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Threads, an Instagram app

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Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#231

I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer. There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't…

Agreed. When Instagram added stories, my entire Snapchat friendlist disappeared within a month and they were all posting to Instagram instead. I think the same will happen here. But it will be lopsided toward people who are already more popular on Instagram than they are on Twitter, which is a lot of social/non-professional audiences. I expect that Twitter accounts with large followings will continue posting there, and Twitter will continue to dominate the professional niches (coding twitter, medical twitter etc.) while the more general shitposting and possibly even politics will move to Threads.

I say this as someone who is no big fan of Meta.

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key thing for me is whether it's really a text focused app or they ruin it by trying to cross promote Instagram/Reels and turn it into a mindless time suck. If they get the little details right, I see this as the only real competition to Twitter right now. After trying Mastodon for a few months, it's certainly not it.

Agreed. I think this succeeds or fails based on the ability to follow different kinds of things from users separately. If I can follow someone's Threads and not their Reels, I'd be glad to have such an easy migration path off of Twitter (I'm having a lot of fun on bluesky, but it's not ready). I'm not optimistic about that though, because you already can't choose to not follow reels separately from pictures.

I never got a Bluesky invite and I've seen a couple comments mentioning "it's not ready" so I'm wondering why people keep saying that? It has been in development for a while, so I would assume it is ready at this point in time.

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#233

Reminds me of how Instagram absorbed Snapchat usecases with stories. Instagram tackled the competition for ephemeral stories simply by implementing Stories as a feature. This time, Threads is a fully fledged app. Getting users to adopt a new app might take as much time as getting Messenger installed. Still, Instagram has a robust social graph to lead users towards downloading it. In fact, they seem to have already on…

I'm really interested in seeing what my Japanese friends do. I don't live in Japan but have made a bunch of friends there in my travels. They're super active on Twitter for baseball and car discussion.

Hoping they make the jump, honestly.

At least if this app is good.

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#234

I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer. There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't…

I couldn't disagree more. I don't see any sign Meta understands what made Twitter great, and the fact that they're heavily branding it with Instagram, using Instagram logins etc suggests to me that they're just looking for another angle to vacuum up user data. Maybe I'm unusual but the accounts I follow on Instagram and Twitter do not have a huge amount of crossover so the fact that their onboarding process tries to replicate your Instagram social graph makes me feel like this will replace Instagram posts composed of Notes screenshots rather than replace Twitter.

Not to mention, when was the last time Facebook successfully launched a new standalone social app? Remember Poke, their Snapchat clone? If you do you’re in an exclusive club. They had to pivot the entire Instagram app in order to compete with Snapchat and Twitter isn’t a big enough threat to ever justify doing that. I think it'll get merged into a "text" type of Instagram post eventually and otherwise killed off.

Side note, but:

> There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative

I actually don't think there is. Twitter always had a relatively low number of users compared to other networks. The key (and what Zuckerberg covets) is the cachet of it being where journalists and celebrities break news.

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#235

I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer. There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't…

A bit premature. If you recall on instagram trying to kill tik tok, has not worked. I think your schadenfreude is potentially blurring your vision. I couldnt care less for either of these companies - but the demise of twitter is one of the most popular things to prognosticate about and i think its overhyped.

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of your examples are unique, distinct separate product and problem spaces, whereas Threads is pretty aligned with Instagram as-is. A lot of the plumbing for Instagram is likely reusable for threads, and a lot of the same optimization techniques might apply just as well (or with minor tweaks). I don't think this is as much "launch something new" as it is "instagram with a mask on".

So. multiple attempts at cloning Snap, HouseParty, IRL etc. into standalone products were unique. And this one is just a minor tweak on Instagram? Let's discuss this in another 6 months. I can't predict what the future of Twitter is, but Threads would have been shuttered by then.

Snap was cloned extremely effectively within Instagram (stories). So was TikTok (reels). I'm actually surprised they aren't taking the same strategy here. Why create a new app? Why not add Threads to the existing Instagram, in the same way as Stories and Reels?

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#237

Oh, wait, this feels like the start of a cyberpunk story. If TikTok gets banned, where to the users go? Instagram. Threads could replace Twitter. Reddit is going downhill... Maybe Meta could even buy it in a firesale? Outside of chat apps like Discord, Slack, Teams and Telegram (which compete with WhatsApp), Meta will have consolidated most of the world's social media under them. And that's assuming they dont buy out…

You could honestly be right.

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#238

I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer. There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't…

Supercuts Deluxe, twitter edition:

Twitter is done. There's no question about it. BREAKING NEWS: a bombshell. Today is a turning point, today was historically bad for Twitter. A turning point. We're at a turning point here. The beginning of the end for the Twitter administration. The beginning of the end! Breaking news: we have ANOTHER bombshell! Mike Zuckerberg might have to assume the office of the Twitter. The call for impeachment. Rumblings of the word impeachment"". Breaking news, another bombshell out of the Twitter HQ. I believe this is the beginning of the end. It's really the beginning of the end. The beginning of the end. He may be feeling the walls closing in on him. All the walls closing in on him. The walls closing in. Breaking news: a new bombshell. One astrologer says says this means the beginning of the end for Twitter. The beginning of the end of the Twitter presidency. Twitter will resign. Is this the tipping point? I know we've said it over and over... you think this is the tipping point? ... and over and over... this is a tipping point... and over and over. Breaking news: Twitter off the rails. This was the beginning of the end today. The beginning of the end... Reminds me a lot of the last days of Nixon. Breaking news tonight: new bombshell. This is the beginning of the end....

and so on and so forth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VdynwAkQy8

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#239

I'm calling it now, this is going to hollow out twitter in extremely rapid fashion. I give twitter a couple of months once this launches, they'll do a Wile E Coyote where they walk off the cliff, followed by plummeting. Meta is going to grind the blue bird to a fine powder, not saying this as a Meta fan, just a casual observer. There's massive pent-up demand for an alternative, and so far Bluesky and Mastodon haven't…

A bit premature. If you recall on instagram trying to kill tik tok, has not worked. I think your schadenfreude is potentially blurring your vision. I couldnt care less for either of these companies - but the demise of twitter is one of the most popular things to prognosticate about and i think its overhyped.

Except tiktok is actually trying, whereas twitter seems to be run by a person with an actual grudge to kill it as fast as possible.

Re: Threads, an Instagram app

#240

I was never able to create an Instagram account because Instagram would just instantly ban any account I created for paranoid anti-spam reasons. Apparently this is [a common problem]( https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/85wbk1/banned_im... ). So I'm not looking forward to trying to sign up with them.

I have a few accounts for various things (personal account, hobby, another hobby).

Recently I tried probably 10 separate times to create a fourth one not even linked to those three, and Instagram outright refused to let me do it with any email address. It even got to a point where on the browser I tried making the account it refuses to let me log in with my normal accounts these days.

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