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

291–300 of 566 posts

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#291

Post by hcurtiss »

_jal wrote: post #262
hcurtiss wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't be so sure. Tesla lowered prices and the press made the same kinds of predictions. Come earning season Tesla clobbered its competitors.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#292

Post by erulabs »

a13o wrote: post #287

I view this entire saga more as an unbundling of microblog topics. One website had all the microblog topics, and now they will be spread across N websites. If you're viewing this as a king of the hill scenario, you've got the wrong metaphor. This is humpty dumpty having a great fall. It won't ever be put back together. Not by Meta, not by Twitter, not by anyone.

If the world is going back to microblogs — does that mean we need something more akin to Yahoo/Geocities than to Google/Facebook?

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#293

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

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…

> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.

Mastodon is chugging along, still growing steadily, unglamorously. I don't see a boom and bust there. It is unbacked by VC "get big or die trying" money, not buoyed by big tech or media hype. Don't write it off in a week or a month.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#294

Post by paganel »

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…

People in here are emotionally invested in seeing Musk fail, no amount of reasoning can make them see the forrest from the trees.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#295

Post by danpalmer »

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…

I completely agree that Mastodon isn't the new place, and I am increasingly thinking Threads may not be either (at least not to Twitter level, or not for a few years), however I'm very convinced that Twitter is no longer the place either.

The technology is crumbling (see rate limiting, interaction counts), the product is moving further away from what people want not towards it (see Zuck's tweets about Threads to see what popular product direction looks like, even if it's not perfect), the ad quality has dropped very noticeably suggesting they've lost good top paying advertisers, the new ad payout program suggests that their ad inventory is low anyway (see also interaction numbers here too), and the culture has gone from pretty bad to openly hostile to large swathes of the population, at least among English speakers (see anti-trans trending topics, rise of hate speech).

I'd agree that reversion to the mean and people going back to what they know is the most likely course of action in most circumstances, but these are not most circumstances. Twitter can't recover from this, at least not without a change of leadership and many years to rebuild.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#296

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#297

Post by LexiMax »

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…

Mastodon was really never going to be that place where most of the internet moved. It would've been nice in a perfect world, but it's simply not set up as an advertiser-friendly social networking site that would attract celebrities and brands, and quite frankly I think the vast majority of its userbase considers that a feature and not a bug.

Still, I believe that BlueSky and Threads remain a looming existential threat to Twitter. One important role that Twitter filled was being the de-facto centralized RSS feed. It is by far the thing that I see that Twitter is still used for, even by ex-Twitter users and people like me who never used the site in the first place.

To be the centralized RSS feed, you need a web-facing interface, so you can pass links around over the clearnet. Threads doesn't have one. BlueSky isn't even open to the greater public yet. But either one of those could change overnight.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#298

Post by chipsrafferty »

gundmc wrote: post #228
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.

[dead]

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#299

Post by chipsrafferty »

erulabs wrote: post #292
a13o wrote: post #287

I view this entire saga more as an unbundling of microblog topics. One website had all the microblog topics, and now they will be spread across N websites. If you're viewing this as a king of the hill scenario, you've got the wrong metaphor. This is humpty dumpty having a great fall. It won't ever be put back together. Not by Meta, not by Twitter, not by anyone.

If the world is going back to microblogs — does that mean we need something more akin to Yahoo/Geocities than to Google/Facebook?

[dead]

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#300

Post by dahfizz »

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.

> 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.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684978651857596429

Post reply on HN