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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

#461

Post by ggm »

If you want an example of "inside the bubble" it's thinking any of the social media channels, private or not for profit represent a realistic cohort of community engagement comparable to "the people have spoken"

It's some people, sometimes, in some contexts, saying some things which go to opinion. It's no better or worse than a radio or TV "vox pop" and equally biassed. Or that eternal source of truth "the man in the street you met in the pub that time" or a taxi driver.

I think it's social cancer and I regret ever participating and taking it seriously. It certainly caused me harm, to my own sense of self and to personal relations and trust.

Do yourself a favour and drop out. By all means stay if you enjoy it, but at least drop out of any belief and claim its a true expression of public views in the wide.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#462

Post by aydyn »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #442
aydyn wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? It’s the media bit… Insta is created to share pictures and videos with your _own_ selection of followers. You couldn’t do that in WhatsApp without creating some horrific cartesian product of different groups chats for every node o…

"It's the user experience" haha

Yeah you couldn't do it by whatsapp, but you could do it with discord, slack, teams, skype and a bunch of other services that you failed to mention to create a strawman.

That you get so defensive is really, and I mean REALLY, telling of the real reason.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#463

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #386
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It (mastodon) peaked in November. Musk's antics might prop it (Mastodon) up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. At least that's what I think you mean. Lots of ambiguous "it" in the text above. Not accurate according to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/ or my subjective experience. mastodon is fine. mastodon is growing. Mastodon is fundamentally not a business that needs to "ge…

People keep claiming this but it isn’t reality. Not one of the programmers I follow have posted on mastodons in the last couple of months. There was a huge rush of most of the people I follow going to mastodon. But even those who still has their mastodons links in their name or profile haven’t posted in months. The fact is that discussions happen on Twitter. Not mastodon.

Saying "Not one of the programmers I follow have posted on mastodons in months" we can't argue with, I don't know who those people are, that's your subjective experience and YMMV, you do you.

But this is not my subjective experience actually. And yes I follow "programmers" and other IT people in the mix. I'm not here to tell you what's true _for you_ but you appear to be telling me that what I experience isn't "reality". On the contrary, it works fine for me, as I said above.

"Discussions happen only on X not Y" is a binary, absolutist, black or white thinking. If taken literally, it is ridiculous. I suppose you would also say that this here isn't a discussion, because that's "only on twitter"?

Discussions and communities are going to happen in different places. It's almost like there's a use for a protocol that lets them interoperate in some kind of "loose association".

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#464

Post by ryzvonusef »

I have a particular problem with Threads/Instagram and Tiktok, that I feel I don't have with either Youtube or Twitter; region base recommendations after signing in.

I can understand that if you are not signed in, the recommendations are based on which country you are in, so that's understandable. But once I log in, if you continue to recommend content based on the region as my default option, and NOT based on my following/watching habits, it becomes annoying.

Most region based content is boring (I do NOT care about sports or entertainment gossip or whatever), but the local content in my region is especially cringe inducing, that I feel physically repulsed. On Youtube and Twitter, I rarely encounter such content, it mostly what I follow and things extending from that.

But for some reason, I cannot, despite my best efforts, seem to curate my feed on Threads/instagram nor on tiktok; it heavily seems to weight the locally popular content on my recommended feed, and moreover makes it the default view.

It even makes it difficult to switch to a following tab, there is an air of "no, don't you dare pick and choose what you want to read/watch, WE will pick what you will view and you will like it".

There are so many tiktokers who I like, but I only follow on their youtube shorts channel, because watching on tiktok or instagram makes me ill.

Threads is no better, I will be reading a thread from some one I like and one swipe and dammit, another cringe worthy thread about some repulsive nonsense, and I close the app.

We are told that social media apps are supposed to entertaining and addictive; youtube and twitter are catering to my addiction, the other apps don't, and if I feel repulsed rather than drawing in, I shan't visit their site and they can't serve me ads to make money.

____

I am not sure if it's because I got into youtube/ twitter early and was able to spend time shifting through dirt to find gold (time I don't seem to be willing to tiktok, I presume)...

or something about algorithms each company uses, because I never really liked facebook/instagram and I have closed my facebook account long ago, not because of some moral stand but because I found the app so boring.

I only keep instagram because of my old highschool fellows are there, and I like to be able to congratulate them on the birth of their babies, otherwise I rarely interact with the damn app, it never recommends me anything nice to watch, despite the years facebook spent collecting my data.

If you are going to invade my privacy and collect my data, why don't I get something useful out of it?

you know which popular accounts I follow and which segments my likes fall into, and I spent weeks trying to nudge you into things I like and avoid things I don't like, why don't you learn, dammit?

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#465

Post by linza »

worthless-trash wrote: post #453
linza wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot has to do with provenance. For journalists this is their day job, they post with their real name and usually under some larger entities name. They are perhaps as biased as everyone else, but it's easier to figure out the biases.

I don't believe one can make any decisive decision about bias in business funded journalism other than self interest.

I probably misunderstand your point, but if your point is that a given journalist can never be reliable then I agree, but that is also not the idea perhaps. We cannot hope to have only unbiased views, we can only average them out by consuming from multiple sources with known biases.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#466

Post by mendigou »

nemo8551 wrote: post #168
hooverd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon isn't going to be /the/ new place. Hopefully it will become part of many new places.

For me mastodon is where I get my cybersecurity and infosec chat from now. HN is my generic techy stuff Reddit replacement, insta for mountain biking and twitter is for lower league Scottish football- it’s very well setup on there. I’m not sure where threads sat for me, it was all the same folk who I follow on instagram but only posting text, now they post pics on thread and their reels on insta. I’m not fully up on…

Any recs on security follows on Mastodon?

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#467

Post by bg24 »

Forcing engagement is in Meta’s culture. Out of the blue, suddenly I have started seeing friends notifications from my contacts list. 9 out of 10 times, people on Instagram will generally accept this. But Twitter/Threads users are different. Instagram culture may not necessarily work for Theeads.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#468

Post by jacooper »

water9 wrote: post #390
jacooper wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%, once Twitter falls, I would probably just leave it all. Maybe LinkedIn for the professional stuff.

That’s called growing up, but there’s a new one of you born every minute

How? It's not like Twitter Userbase is particularly young, neither is HN.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#469

Post by eertami »

bombolo wrote: post #436
bruce511 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, also comms/marketing people. I once had to explain to someone that nobody outside of Twitter has ever cared about anything that has ever happened on Twitter. It is a pure bubble of unimportant drivel.

The only people who would even know are other Twitter users, most real people in real life don't use it and they are not interested or affected at all.

Re: Threads users down by more than a half

#470

Post by eertami »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #370
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…

Elon is trying to turn Twitter/X into the wests WeChat. So at least he’s doing something interesting? I’m back in the Elon corner. Is he goes down, it’ll be doing something interesting at least. Meta might have a head start with WhatsApp, but I don’t see them doing anything interesting or well.

There is no feature Twitter/X could bring to chat that would take users away from WhatsApp. It already covers 100% of it's users needs, is free, and has near complete market penetration in many regions. (If you are talking to anyone in Europe by text, you will always use WhatsApp)
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