Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Threads users down by more than a half

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 566 posts

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#431

Post by tayo42 »

rglullis wrote: post #199
tivert wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe. Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting against?

That was his excuse , there are some alternative theories that say that he put the rate limits only to cut his AWS bills. Anyway, it should be known that fighting against scrapers is a lost cause. Nitter is still going strong, BirdSiteLive (the software that powers bird.makeup) as well, and even if he really blocked these alternative methods, I wouldn't be surprised if the archive.org people came up with some browser…

Twitter doesn't use aws for anything important... Lol people's just say anything online

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#432

Post by [deleted] »

Eisenstein wrote: post #426
AmericanChopper wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m so unable to relate to perspectives like this on social media. I have Insta and my connections on there are almost entirely my real friends, we all post stuff we’re actually doing in our lives, and send messages to each other, etc… as in, we actually use it for socialising. I follow a small handful of celebrity accounts, and browse reels occasionally, but the main reason I like using it is to interact with my fri…

That isn't 'social media', that is a friend network utilizing a social media network already in place as a communications device.

[deleted]

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#433

Post by evandale »

gerdesj wrote: post #346
hcurtiss wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so sure. Tesla lowered prices and the press made the same kinds of predictions. Come earning season Tesla clobbered its competitors.

This isn't Tesla - its Twitter or X. You might as well jabber on about tulip bulbs.

The Musk brand sells.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#434

Post by bruce511 »

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…

There are a lot of news articles about Twitter because journalists use twitter, and have come to depend on it to boost their readership.

Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers.

These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless articles about Musk, and Twitter and anything even tangentially related.

Most people of course are not on twitter at all (and could care less). Some use it as a group-chat service. Some use it as joke-of-the-day. But the biggest user base by far is journalists who have invested in it big time.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#435

Post by baby »

andrewstuart wrote: post #200
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.

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 think one datapoint that people are missing is celebrities on instagram creating threads account and carrying their followers. For example this thread by mr beast: https://www.threads.net/@mrbeast/post/Cucz2pARLyA/?igshid=MT... (10k replies and 60k likes)

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#436

Post by bombolo »

bruce511 wrote: post #434
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…

There are a lot of news articles about Twitter because journalists use twitter, and have come to depend on it to boost their readership. Just this week there was an article on HN front page about journalism school requiring twitter accounts, and pushing journalists to build "their own brand" by getting lots of followers. These journalists hate the changes in twitter, and dont want it to go away. Hence the endless art…

journalists use twitter and love to pretend that everybody else does too, and pass a few tweets as "the people have spoken" all the time.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#437

Post by randomdata »

TX81Z wrote: post #393
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.

Yea, this is a truly impressive launch. If even 25% of people who logged in just to see the new shiny thing stuck around and became a DAU that’s utterly remarkable. This framing is absurdist.

It would be remarkable for a lot of businesses, but given that it’s just a new Instagram feature, double digit million users long term would be an abject failure for Meta. Other new-ish Instagram features like Stories and Reels now have DAUs into the billions. Still time to right the ship, of course.

Also, keep in mind this is Threads “2.0”. Threads was first launched in 2019[1]. As such, it may even be a stretch to call it new. They have taken several years to test the market and iterate on that earlier MVP to finally find a fit that found up to ~100 million users. Not exactly an overnight success.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833903/facebook-instagr...

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#438

Post by iamflimflam1 »

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…

Threads now has a “following” tab - and most importantly, so far, it hasn’t randomly switched back to the “for you” tab.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#439

Post by matheusmoreira »

dessimus wrote: post #406
macinjosh wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

journalists leaving twitter is an improvement.

Care to expound on that? Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics. Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.

> Journalists are typically the ones bringing any sort of credibility to topics.

Not at all. "Journalists" are as biased as they come. They'll sing any tune prescribed by the hand that feeds them. That hand is most often advertisers but may also be governments. Chances are the articles they produce are actually hidden advertisements or propaganda. How could anyone with such massive conflicts of interest bring credibility to literally anything? I want access to real information posted by real people, not agenda-pushing "credible authorities".

> Without journalists, it's just randos and bots shit-posting their hot takes.

What makes you think these "journalists" aren't just randoms themselves? They're not really any better than any person on this site. Their particular brand of hot take is not automatically more valid than anyone else's. As far as I'm concerned their only purpose is to generate material for us to comment on.

There is exactly one site in the entire internet I have enough respect for to call them true journalists: LWN. It's just excellent in every way and they don't need to posture as authorities for everyone else to believe it. Everything else ranks lower than HN's comment sections to me.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#440

Post by aydyn »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #430
Eisenstein wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't 'social media', that is a friend network utilizing a social media network already in place as a communications device.

This seems like a very peculiar attempt at gate keeping to me. It’s a social network application that we use to share the content that we’ve created with each other. That’s what social media is, and the use case I’m describing is basically what it was initially created for.

No they're right.

If all you're doing is keeping up with a tight-nit group of friends, you could use a million other services. Group SMS, I-message, discord, Hangouts, even plain old email.

Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?

Post reply on HN