What do you think of Threads, Meta’s new Twitter Alternative?
What do you think of Threads, Meta’s new Twitter Alternative?
Meta has launched ‘Threads’ an alternative to Twitter. Have you signed up for Threads? What do you think, does it live up to its Hype?
I believe that because of Meta copying and integrating features from their competitors (Snapchat, Twitter and others) they will create a monopoly on social media. Instagram added stories a feature on snapchat that is really popular. Slowly they will make a platform which has everything a user needs. Also they will try to buy everything just like Whatsapp.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadAnd threads are for everyone, the general public.
For now I am good with twitter though.
Threads is backed by a competent run company. Sure Facebook is on the whole likely bad for democracy and the world but it’s paying its bills and has a content moderation arm (how well it works is meh).
I’m on threads, mastodon, Twitter, and post.news. Twitter still seems to be where stuff is happening but it’s slowly falling apart and I’m seeing fewer and fewer new things there.
Threads seems to be where people are going. Having your instagram network is a baller move to bootstrap Threads. And if a quarter of instagram’s users come over it’ll have more users than Twitter and it’s already going to be extremely profitable. Threads is an existential threat to Twitter.
The idea that the blueticks could be described as "intellectual elites"... Well, I very rarely actually literally laugh out loud at this website, but that did it.
That always _kind of_ was Twitter's positioning, bar the 'paid' bit (Twitter blue, well, existed, and that's about all you could say for it), but it's not something that Musk has exactly been encouraging.
That stupid blue tick is important to have people engage in discourse, it's healthy for people to talk instead of vilifing anybody not in your bubble.
To think it represents intellectual elites is a mistake and it's missing the point.
I'd be happy if Threads establishes itself as a version of Twitters for creators, artists, scientists, professionals, and stays away from politics, trolls and polarizing opinions. If people want this, Twitter can have at it.
Also I'm looking forward to BlueSky opening as they also show promise. There won't be a single replacement, or a complete replacement, for Twitter so quickly. It'll be a process.
I don't think it'll stay that way for more than a month though. I see people tagging product owners, asking them to ban words like groomer because it induces suicide in LGBT or something. There's already giveaway campaigns to increase follower count.
It's novel fun now, enjoy it while it lasts. I fear it might be an EEE campaign to destroy the fediverse rather than twitter, but we'll see.
The "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy is introducing a technology compatible with competitors, extending that tech with proprietary additions, then using those differences to disadvantage competitors.
The "embrace, extend" phrase appeared in a 1996 New York Times article on Microsoft, and for a decade or two was considered Microsoft's de facto strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
What's the motive? The Fediverse has a 7 digit user base, while Twitter has a 9 digit user base, so why would Meta care more about the former than the latter?
Not to mention, Threads shipped without ActivityPub support, so it's obviously not their top priority.
Fediverse is slowly sloping up. That's a threat because it'll pull people away from FB, Instagram, etc.
But if 90% of the Fediverse is Threads, they have a bit more control over it. And they could ditch it later if it proves that it's no longer a threat, like they did with Parse and XMPP.
This is false. Facebook user base is increasing:
https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
> Fediverse is slowly sloping up.
Slowly being the key word. In 7 years, Mastodon has got fewer than 2 million users.
In 6 days, Threads got more 100 million users, without Fediverse support. Now that's a slope! There's something to be said for absolute numbers.
> That's a threat because it'll pull people away from FB, Instagram, etc.
Mastodon users are coming largely from Twitter. There's no evidence they're coming from Facebook and Instagram. And again, Mastodon's entire 7 year user base was surpassed in a day or two by Threads.
I’ll never use it, I don’t have any social media, but I’m all for shaking things up. Wish the same would happen with YouTube.
The whole Twitter thing is just PR.
To me, the real story is the use of ActivityPub - the decentralized protocol that powers Mastadon.
I feel like I haven't been able to nail down whether Threads uses it (I've seen sources say definitely yes, and definitely no) but to me, THAT would be the only reason to launch this thing.
Not to eat Twitter's lunch, but to be the first major player into DeSo
I've connected with so many people there.
There's also a culture of DMing there, where your messages have a higher likelihood of getting replied to than other places like LinkedIn.
I didn't use DMs for years. And also wasn't a big Twitter person at all. So I get it. But that all changed a few years ago, and now, I'm tellin ya' - the only feature that matters there is the DMs.
I can't imagine having open DMs. I've tried that, and ugh, the unsolicited messages from strangers were terrible.
Assuming it just federates as-is, though, I don't think it'll last a day on most instances.
... Eh?
I was a heavy Twitter user from 2007 to the ascension of naughty ol' mr car. I think I maybe sent ten DMs, ever. I don't think it even had them for years after launch.
Like I don't doubt that they're important to some people, but this seems like weird positioning.
That's incorrect. Also Threads is currently a MVP, and will quickly iterate to meet users demands. It can afford to quickly iterate as it's a small team that built a codebase from the ground-up. Unlike Twitter, which is saddled in a swamp of legacy where everything they touch... something breaks.
Meta is in the crosshairs of regulators after Cambridge Analytica.
Twitter is dead anyway, account walling tweets, decreased moderation and rate limits. It's all worse for any advertiser who has stuck with them post-Elon
I'll believe it when I see some actual results. With the kind of money and influence that Facebook has, the wrist slaps they get are just BAU.
Sure it's worse for advertisers but is that really what we base success on?
Ah, well, that's the rub, isn't it?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36658486
If twitter gets him political wins then that'd be a success, but there are other billionaires out there getting their way politically without burning $50bn or the public scrutiny.
My first thought was to wonder who was getting paid, who was a bot, etc.
I think everyone will get bored of the sterile nature really quick and it will either die or become Twitter 2.0
Privacy nightmare -- failure
That's too much for me so, well, not touching it.
It does not appear that any real algorithm is at work. It is just foisting stagnant posts by celebrity accounts in front of everyone, and promoting the same people that had high follower counts on Twitter... Nothing about the app is revolutionary, at all.
The site also has been randomly muting videos I upload without any sort of explanation, and there has been no response from support for this issue since I submitted it on day 1. There is very little video content, and video is not displayed particularly well, so that rules out any strong competition with TikTok.
Even though an app has 100 Million people signing up, most aren't posting, and that's just an indication that people just want to prevent others from stealing their IDs, or that perhaps many are registering fake accounts to sell or use for brigading later on. If nobody uses their accounts, it's a failure, so reports about "wild success" means very little in my opinion, especially when registration for most was simply a few clicks over from Instagram to start an account on Threads.
It doesn't seem like there is much thought behind products of this kind in terms of adding value to the experience for users... There are really just a bunch of tricks and PR to keep people signing up and in keeping people uselessly posting in hopes they will go viral. Meta built a platform, so what? They already ran 3 terrible ones that are failing miserably... In order to compete now, you have to burn a lot of cash, which pretty much shuts out the really innovative ideas, and it shows. Meta Threads is a half-baked clone of a bad era from Twitter, they really didn't ask themselves what they should have done differently, they just cloned Twitter.
This is where we are in terms of the Internet, original ideas that are highly helpful and highly functional just aren't happening, there is only "bait and switch" ideas and strategically planned opportunism developed strictly around baiting people in for profit, and that's going to just keep failing hard over time. It's really not differentiated at all from what has been done before, and it's painful to think that all that money and labor went to just recreating the same old "spinning wheel" of artificial online celebrity adoration and suppression of undiscovered talent that happens in pretty much every other major social media app these days.
It's an early start clearly to capture people frustrated by what twitter has become. There's a LOT of work still to be done though. It's more a beta than a proper full blown product at this point.
- Moderation seems reasonable, aggressively removing hateful/violent content but hardly ever banning people. So far this is keeping the more offensive bluechecks away.
- After my first few follows, the algorithmic feed quickly showed me a lot of my favorite follows from twitter, despite starting from a pretty bare follow list (I'm not much of an Insta user). So discoverability is excellent.
- UI is clean and light
- no Musk.
Cons:
- Lot of missing critical features. No thread search, no hashtags, no web-interface, no chronological feed.
- Zuckerberg.
- The algorithmic feed happily dumps an infinite list of inane celebrity and influencer fillter on you the moment you run out of your preferred content.
Mostly it's showed me how awfully Mastodon fumbled the bag with their terrible discovery. The end-zone was wide-open here.
Honestly, all Mastodon needed to win this game was the better search and some "friends of friends" kind of algorithmic feed. Now it's probably too late.
- The lack of a web interface to browse Threads is frustrating, you can only view a specific thread someone has shared a link to before it forces you to download the app. - No following feed, so I've had to mute dozens of media/political/brand accounts that appear on the homepage. - No chronological feed is annoying. - You also can't search for keywords/hashtags. I primarily use twitter to receive real time commentary on events, so this is the biggest downside in my opinion.
Overall, Threads feels like a beta product that was rushed to release to take advantage of the rate limits implemented on Twitter. We'll see in a few months if Meta can follow through in building an app with the feature parity of Twitter.