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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

#351

Post by etchalon »

hcurtiss wrote: post #268
atorodius wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the parent was referring to this rather massive and long outage very recently: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/01/tech/twitter-rate-limit-excee... rather than cloud providers it would probably be more useful to compare to eg Instagram or TikTok

I wouldn't style that an outage. I'm not sure what regular users that affected, but it could not have been very many.

The problem is that it was high-volume users who were impacted.

And high-volume users are who create content for the site.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#352

Post by pornel »

madeofpalk wrote: post #342
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…

> Twitter is raw, edgy and toxic. It's also known for its real-time coverage of events, which Threads so far lacks. Yeah, for the "chronically online". But twitter is also celebs and brands, and the "normals" following them. I think for those Threads will find an audience. It will be... Twitter, but for Instagram. Twitter has always had an outside impact compared to it's actual userbase, mainly due to nailing the new…

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a deliberate strategy to lure only "normals" away from Twitter, so that the remaining faithful X users will be the loudest, edgiest, most politically polarized ones, speeding up the vicious cycle of X becoming nothing more than a toxic culture war battleground.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#353

Post by [deleted] »

andsoitis wrote: post #316
lancesells wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yeah. The honeymoon is over and we've seen how morally bankrupt these companies are. Twitter has someone who posted child abuse images (as a warning or something) but doesn't ban them because they create engagement. Meta bought a VPN company and paid people (I think in some cases kids/teens) to use it so they can slurp up their entire internet browsing. Amazon has people pissing into water bottles so the founder…

> Twitter has someone who posted child abuse images Can you say more on this?

[deleted]

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#354

Post by VincentEvans »

People I spoke too are super happy Threads appeared and as their favorite accounts are gradually making their way there - feel they can now consume the content they like without Twitter’s ever-present toxic shit.

There was no popular and populated alternative to Twitter. Now there is.

As I watch this unfold - I think that Twitter is now worth half of what it was a month ago. And Threads soaked in all that value. Not sure how anyone would call it a failure.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#355

Post by gochi »

bhauer wrote: post #163
adam_arthur wrote: post #107

Threads launched without the ability to only see the people you follow. To me that marked it as doomed from the start. Most people use Twitter to follow specific niches or topic areas, not as a general conversational platform. If I follow even one account that's posting low quality content at any sort of frequency, it seriously degrades the experience. It's really a headscratcher how they launched without that. I gue…

This is probably its most important failure. Ironically, the people who refuse to use the "Following" tab on Twitter are, I expect, the same people who are most dissatisfied with Twitter. If you use the Following tab, Twitter remains pretty damn great. It's when you allow an algorithm to feed you stuff that the experience can become something between unsatisfactory and toxic.

The "following" tab inserts algorithmic posts, and has for years now. Tossing in likes and other recommendation experiments. This means that even if you carefully only follow people you specifically want to see on your feed, if they start liking stuff that interests them but does not fit their feed, you now see it.

Some of these aspects have changed, but again, they are part of a larger recommendation experiment that twitter constantly pushes because a strict following feed = less money less engagement.

You cannot curate twitter as well as you think you can. It would be nice if that was possible though.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#356

Post by canadianfella »

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…

[dead]

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#357

Post by jacooper »

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.”

100%, once Twitter falls, I would probably just leave it all.

Maybe LinkedIn for the professional stuff.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#358

Post by mjmsmith »

pessimizer wrote: post #238
medler wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that’s impossible to ignore is that Twitter now forces you to read bad replies. Before, it would rank the most popular replies near the top, but now you have to scroll past lots of low-quality replies from people who are boosted just because they pay for the privilege.

Bad replies aren't necessarily the least popular. Any number of people would prefer blue check (basically signed) replies than pseudonymous drivebys whose entire participation in twitter is sharp replies that get massively upvoted. Also, popularity based in upvotes from nobody, unverified accounts is usually inorganic. Scoring upvotes based on how many of them are from verified or likely authentic accounts can only i…

> Any number of people would prefer blue check

... where "any" is the number of people who paid for a blue check.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#360

Post by damontal »

davidw wrote: post #45
ghawk1ns wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s becoming increasingly obvious that Twitter isn’t going to be that place with each new chaos monkey attack from Musk Is this hyperbole? Twitter will be fine, Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions. Twitter today isn't even that fundamentally different from pre-Musk. The biggest change has been perception from ideological extremes. I'm sure Twitter will evolve but evolution is for growth, not death. You…

> Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions He already has? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/18/twitter-i... https://www.fastcompany.com/90901033/for-elon-musks-co-inves... It's big enough and established enough that it's not going to disappear overnight, but so far the results are pretty underwhelming. I, for the life of me, can't figure out why someone who has been successful and earned a decen…

>He already has?

What’s the point of the question mark there? Are you not sure of your statement?

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