I think a big part of the initial explosive growth was due to ease of access. Almost everybody has an instagram account, and that made it really easy for people to just “check out” threads. I’m not surprised that a lot of people didn’t end up sticking around.
Is there a rimjob_steve equivalent on Lemmy?
The fact that you find me worthy of that is truly an honor.
Not even just checking out, everyone with an Instagram account had a Threads account created or linked for them with no user input. This was done on purpose in order to boost their user count on launch. Probably 80% of people with a Threads account have never once opened the platform.
I think this is where the big numbers came from, yeah. That, and cleverly pushing up the launch date to practically the same day Elon limited access to Twitter, so everyone was looking for doomscroll methadone.
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At least not until there’s a damn web version.
Lol, this funny trend of having a stupid ass homepage that just links to an app store.
It’s for the data harvesting they get from your phone.
That is likely a benefit but let’s be honest the real reason is that a web version would require a lot of additional overhead especially to staff enough engineers.
A web wrapper for the platform would be effectively no effort, especially for a company like Facebook. The difficulties would be losing out on tracking data and dealing with annoyances like adblock
I wouldn’t be surprised if they are working on something now and just wanted to get the app out as an mvp.
This makes no sense honestly. Making a captive web app is easier than supporting two apps.
Easier doesn’t mean better though.
Twitter had the most data harvesting with news sites embedding tweets. Can’t do that with an app and no web.
And despite that I can’t believe some people are still not highly skeptical of federating with meta as though there isn’t over a decade of privacy infringing business practices. Instead wanting to hear them out after they just went through deleting content from reddit because they didn’t want to provide value to Spez, but they are fine with providing content for meta users to interact with for Zuckerberg?
Threads just needs to add more features. It’s pretty bare bones right now and has a lot of room for improvements especially comparing it to Twitter. Once they do that I think it will be easier for them to retain users.
It was alright I guess the first week, but really the big part that interested me was the Fediverse, and I really do hope people jump off Threads to come use other platforms.
Some might not and I wish Meta goes by there work and does Fediverise to allow those users to use the wider Fediverse
Someone accidentally shutdown the bot farm
“Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days.”
LOL The biggest bullshit of the year… Meta just created shadow accounts of all Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent…
Is there a way to check if a user account exists for my instagram account without logging in?
I saw this in browser: You can go the person Instagram account and see if they have a thread logo next to it.
people reported already having followers before ever using the platform, meaning all people automatically had an account created for them. that (and many other things) is also very legally problematic in the EU which is why the service isnt available here.
“An account was already created for them” because it’s the same Meta account. You can just follow people when you start your account without them necessarily activating threads.
Sole benefit of Brexit identified. We get to hand over our data to meta before you guys. It’s all been worth it.
It’s not hard to understand what was happening.
- I follow Person A and Person A follows me on Instagram
- Person A signs up for Threads before me
- I sign up for Threads after
- Because we already follow each other on Instagram, Threads automatically made Person A follow me
The issue with the EU is you can’t mingle and mix user data from two separate services.
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Not to mention all the spam bots they fail to actually ban after multiple people report.
Bots generate user engagement! Granted, it’s bad engagement, but it also generates jobs for the moderator
AIteams
Exactly. Everybody checked what is this about, then stopped gave shit and here we are
People who voluntarily tried out Threads is not the claim that was made:
Meta just created shadow accounts of all Instagram users
That is a lie.
100 million isn’t that much when it comes to Meta. There’s over 2 billion “active” Instagram users that all were prompted to download the app. That means only 0.005% of Instagram accounts fell for it.
I have no doubt that at least that many people tried it out. When I went to the Android App store, Meta was paying for a front and center promotion of Threads.
Your maths is a little off there: 100m is 5%
while you’re correct based on instagram’s numbers, the other commenter would be correct if it was a British billion which is a million millions. just a fun fact 🦄
That’s true, although the long scale billion hasn’t been a thing even in Britain for decades.
If it’s fun facts you like, try this: English is the clear odd one out, most other languages use milliard for 10^9 and billion for 10^12.
milliard - love it ty for that. Reminds me of: French: L’ananas Italian: L’ananas Icelandic: Ananas Portuguese: O ananás Swedish: Ananas German: Die Ananas
English: Pineapple
IT’S JUST A FEW DECIMAL PLACES GIVE ME A BREAK 😆
What’s a few decimal places among friends, right?
where have you found 2x10^12 people
Well, technically… they said “users”, not “people”. Maybe there are 2E12-1E8 bots… 🙃
Eh… Check your math…
Right? Seems like he is off by a couple digits, unless we are missing something
Wasn’t it announced to be the case? So it’s “just” without consent, which is already bad enough.
Do they count account creation as engagement? I suppose it was only engagement for people there
Everyone’s lurking now.
Looks like they’re tracking time on site
It’s Google Plus all over again.
If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don’t like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
I’m never going to download or sign up for TikTok. I know Meta isn’t really that great as far as privacy goes, but at least they don’t share information directly with the CCP. Fuck the CCP. IG Reels works just fine for me. I actually can’t stand the IG home feed because of the algorithm showing me what it wants to show me instead of a chronological timeline of the posts of the people I follow, so I mostly just use IG for stories and Reels.
All social media based in the U.S. share information to the three letter agency, confirmed by the NSA leaks.
I trust America more than China. If some foreign government has to have my data, I’d rather it be America.
Why? Isnt a government that directly affects you a more immediate problem? Sure we’re not authoritarian, but the things the FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, ETC have done sure look like it.
Yeah I hate that curated list bullshit. It made both FB and YouTube worse, too. And both were intended to manipulate users into spending more time there. Ironically, I haven’t been on as many YouTube dives into the random following interesting videos from the recommended ones since they started curating their list based on what you’ve previously watched (and seemingly picking one or two of them to tunnel vision on).
YouTube used to work by showing you videos that other people who watched that video watched, which was really great for music discovery. Now it shows me things that I already watched with a small sprinkling of new things. The front page still suggests things I haven’t seen before related to things I watched. I think they were pressured to make that change because it was taking impressionable people too quickly down rabbit holes of extremism… seems like it still does though.
I miss the old YouTube dives. You never knew where you would end up.
Unless you live in China, are a Chinese national, or have someone living in China who could be used to blackmail you, then you shouldn’t care much about what data the CCP has on you.
Meta shares data with the NSA and likely any other US allies, so that might be a slight concern if you live in any country like that.
Lemmy makes all its data essentially free for everyone to grab, so… Hi CCP, Hi NSA, Hi CIA, Hi MI6, Hi FSB…
lol dumbest post i read on this site this week. log off and seek therapy
if they don’t like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.
Doubt. The venn diagram of people who don’t want to use twitter and people who know what mastodon is, are separate circles with little overlap. Mastodon is not mainstream, like reddit. Redditors are still in denial about this.
Go ask a random 40 year old if they know what reddit is.
Even less people know about mastodon.
I should have been more specific, what I meant was "people who want to use a microblogging platform but don’t like who’s running the bird app. "
But I would say reddit is mainstream enough that random 40 year olds probably has heard of it now, after all the large big profile celebrity AMAs, it’s the 10th most visited site in the world and 6th in the US.
Just to point out many ex-Digg users are 30-40 years old. I would agree a 40yo normie who only use Facebook wouldn’t know about Reddit.
I’d say a lot of these 40 yo on Facebook actually got on reddit during the QAnon nonsense.
I’m not American so not sure about qanon.
Wasn’t r/the_Donald before Qanon?
There was ridiculous Q shit on reddit before Qanon became popular. In fact, that’s the first place I ever heard of it. I came upon a sub called, I think, cbts_radio (for “calm before the storm”) and was just like, what the fuck is this? It was a sub for off-topic casual discussion split off from the original cbts sub, and it was filled with the most ridiculous anti-Democrat/Hillary Clinton screechy conservative bullshit I’d ever seen. Qanon didn’t enter the public awareness for another couple of years after that.
Seems qanon is from 2017 and the_donald from 2015.
Mastodon is almost all 40yo white guys. Source: am one
And Misskey is mostly Japanese artists who need more privacy. Hence, Misskey is a Japanese product, and Japanese Twitter refugees might find Misskey useful. People should join any other Misskey instance instead, if Misskey.io is full.
Weirdly placed comment, but I do think these platforms need the advertising, so do continue to spread the word
Google+ had more than one thing wrong with it. Just for example …
The precursor to Google+ was called Google Buzz, and it was rolled out to Gmail users in a way that exposed privacy & security problems with Gmail contacts. This led to a lawsuit and a settlement which Google had to obey when releasing their next “social media” attempt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz#Privacy
As a result, Google+ became a heavy-handed effort that tried to hew closely to the settlement’s privacy & consent requirements while assimilating seemingly-unrelated projects such as YouTube comments.
IMHO Google+ had one good thing: Circles. You could define groups of people to share stuff with, without those people having to “join a group”.
I don’t think people understood it well, though.
Mastodon sort of has this.
And half of movement there is just bots reposting shit from twitter. Indeed great success.
I’m sure there’s at least a few ChatGPT bots too!
Makes sense. People are thirsty for a something along the lines of “Twitter, but fewer nazis”, so tons of people checked it out, but it still lacks feature parity with Twitter since it was a rushed-to-market MVP.
I think once it adds on a handful of new features, it’s only a matter of time before audiences gravitate to Threads over a platform whose owner is bragging about funnelling money to human traffickers.
I tried it at first too, and haven’t been on in a couple days. No Trending view and no hashtags makes it not very useful as a social network, and the novelty of text based Instagram posts wore off really quickly.
not too surprised. this happens with platforms like there where there’s a surge of initial interest and then it dies down to the people that will actually use it. it’ll either stagnate and die like most google social products, or it’ll start to grow and users will generate content that others want to see.
Expected. They haven’t added lots of essential features yet so it doesn’t even have anywhere near feature parity with Twitter, making it more pleasant and useful for people to Twitter.
No hashtags, no anonymity…. Threads has no purpose and is likely to fail unless this changes
no anonymity
I doubt that Instagram users who willingly install an another app made by Facebook care about that lol
They want anonymity from relatives/friends. Most people don’t care much about advertisers knowing their interests.
