They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.
Threads has 320 million monthly active users and 100 million daily. It’s certainly not a flop. It’s almost as big as X globally. There’s a tremendous locality bias around Meta’s products. Social media use is very localized by geography and age. So if all your friends stopped using Facebook ten years ago, you assume that’s probably true everywhere, while in fact they’ve added several billion users on FB since then.
I frankly don't believe those numbers at all. They've massively pumped it through integration with Instagram, and have integrated dark patterns around profile creation and follows based entirely on Instagram social networks. Yes, a lot of people do actively use Threads, but it's absolutely not a first class social network [yet].
While I was at FB (it wasn't Meta then), I saw what a superpower the infrastructure is there. Product engineers build things of a scale in days. While I was there, I got to be tech lead for several different teams (2x distributed dbs, 1x Dev Efficiency, 1x Ads), some of which are called out by name here. Shout out to the HBase and ZippyDB teams! This is the first public acknowledgment that ZippyDB was converged upon.…
Good luck to you. Maybe you’ll be the next StatSig.
Thanks! They have built an impressive business and tool.
They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.
Threads has 320 million monthly active users and 100 million daily. It’s certainly not a flop. It’s almost as big as X globally. There’s a tremendous locality bias around Meta’s products. Social media use is very localized by geography and age. So if all your friends stopped using Facebook ten years ago, you assume that’s probably true everywhere, while in fact they’ve added several billion users on FB since then.
> Threads has 320 million monthly active users and 100 million daily.
At least that's what Meta tells advertisers and shareholders.
> Moreover, once it [Threads] was developed, the infrastructure teams were given only two day’s notice to prepare for its production launch. Most large organizations would take longer than two days just to draft a project plan involving dozens of interdependent teams, let alone execute it. At Meta, however, we quickly established war rooms across distributed sites, bringing together both infrastructure and product te…
Well, yeah. What's the privacy policy and retention policy of this new social network? How do you answer that in two days.
It's unfortunate there is so much cynicism and negativity in these comments. I understand many people here strongly dislike Meta but the actual article is awe inspiring to me. I didn't know how extensive and complicated the infrastructure underpinning the modern digital world was. Reading this article and seeing the sense of scale is mindblowing to me. It feels almost like a miracle and like magic. A "wonder of the world" in terms of the amount of effort and complexity.
Maybe the company in charge is bad in many ways but all of the things in the article are astounding to me.
I am not an engineer like many of you so maybe the article is old news to you guys but I couldn't help but say "wow".
I feel like if you took some old science fiction writers from back in the day and showed them this article, you would find sheer awe in their faces too.
Sure mate, I am definitely the one with an axe to grind here ;) Now prove me stupid and show me and the HN readership how is a product which even it's own management sees as unprofitable for the next three-four quarters, producing any benefits at least to it's shareholders, not even talking about the society. Maybe lean into the argument with a pinch of how the latest Meta "free speech" policies augment it's positive…
Let us know how important a business is WhatsApp. Which has made about zero revenue for Meta in 15 years and yet is utterly dominant globally.
Again, the argument for overall net value is not based on a single KPI, be it DAU, MAU or unproven/unsourced "utter global dominance". By focusing on 'dominance', instead of value, you're missing the whole point. You know who also had total communication service dominance (we call that "monopoly" actually) for a good chunk of the 20th century in the US? A little company called AT&T. Look them up and why they were split up. The difference being, at least AT&T was highly profitable at the time. But even if we took your argument as valid, haven't all the MBAs been telling us that unprofitable 'cost centers' should not exist, and should be extinquished, surely you must have heard that argument at some point? So why then are we allowing VC capital to provide a lifeline to some of those utterly unprofitable "businesses" indefinitely? The quotation marks around "businesses" because that's another axiom from business schools - you have a business once you start turning profit. Isn't the point for market to promote the winners and defer the losers? I am afraid the way AirBnB, Uber & co. operate looks a lot like a capitalist version of communist central planning commitees, when we still had independent and free press it used to be called "crony capitalism".
It would be pretty impressive to launch a public cloud I would trust even less than GCP :D
A lot of Fortune 50 companies compete in some way with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google so are reluctant to use their services. I think Meta has the benefit of less corporate competition Anyway in that context, you don't need trust when you have a sufficiently large legal department
I doubt there is a single Fortune 50 company that doesn't use one (or more) of the top 3 clouds.
I mean, Netflix and Apple even use public clouds quite heavily.
Threads has 320 million monthly active users and 100 million daily. It’s certainly not a flop. It’s almost as big as X globally. There’s a tremendous locality bias around Meta’s products. Social media use is very localized by geography and age. So if all your friends stopped using Facebook ten years ago, you assume that’s probably true everywhere, while in fact they’ve added several billion users on FB since then.
I frankly don't believe those numbers at all. They've massively pumped it through integration with Instagram, and have integrated dark patterns around profile creation and follows based entirely on Instagram social networks. Yes, a lot of people do actively use Threads, but it's absolutely not a first class social network [yet].
Honestly it’s more the case that X is not a first-tier social network anymore. It now plays in second league with the likes of Threads and Pinterest.
It retains important bubbles like Silicon Valley VCs and media people, but globally it’s just not significant with its single-digit market share.
It's unfortunate there is so much cynicism and negativity in these comments. I understand many people here strongly dislike Meta but the actual article is awe inspiring to me. I didn't know how extensive and complicated the infrastructure underpinning the modern digital world was. Reading this article and seeing the sense of scale is mindblowing to me. It feels almost like a miracle and like magic. A "wonder of the w…
> I feel like if you took some old science fiction writers from back in the day and showed them this article, you would find sheer awe in their faces too.
I can't tell if this is satire. The science fiction writers from back in the day wrote about humans exploring other planets, building sentient machines, encountering aliens or maybe developing psychic powers. (looking at you two, Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon)
Building the world's biggest ad-serving infrastructure might impress them. It impresses me! But "sheer awe" seems a few orders of magnitude off the mark.
Not to burst your weird leftist-rightist libertarian bubble, but vaccine passports are actually a fairly normal thing in most of the world mate. You know, it's just about documenting what vaccinations you were receiving throughout your lifetime. Go outside and touch the grass, you sound very angry.