucrative and sticky glue between Google properties. Instead it was the crappy old spiderweb you accidentally get stuck to your face while cleaning out the shed.

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

#315
post #204
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because threads.com was taken by another company?

threads dot net was also taken, clearly from the gp post. I think they (fb/meta) prob reached out to both and the made an offer that couldn't refuse.

One of them refused

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

It had group chats too, but still, the chat rooms themselves in AOL were ephemeral. No one knew who you were on AOL unless you let it be known, and you could make up a persona if you wanted.

As for word-of-mouth spread at Harvard about Facebook, well that's not different than anything else. Word of mouth is always a part of marketing for any product. You still needed to manually look up your friends or your friend's friends and even to see what was up you'd have to visit their profile (until the feed came out later). Facebook didn't start off by showing you thousands of people you didn't care about, it did the opposite, it wanted you to connect with people you knew IRL.

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

#317
post #66

Feels like they were too eager to scoop up Twitter refugees. The platform is still missing basic features and new users turn away immediately. Nobody’s going to join a platform and then keep their account open for 6 months while the platform plays catch-up. The launch would have been much more successful if they waited another month. I understand this is a peak time to capture former Twitter users, but in the long ru…

You can't close your account without also closing your Instagram account so that might make it more sticky.

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

#318
post #253

A failed product Google Allo passed 10 million in that period of time.

No it didn't. It got to 5 million downloads in 5 days[0] (and that's downloads, not sign-ups), and took a few months to break 10 million downloads. Threads got that many sign-ups in 4 hours[1], and I assume we'll see the 10 million mark this week. [0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/11/29/google-allo-hit-5-m... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/over-2-million-signups-2-hou...

Threads exceeded 10 million a few hours ago.

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

totally agree with this, quality content is and always will be a niche. a platform that only focuses on that will never be "corporate" good enough and make enough money to justify its existence in companies like google. what twitter and reddit got right (imo) is that they made it easy to filter content based on personal interests.

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

#320
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with the App Store. Apparently the app is going to collect health and wellness data about me. Wonderful.

How can this be legal? I'm pretty sure that in order to legally process health data, an entity must have a plausible reason for doing so, at least in some jurisdictions. What could that reason possibly be for a social media app?

Hence why they're not launching it in the EU https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/threads-no-eu-launch/
Post reply on HN