Threads users down by more than a half

It was a reaction against Elon Musk, and the desire to find a Twitter-like social network that's more human focused with less news, etc. But it's very bare bones right now. You can't do a lot of the common things that made Twitter so good, such as searching to see if AWS us-east-1 is down by people posting tweets.

I'm saying that Facebook's specific history (the OG FB site/app) is not a great basis for comparison as it's such an extreme outlier. Launching new social networks is fraught, but an uneven start is not a necessary kiss of death. And even Facebook has seen growth plateaus.

Facebook is one case, and is still the largest (or among: TikTok and a few newer entrants may be giving it a run for its money).

But if you want to look at multiple platforms over time, it helps to ... well, consider other cases.

I've been something of a purveyor of niche and smaller social networks, from the beginning (Usenet). What I've observed of these is that even among those which continue for a considerable period as a viable option there is the tyre-kicker uptake, a fade back, and then ... several possible trajectories. One of those is straight to the floor, but another is to have either a steady base or a longer and slower growth.

Sure, both of those are death for a venture-backed site or service. But if that's not the foundation, then steady-state or long-steady-growth is a viable option.

And I've seen the pattern:

- On Google+: there was an initial excitement, then the site got stale (2011--2013 or so), then I (and from what I can tell, others) came back. The forced integration with YouTube annoyed a lot of people (on G+, on YouTube, and of course, Not On Either). After about 2015 things seemed to go into a long slow fade, which turned into a race for the exits after the planned shutdown was announced in 2018.

- On Diasapora*: Similar pattern, though I'd participated early on (2011-ish), after leaving G+ for a spell (around 2013--14), and then returned to the site with the G+ shutdown announcement. Some long-standing gripes and personal hardware failures had me lose interest about a year ago, though there quite honestly still is a good community there.

- Ello: It was (somewhat poisonously) plastered with the "Facebook Killer" label in 2015, and saw a few periods of excitement buzz. The site remained small (a few hundred thousand MAU, low millions of total accounts, by my own guess, verified in person with Ello staff), but had a vibrant community. The killer was sale of the site to a VC with the original staff gagged as part of the agreement. Various protections (B-Corp organisation and highly member-friendly policies) seemed to disappear at that point, and most of the small crowd I'd followed there drifted elsewhere.

- Mastodon: I'd joined in 2016/7, participated a bit, faded off, then came back. After HN it's my most active online presence. Mastodon's long-term growth has shown numerous large-influx phases where a significant influx of new members arrive, some of whom remain active. The trend is episodic but positive.

- Tildes.net: Launched by an ex-Reddit staffer, deimos, the site's been ticking along as an invite-only beta since 2016. I've given more invites in the past three months than the previous seven years, so far as I can recall. As with other sites, it seems to gain and lose activity on phases, though overall seems to be growing.

- Imzy: An ill-fated venture which followed the "crater rapidly" phase. It remains the most socially-dysfunctional online network I've ever participated in directly, strongly at odds with its "kinder, gentler Reddit" labeling.

- Hacker News: The site has seen a long steady slow growth since opening to the public in 2007. I've been studying front-page activity for the past few months, one element of which is looking at total activity (votes and comments) on those front-page stories and how that's changed over time. It's an interesting dataset as there are a fixed number of items per year (10,950, 10,980 in a leap year, based on 30 per day), but as participation increases we'll see more activity on the page, and metrics such as distinct sites and distinct submitters can vary. Votes per story have actually held relatively constant for 2020--2022 (most recent full years), comment activity continues to rise, see below. According to dang, MAUs have held steady at about 5 million for years, as have other indicia of site activity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146958> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18150721> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33454140>).

Hacker News isn't dying. Sites such as Metafilter remain not only reasonably vital (in terms of on-site activity), but have high quality discussion, as opposed to the plunge to the bottom of Reddit and Twitter. Diaspora* ... continues to tick along. Mastodon and the Fediverse are growing fairly rapidly (particularly for a non-venture-funded platform). Ello succeeded ... for a while. Google+ made it to just shy of the 8-year mark, and for much of that time did have quality discussions and engagements in my experience. Sometimes small scale is a virtue.

HN runs on a single server and with a single public moderator. I suspect it's pressing the edge of viability with both, but the results are ... pretty good.

As with another thread I'd participated in yesterday, one challenge is that there aren't a whole lot of major social network initiatives, most especially not by existing major players. Facebook's Threads is the first sui generis effort by that company since its original The Harvard Facebook launch (all others have been acquisitions). Last year's Bluesky launch by ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was the first significant new launch in years. The most recent major launch by an established company before that, so far as I'm aware, was Google+ itself. There've been other social media efforts, obviously, but most of those were not by an incumbent major player in the field, and were instead new ventures.

Checking myself, HN search lists 677 results for "new social network": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

Among prominent mentions, with "name" (affiliation) YYYY:

- Google+ itself (Google) 2011

- "Hello" (Orkut) 2018

- "Friended" (?) 2019

- "Slyde" (?) 2020

- "So.cl" (Microsoft) (2012)

- "Inside.com" (Jason Calacanis) 2022

- "WT.social" (Jimmy Wales) (2021)

- Entries named or by: Hipstamatic, Frontpile, and Coccoon, on the first results page.

- LinkedIn, Skype, Pinterest, WeWork, and Slack are all mentioned.

Overall, though, I'd say my characterisation is accurate: there aren't many new large entrants, especially not by incumbents, and those that do emerge tend to see a rapid initial "testing the waters" bump, followed by some subsequent trajectory either up or down.

On Hacker News front-page story activity 2007--2022:

  Year  Stories     Points (   mean )  Comments (   mean )  Sites  Submitters
  ----  -------     ------ ---------   -------- ---------   -----  ----------
  2007     9382      92264 (   9.83 )     61207 (   6.52 )   2644        1163
  2008    10980     294775 (  26.85 )    186339 (  16.97 )   3458        2021
  2009    10950     608603 (  55.58 )    303962 (  27.76 )   4157        3017
  2010    10950    1062763 (  97.06 )    491718 (  44.91 )   4397        3987
  2011    10949    1657004 ( 151.34 )    632724 (  57.79 )   4830        4889
  2012    10980    1829402 ( 166.61 )    778634 (  70.91 )   5047        5537
  2013    10950    2132819 ( 194.78 )    998387 (  91.18 )   5250        5975
  2014    10905    2057628 ( 188.69 )    916438 (  84.04 )   5338        5920
  2015    10950    2001269 ( 182.76 )    845719 (  77.23 )   5301        5313
  2016    10977    2521394 ( 229.70 )   1137575 ( 103.63 )   5238        5341
  2017    10950    2776064 ( 253.52 )   1259899 ( 115.06 )   5236        5274
  2018    10950    2762928 ( 252.32 )   1262654 ( 115.31 )   4986        5038
  2019    10950    3051011 ( 278.63 )   1447141 ( 132.16 )   5302        5123
  2020    10980    3338150 ( 304.02 )   1734703 ( 157.99 )   5938        5564
  2021    10950    3376829 ( 308.39 )   1859933 ( 169.86 )   6178        5339
  2022    10950    3308025 ( 302.10 )   1986265 ( 181.39 )   6446        5443

Note that mean votes doubled from 2011 to 2020, and has held steady since. Mean comments doubled 2011--2017, though have continued to rise about 157% since (over the 2017 baseline). The overall site count has also increased, suggesting that submissions are more diverse.

Per HN's "flamewar" metric (or what I prefer to call "spiciness"), that would suggest that spice has increased especially 2020--2022, that is, the ratio of comments to votes is up. HN views that as a possible sign of discord, though it could be more interest in discussion.

You can switch to a following-only view, but it resets whenever the app is re-launched, which is a real scummy pattern.

Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app.

Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.

What evidence would it take to convince you Threads is a failure?

Yeah. And in India it's _only_ WhatsApp. Nothing else. It's the default.