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Threads users down by more than a half

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Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#331

Post by justapassenger »

potatototoo99 wrote: post #305
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.

What is one thing Meta succeeded in copying and beat the original?

2 most recent - stories basically destroyed Snaps growth potential and Reels are on track to overshadow TikTok.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#332

Post by ipaddr »

sanderjd wrote: post #221
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…

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…

That second group includes people who post to both and most fall into this group. To someone selling a product this is just another market. To others now is the time to get followers.

What percentage have left twitter for threads? Unknown.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#334

Post by tracerbulletx »

It's still fine, they created an escape outlet for journalists and public figures in various communities to escape to if they finally get pushed out of Twitter. A lot of them haven't left yet because they're attached to their current following, but if it starts becoming unbearable or they start to lose reach they may pull over enough communities that it can supplant the role in the culture Twitter used to have. As far as I know the reasons people use twitter are different, there's tech twitter, and art twitter, and media twitter, and corporate twitter and people engage with them for different reasons. Threads would need to replace those reasons.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#336

Post by ghaff »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #334

It's still fine, they created an escape outlet for journalists and public figures in various communities to escape to if they finally get pushed out of Twitter. A lot of them haven't left yet because they're attached to their current following, but if it starts becoming unbearable or they start to lose reach they may pull over enough communities that it can supplant the role in the culture Twitter used to have. As fa…

I suspect that the “Burn it all down” crowd view Twitter through the outrage content lens whereas there are a lot of different communities.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#337

Post by sega_sai »

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…

I think you can now disable algorithmic feed, which was my main gripe as well. But the lack of website is still a show-stopper for me.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#338

Post by user_named »

markdown wrote: post #306
TechBro8615 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, I doubt the premise of this entirely, e.g. Pokémon Go almost certainly had higher DAU weeks after it launched (and it was growing rather than shrinking). But secondly, I'm skeptical that it's even fair to talk about Threads stats using the same measurements as any "new" app, since it's really an extension of Instagram. You don't make a new account for Threads, you just use your Instagram account. They a…

Yes, this was a massive miss-step IMO, and will be their unthreading. I and half the people I know on Twitter are not owners of Instagram accounts. It's absurd to require Insta to login to Threads.

If you think like this you're engineerbrained and don't live in the real world.

The account linking was a quick fix, the app was released early, and the accounts will not be forcibly linked later on. You won't need an Instagram account to sign up to Threads. But still, if you don't have one, just sign up to Instagram as you would Threads, and you already have your account made.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#339

Post by marcosdumay »

dredmorbius wrote: post #275
marcosdumay wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't expect the number of active users to ever fall in an startup. You are correct in that this was unavoidable because the original number was artificially inflated in a non-sustainable way. But well, that would be a huge red flag for a startup too. It is less so for a giant company like Meta, as they can eat the loss from forcing the market, but it is still ridiculous, even for a company as large as Meta.

That's not accurate. There's often an early "tyre kicker" phase, with people signing up to explore a service. Or to ensure that others don't misappropriate well-known account handles. User attrition / retention rates for sites, services, and apps are well-studied and closely watched. E.g., "Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app installs worldwide in 3rd quarter 2022, by category" https://www.statista.com/statistics/…

That mostly only makes the number of users to fall if new people stop coming at some point. To some non-stablished service, people stopping to come is death.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#340

Post by anyfoo »

ghaff wrote: post #319
dahwolf wrote: post #315

It's pretty common that after a peak of new signups, most do not convert to long term active users. This doesn't even take into account that most "active users" tend to never post anything, they just leech. They still count as MAU. I'm sure that Meta has plenty of ways to boost that number in the long term but overall I find the entire thing underwhelming. Threads is text-based Instagram. But not even that as you can…

It’s hard to say. What I see is a lot of people in my network really scaling back or dropping Twitter and maybe playing with the alternatives but not really embracing them. I suspect that for many it will be a case of “Social media was nice while it lasted.”

My impression as well. Though I'm biased, because it's also the case for me specifically, so I tend to see the world through that same lens.

In my case, I didn't give up social media entirely, but mostly shifted back to "web forums", which also seem to be experiencing some sort of renaissance (another data point). They have more of a local/semi-closed community feeling, as opposed to the "wide open sea" of major social media.

I consider HN to be one of those "forums", although it's more a bit of a hybrid between the two worlds, and of course it has been existing all along.

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