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Threads users down by more than a half

bbc.com

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Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#221

Post by sanderjd »

andrewstuart wrote: post #200
justapassenger wrote: post #180

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.

Absolutely this is failure. 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…

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.

But not this time!

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#222

Post by boneitis »

AlexandrB wrote: post #196
nerdawson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk, but what the successor place is going to be remains to be seen. First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't. Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't. My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along…

> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't. Just about all the people whose opinions I'm interested in hearing are on Mastodon now. I don't really care if anyone else shows up. Maybe it's better that they don't.

Right. Hell, I wasn't among those saying Mastodon was going to be the "new place" or that Twitter was otherwise on its way out. Even with my proximity to tech circles, Mastodon seemed to me hardly a blip on most people's radars.

I only finally checked it out during all the Reddit protests and am thoroughly amazed to simply see content without all the cruft.

It is only now that I don't feel as sure; Twitter still has its login wall today. I reactivate my facebook account only when, say, I absolutely need to interact with a particular small page/business. I don't use Instagram. I have only since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following list and make a first pass at building my Fedifeed by seeing who's moved over (incidentally, most of the people I follow that are still active). This time, I might actually check my feed regularly while logged in, since I'm not seeing a sponsored submission or ad every other post.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#223

Post by andrewstuart »

peter422 wrote: post #215
andrewstuart wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this is failure. 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…

By this logic Twitter should also be growing, as it’s even better than threads in terms of content. Yet not only is Twitter not growing but it’s shrinking. I think your expectations for success in this vertical are off.

Google says “Twitter has approximately 450 million monthly active users as of 2022”.

I’d say that’s probably broadly the number of potential Twitter users.

If you think user growth should be exponential to all people in the planet, then that is false.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#225

Post by matthewdgreen »

nomel wrote: post #57
superfrank wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the most recent estimates of Twitter's value, Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars. You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year…

> Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars. Why would a user of the site/app care about this? How is it impacting their experience?

It will certainly impact my experience when Musk gets tired of losing money and sells the husk to some grifter or Verizon.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#226

Post by phpisthebest »

peter422 wrote: post #215
andrewstuart wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely this is failure. 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…

By this logic Twitter should also be growing, as it’s even better than threads in terms of content. Yet not only is Twitter not growing but it’s shrinking. I think your expectations for success in this vertical are off.

in my world of twitter/x I see no signs of shrinking...

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#227

Post by SanderNL »

andrewstuart wrote: post #125

I can’t see how threads can be “launched” without a desktop client. That’s not even an MVP, it’s non existent. Some of these supposed genius tech leaders are really showing themselves to have very questionable decision making capability. It was also extremely off putting that it was so tightly linked to instagram. They also made a mistake by not leveraging peoples desire to get their own Twitter handle on threads. Fa…

Hey.. don’t diss SpaceX. Even their exploding rockets are leagues ahead of anything Meta scratches of the bottom of their barrel.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#228

Post by gundmc »

justapassenger wrote: post #180

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.

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.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#229

Post by kstrauser »

max_lameme wrote: post #106

[flagged]

I run a Mastodon server. It respects the 1st amendment: I say anything I want there, and you can go make your own server if you want to say something different. And in no known cases has the US government told anyone they're not allowed to talk there, which is the only way the 1st amendment would be relevant to a social media platform.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#230

Post by toshk »

I feel like they dropped the ball on content.

Most complaints I've read is that thread's content is just boring.

Most instagram influencers are visually oriented and don't translate well to textual thread.

If they would have been able to get that right from the start, they could have kept a lot more. Either through collabrations, or pushed influencers who get engangement on long text posts.

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