Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Threads users down by more than a half

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 566 posts

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#261

Post by scythe »

nerdawson wrote: post #41
dhosek wrote: post #23

I don’t use Twitter because I like Twitter, but because that’s where the people that I like to interact with (mostly writers) are. 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. Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed only and the algori…

> 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…

VC money is tight right now, and Twitter was never profitable. If I were an investor, you'd have to have some kind of revenue story if you were selling me a Twitter killer.

Mastodon works for the people who are willing to "pay" (in social labor or hosting money) the startup costs. Threads very likely has the limitations it has because that's what Meta thinks will generate useful advertising data — their bread and butter.

For tech people, I think the most likely way to get a Twitter killer in the near-medium term would be to convince Microsoft to add that feature to Github. As usual, you're the product.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#262

Post by _jal »

hcurtiss wrote: post #253
marcosdumay wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, Twitter keeps its slow death. People are certainly going somewhere (outside?), what isn't happening is for all of them going to the same place. IMO, that's a very good thing, but it does break any ambition of social world domination large companies may have.

Last numbers I saw, Twitter DAUs have held pretty steady. What evidence do you have of a "slow death"?

Xitter has moved from offering 50% off ad purchases of $250k a couple months ago to threatening removal of "gold checks" from companies that don't spend $1k.

That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#263

Post by nitwit005 »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #100
explain wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

87.6% of Twitter active-seconds are mobile, according to Elon's most recent data. Would've expected closer to 70/30 personally.

And do you actually believe this statistic? I don't know a single person who willingly prefers a limited, bogged-down experience of any product (social media or otherwise) over a full-fledged desktop client.

A lot of people just don't own a desktop, or laptop.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#264

Post by operatingthetan »

dredmorbius wrote: post #245
operatingthetan wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google of a decade ago had launched Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader). Google didn't "launch" youtube. They purchased it. It was big before they purchased it. Regarding Reader, calling something "small but quite significant" is nonsensical. Additionally you're propping…

Then s/launched/running successful social networks/, which again in this case was your original position. We have now: - Long standing critical takes on new social media launches and claimed performance. - Google as "running ... successful social networks". You're litigating pedantry in a counterfactual manner. It's tedious. I've shown this twice, which is sufficient for my tastes.

My comment was about news articles and you opened it up to HN threads and academic papers and whatever else. You hand waved away the fact that your timelines were vastly different, and are now complaining about pedantry when in several cases basic facts eluded you which changed your arguments when edited. You continually paraphrase my comment in an incomplete manner in order to serve your view.

No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#265

Post by csallen »

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…

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.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#266

Post by lxgr »

gpm wrote: post #247
lxgr wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google login does not give you a social graph.

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.

It sure beats having to bootstrap one, would be my hunch.

Even just having a few people automatically followed can make a difference, even if most people diverge quickly after joining.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#267

Post by pessimizer »

skc wrote: post #32

Threads will be alright in the end. They launched it at a very opportune time when Twitter was having massive technical issues. That was enough to get millions of people to kick the tires and more importantly, create awareness. The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now, people will again flock to Threads and notice that it got a little better. Twitter will get fixed again, and a lower percentage of Thr…

Everything that people were complaining about on Twitter is also true of Threads, other than that Musk doesn't own Threads. The solution to DMs being limited or filtered on Twitter can't be to move to a platform without DMs at all. Various trolls are already partying on Threads, and targeting people that used to get them banned on Twitter. Commercial people and celebrities are seeing no engagement.

Also, the idea that Threads will be better than Twitter is simply a promise based on nothing. The concept I heard is that they were going to mod out politics, but that's a) impossible at scale, ask China, and b) Facebook couldn't care less about politics; the reason they censored anything other than nipples was by government demand, and Facebook has promised to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee that it was hiding documents from until a few days ago under pain of contempt of Congress, personally, against Zuckerberg.

I don't think he's hero enough to go to prison for the sake of this administration, especially since he started censoring for the last administration. He doesn't care about the politics at all, so who would he be going to prison on behalf of? Movement Democrats will certainly make him a hero, like Cheney, Comey, etc., but what will that get him if the Democrats go down in the next general? All this is to say is that he's motivated to govern Threads with a light touch.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#268

Post by hcurtiss »

atorodius wrote: post #242
dgrin91 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now People have been saying this since the day Elon took over... but has it really gone down that much? More than other tech products? E.g. how many outages have the big cloud providers had in the last year? When I hear people say 'any day now' it reads like they are looking for any excuse to say 'mars man bad'.

I think the parent was referring to this rather massive and long outage very recently: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/01/tech/twitter-rate-limit-excee... rather than cloud providers it would probably be more useful to compare to eg Instagram or TikTok

I wouldn't style that an outage. I'm not sure what regular users that affected, but it could not have been very many.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#269

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dullcrisp wrote: post #76
throwaway-243 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why not just ignore the "chaos monkeys" and focus on your writers instead? no one is forcing you to interact with anyone you don't like on X.

What’s X?

The X Window System allows applications to present bitmap images on a display, and receive mouse and keyboard input. The main implementation is X.Org, shepherded by the X.Org Foundation: https://x.org/. Originally for Unix-like systems, it is now available on many other architectures, such as Microsoft Windows: I find ssh's X forwarding feature especially useful there.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#270

Post by dredmorbius »

jstarfish wrote: post #244
dredmorbius wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your original position was "We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users". I've given multiple examples of just such a comparison being made over a decade ago. In both cases, the new launch was by an existing giant in the sector, with claimed performance being not entirely credible. Google of a decade ago had launched [edit: or aquired, but in either event,…

Waze was an acquisition. It was launched by an Israeli company.

Fair enough, noted in edit above.

As Facebook did with Instagram and Whatsapp.

And with the facebook.com domain name, Parakey, ConnectU, FriendFeed, Octazen, Divvyshot, Friendster patents, ShareGrove, Zenbe, Nextstop, Chai Labs, Hot Potato, Drop.io, FB.com domain name, Rel8tion, Beluga, Snaptu, RecRec, DayTum, Sofa, MailRank, Push Pop Press, Friend.ly, Strobe, Gowalla, Caffeinatedmind, Instagram, Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox.com, Karma, Face.com, Spool, Acrylic Software, Threadsy, Atlas Solutions, osmeta, Storylane (Mixtent), Hot Studio, Spaceport, Parse, Monoidics, Jibbigo, Onavo, SportStream, Little Eye Labs, Branch, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Ascenta, Salorix, ProtoGeo Oy, PrivateCore, LiveRail, WaveGroup Sound, Wit.ai, Quickfire Networks, TheFind, Inc., Surreal Vision, Endaga, Pebbles, MSQRD (Masquerade), Two Big Ears, Nascent Objects, Infiniled, CrowdTangle, Faciometrics, Zurich Eye, Ozlo, Fayteq AG, tbh, Confirm, Bloomsbury AI, Redkix, Vidpresso, Dreambit, Chainspace, GrokStyle, Servicefriend, CTRL-labs, Packagd, Beat Games, PlayGiga, Sanzaru Games, Scape Technologies, Giphy, Mapillary, Ready at Dawn, Lemnis Technologies, Kustomer, Downpour Interactive, Unit 2 Games, BigBox VR, AI.Reverie, Within, Twisted Pixel Games, Presize, Lofelt, Armature Studio, and Camouflaj.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...>

Neither Google nor Facebook are distinctive within the tech sector in aequiring large numbers of other firms.

Post reply on HN