Only by half? I thought traffic on Threads was off by 90% a week after the launch when "one hundred million people joined"... then again they probably joined just to see what it was, were unimpressed, and went back to Mastodon or Twitter.
So 100M+ Threads accounts created with 50M+ active users still sticking around on Threads after the media hype and fanfare? Compare that to the rest of the other so-called 'alternatives' other than Twitter / X that is a much better result especially in less than a month and the closest to a proper alternative to Twitter / X.
This is even without launching in the EU, so as soon as Threads is available in the EU, they can get another 100M+ easily anyway.
This is what I call 'early days'. We'll see what happens in 6 months or a year whether if people want to continue using Threads rather than initial sign ups. Retention is what matters.
It seems to have enough people that it has some legs. I am really looking forward to a web version of it, but otherwise enjoy it, despite some growing pains.
Edit2 If I think about it some, the biggest drawback about Threads for me is swapping one egocentric billionaire who is rapidly going off the rails for another who is, for the moment, more stable, but has still accumulated a godawful amount of wealth and power. Mastodon seems like the alternative if you really hate that kind of setup, but... it doesn't seem to have much traction.
I would be awestruck if they made a web version. Instagram goes through great pains to screw web users. Apps have more control and collect more data after all.
I kind of doubt it will get an API. Seems like Reddit and Twitter have come to regret how much power an API gives to users to sidesteps or whatever they don't like about the platform.
>Mastodon seems like the alternative if you really hate that kind of setup, but... it doesn't seem to have much traction.
People keep saying this as if the only "success" mastadon can have is by being in everyone's pocket. It's not an SV unicorn startup, it's not trying to buy out some investors. It's doing exactly what it is designed to do: be a user owned platform. Not everyone will want that all the time, and some people will never want that, and that's fine, not everyone spent 24/7 on the forums of the old web either.
We could stop considering "Everyone is using it all the time" as the desired end goal maybe?
for social media though that's a pretty important end goal. If the people I want to follow aren't using it, then I don't want to use it either. It's like with messenger apps - the one that everyone else is using is the one that wins. And if they aren't using it and I am, then part of my use of the platform becomes trying to get the people I want to talk to onto the platform. It's not a silicon valley thing - it's a communications thing. "everyone is using it all the time" was an important end goal for the post office too, and highways and other shared infrastructure with network effects.
> It seems to have enough people that it has some legs.
My view too. Not the best service ever offered, but allows me to continue distancing myself from Twitter.
Would I much prefer it if Twitter was a public company and/or ran by anyone else? Sure, but that isn't happening, so, I'll take Mastodon and any other reasonable alternative. We'll see how the market pans out.
An aspect of me wants Mastodon to win... but there's a deep cynicism in it ever working at Twitter scale (which may be the point, in the end).
I think, in retrospect, they made a mistake in launching quickly before having core features. There was a desire to capitalize on twitter technical issues.
> Mr Zuckerberg [...] described the situation as "normal" and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.
I think if it was normal, they wouldn't have publicly spiked the football after the admittedly incredible signup numbers. They would have been a bit more humble, said they expected most users to leave soon after, but that this is an encouraging sign (or something to that effect). Maybe a bit more celebratory, but playing with expectations a bit more. They started off with INCREDIBLY humble talking points about likelihood of failure and then I think just got too excited.
None of this is to suggest they have no chance. They still have a ton of users and I'd still consider the launch a success overall.
It'd be a lot more compelling to me if it had a "people I follow" feed. I get that they didn't want it to be empty on launch, but at least giving me the option would mean I could at least have a chance of seeing mainly people I know on there.
I've seen threads posts linked from Instagram stories. I think that's the main sharing use case right now. I don't know because I haven't bothered signing up for threads.
That's the problem: if you don't sign up (as I haven't), you can remain blissfully unaware of Threads. The same isn't true of Twitter.
I stand corrected on other Meta properties linking it, but, of course, they have to get links outside of that sphere to compete with Twitter on mindshare.
Huh? I see them all the time. And even without that, HN and reddit still link twitter or snapshot it. I have no idea what the Threads app looks like still!
Interesting that even without the ability to really use it on the web, Threads already has a better anonymous-user web view than Twitter.
Since the recent changes, on Twitter you can't see replies if you're linked to a tweet while not logged in, and you don't even have any indicator that replies exist and that you could see them with an account. The whole implementation of the changes in that area is a real baffler.
I'm just pointing out that it's been broken to a state where even an app-centric thing like Threads, spun off from web- and anonymous-hostile Instagram no less, is a better experience to link to.
This is being reported in a strange way. We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users as if they lost something by not getting 100% of them to engage. Do we even have numbers for what percent of twitter users actively engage versus total user base?
I don't think they are doing very bad considering it's mobile only right now.
"Not getting 100%" is a bit of a straw man argument.
"Less than half" is significant, particularly when the CEO (to his credit) is calling it out as something that must improve. And it matters to balance the existing narrative from the Verge, which seems to just regurgitate Meta's VP's language about it being a runaway success.
>We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users as if they lost something by not getting 100% of them to engage.
I mean, we should? Startup valuations are full of MAU pumping and straight bullshit, so why shouldn't we judge their numbers with a cynical eye? Meta claimed a number of users the first few days, well, half of them aren't using it anymore, so they aren't "Users"
I did my own assessment of G+ later, after there was much discussion of Google's own "engagement" numbers for the platform meeting open skepticism. (I used the platform heavily myself and appreciated elements of it.)
I think we're seeing more and deserved skepticism generally in accepting statements of activity at face value, which is a Good Thing in my view.
This was nearly a year after G+ launched. The article in question here is about three weeks after the launch of threads. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me...
I picked a particular item with significant HN discussion. The fact that it was data-backed (a 40k profile analysis) also means that it lags actual activity. As with all complex evolving situations, hard empirical data are not realtime.
The "ghost town" label had been stuck on G+ within the first few weeks, yes.
HN discussion from September 2011 (G+ launched in July):
Way too much conflation with labels, timelines, types of project, recollections from 12 years ago, etc. for me. Also we're comparing Meta, a company with experience running two successful social networks against Google of ten plus years ago, with none.
Your original position was "We don't typically write about startups gaining initial signups and then compare them to the active users".
I've given multiple examples of just such a comparison being made over a decade ago.
In both cases, the new launch was by an existing giant in the sector, with claimed performance being not entirely credible.
Google of a decade ago had launched [edit: or aquired, but in either event, run] Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).
The Social space is immensely fickle, and the ability of even an established industry giant to succeed with a new venture is fairly thin. Facebook has largely bought rather than made its own follow-on successes to date (as did Google in buying YouTube).
Note edit above. Poor language choice around pedants.
>Google of a decade ago had launched Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).
Google didn't "launch" youtube. They purchased it. It was big before they purchased it. Regarding Reader, calling something "small but quite significant" is nonsensical. Additionally you're propping up a failed application which wasn't even a social network as a success.
As I said, your comparisons included far too much conflation of several varieties for me to take them seriously.
Could you just be specific about why the first example brought up doesn't apply, instead of letting the other person put themselves out there to advance the discussion and finding little details to accuse them of bad faith?
The idea that forgetting that Google failed horribly with Google Video before buying YouTube is a "smell" of bad faith is weird.
I did regarding the timelines, then they pivoted to including HN threads in the comparison when my original statement was about articles. I don't know what you're talking about regarding Google Video, I did not mention it.
It's often easier to search within a specific timeframe on Hacker News itself given Algolia search's excellent date-range functions, and the fact that HN itself is strongly time-oriented. There are doubtless other stories elsewhere, but it would be more tedious to track those down and verify that they actually came from the period under consideration.
It's also possible to search via comments, with one useful set of terms being "Google+" and "ghost town", an assessment which was being thrown about early on.
And we can link directly to the HN threads and see what contemporaneous discussions were like and how they characterised the issue at the time.
By contrast, date-ranged General Web Search on, say, DuckDuckGo or Google is often confounded by Web pages which have inaccurate date indicia, or have been misclassified as to time by search engines. It's much more tedious to try to find specific content matching time criteria, though the universe of total such articles is obviously larger. Fortunately for this case, Google+ was of sufficient interest to HN that there were numerous submissions concerning it submitted early on, many of course highly syncophantic, but also concerning the rather fumbling rollout and weak adoption.
Amongst other possible archives, Google+ itself is no longer extant, and so cannot be searched. Its own search features did not afford date-ranged search, though I'm well aware that there was much early hand-wringing over the "brutally unfair" stories (in the framing of G+ advocates) circulating at the time.
Reddit might be another useful trove, though I'm avoiding that for the time being. Search there is limited to only the initial story title and, in a limited number of cases, the "self-text" content of text-based posts. Pointedly, comments aren't searchable on Reddit itself, and so the potential match space is far more constrained than it is on Hacker News.
Despite those limitations, in answering your own historically uninformed vague hand wave that the response to Facebook's Threads launch is exceptional, I'd given numerous specific and quantified examples from a roughly comparable time period for Google's G+ launch strongly suggesting otherwise.
Yes, the data I brought to bear are subject to a strong availability heuristic. But the evidence presented is rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.
My comment was about news articles and you opened it up to HN threads and academic papers and whatever else. You hand waved away the fact that your timelines were vastly different, and are now complaining about pedantry when in several cases basic facts eluded you which changed your arguments when edited. You continually paraphrase my comment in an incomplete manner in order to serve your view.
No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.
For how counter-cultural HN has always prided itself in being, I find it a bit hard to believe just how much the media has shaped the story here. There's a lot of reason to be skeptical... it's not that I like Musk but the media doesn't like him and that's no secret. I find it to be quite the opposite of what you're saying, that their press team has done a good job of shaping the story positively for Meta.
The puff piece in the WSJ combined with the all the positive press over the success of Threads, with now a quite rosy view of how it has played out since. I'm personally not a believer that they internally think Threads is a success, but to each their own. I constantly hear from my engineering co-workers about how much Twitter has changed and how the sky is falling, but the user numbers don't back that up and my user experience seems to be much the same.
>For how counter-cultural HN has always prided itself in being
Really? A bunch of engineering types who work for big corporations and who also dream and or do start their own hopefully big corporations prides themselves as being "counter-cultural?" That seems like a tough generalization to support.
It’s also encumbant company solely owned by the worlds richest man versus enormous global corporation mostly owned by another one. There is no counter-culture here.
Right, and the closest thing I can recall to a counter-culture here is occasionally seeing the suggestion that software engineers should unionize. The rest is bread and butter tech culture (which loves obscure technical topics, psychedelic drugs, discussing money, various ways of accomplishing tasks in a clever way, statistics, design and so on).
Much to your point of media having an apparent dislike for Musk, I had noticed Business Insider dominating anti-Musk coverage. It was so much so that when they published a flattering article about him I was shellshocked.
I think people assume that because Musk is highly successful that he is a normal person, worthy of being judged by such a standard. From the outside nothing seems normal about him to me. He is almost certainly on the spectrum, yet fairly highly functional.
I attribute half of the hatred for him not because of his behavior, but because of the general anger towards the billionaire class.
I think the sharp divide in perception of him shows that polarization within America has reached unhealthy levels. I won't invoke the terms used to describe people believed to be pro or anti Musk here, but I think most know them. I wish we could get to a point where we discuss less about people and more about their individual actions.
While I can’t deny that people, including the media, have a general disliking for him, there’s plenty of puff pieces to be found, especially by corporate friendly outlets.
Business Insider in particular likes to publish articles that are either outright shameless puff pieces or occasionally contain thinly veiled attempts at spinning things in his favor.
As for the disliking or hatred towards him, I’m not sure why this puzzles you.
He is simply an unlikable person, doing unlikable things.
Yeah sure it doesn’t help that he’s wealthy in this time and age and it also doesn’t help that he’s attributed accomplishments of mythical proportions that are mostly veneer, nor does it help that he seemingly has taken it upon himself to disprove the business acumen that people attribute to him, but all of those are just cherries on top.
Certainly not half the reason people dislike him.
Gates, Zuckerberg and Bezos are in the same order of magnitude as Musk (at least from the perspective of most people) and don’t nearly get as much hate, because they don’t act like utter tools at every single chance they get.
That’s it, that’s the reason. It’s not rocket science.
Which is why it’s weird that you seem to yearn for a time where people will judge him on his individual actions, when they already do so.
We don't expect the number of active users to ever fall in an startup.
You are correct in that this was unavoidable because the original number was artificially inflated in a non-sustainable way. But well, that would be a huge red flag for a startup too. It is less so for a giant company like Meta, as they can eat the loss from forcing the market, but it is still ridiculous, even for a company as large as Meta.
There's often an early "tyre kicker" phase, with people signing up to explore a service. Or to ensure that others don't misappropriate well-known account handles.
User attrition / retention rates for sites, services, and apps are well-studied and closely watched.
E.g., "Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app installs worldwide in 3rd quarter 2022, by category"
That mostly only makes the number of users to fall if new people stop coming at some point. To some non-stablished service, people stopping to come is death.
As an example, Facebook (the site, distinguished from other aquisitions) has seen stagnant or falling usage in certain markets, notably the US and EU, as of about 5--6 years ago:
So, did the number of active Facebook users ever go down before it was a dominant player on social networks? Or are you claiming that Threads is ok because it's as big as it is ever going to be and it is all downwards from now on?
I'm saying that Facebook's specific history (the OG FB site/app) is not a great basis for comparison as it's such an extreme outlier. Launching new social networks is fraught, but an uneven start is not a necessary kiss of death. And even Facebook has seen growth plateaus.
Facebook is one case, and is still the largest (or among: TikTok and a few newer entrants may be giving it a run for its money).
But if you want to look at multiple platforms over time, it helps to ... well, consider other cases.
I've been something of a purveyor of niche and smaller social networks, from the beginning (Usenet). What I've observed of these is that even among those which continue for a considerable period as a viable option there is the tyre-kicker uptake, a fade back, and then ... several possible trajectories. One of those is straight to the floor, but another is to have either a steady base or a longer and slower growth.
Sure, both of those are death for a venture-backed site or service. But if that's not the foundation, then steady-state or long-steady-growth is a viable option.
And I've seen the pattern:
- On Google+: there was an initial excitement, then the site got stale (2011--2013 or so), then I (and from what I can tell, others) came back. The forced integration with YouTube annoyed a lot of people (on G+, on YouTube, and of course, Not On Either). After about 2015 things seemed to go into a long slow fade, which turned into a race for the exits after the planned shutdown was announced in 2018.
- On Diasapora*: Similar pattern, though I'd participated early on (2011-ish), after leaving G+ for a spell (around 2013--14), and then returned to the site with the G+ shutdown announcement. Some long-standing gripes and personal hardware failures had me lose interest about a year ago, though there quite honestly still is a good community there.
- Ello: It was (somewhat poisonously) plastered with the "Facebook Killer" label in 2015, and saw a few periods of excitement buzz. The site remained small (a few hundred thousand MAU, low millions of total accounts, by my own guess, verified in person with Ello staff), but had a vibrant community. The killer was sale of the site to a VC with the original staff gagged as part of the agreement. Various protections (B-Corp organisation and highly member-friendly policies) seemed to disappear at that point, and most of the small crowd I'd followed there drifted elsewhere.
- Mastodon: I'd joined in 2016/7, participated a bit, faded off, then came back. After HN it's my most active online presence. Mastodon's long-term growth has shown numerous large-influx phases where a significant influx of new members arrive, some of whom remain active. The trend is episodic but positive.
- Tildes.net: Launched by an ex-Reddit staffer, deimos, the site's been ticking along as an invite-only beta since 2016. I've given more invites in the past three months than the previous seven years, so far as I can recall. As with other sites, it seems to gain and lose activity on phases, though overall seems to be growing.
- Imzy: An ill-fated venture which followed the "crater rapidly" phase. It remains the most socially-dysfunctional online network I've ever participated in directly, strongly at odds with its "kinder, gentler Reddit" labeling.
- Hacker News: The site has seen a long steady slow growth since opening to the public in 2007. I've been studying front-page activity for the past few months, one element of which is looking at total activity (votes and comments) on those front-page stories and how that's changed over time. It's an interesting dataset as there are a fixed number of items per year (10,950, 10,980 in a leap year, based on 30 per day), but as participation increases we'll see more activity on the page, and metrics such as dist...
The low-water (or low-spice) mark was 2011, at 38.185. High-spice was 2007, though in the post-2010 world (after HN has more-or-less stabilised, and after the flamewar detector was implemented), it's reached in 2022.
For those who think discussion's getting more heated, there's some evidence of that.
Note that HN's "flamewar detector" is triggered for comments > 40 and comments/votes > 1 (or 100 as I calculate it above), best as I understand.
A part of these users might be europeans? Initially it worked here if you created a US App Store account, but after 10 days they disabled it based on VPN & IP. Like everybody in my European network had the app installed and is not using it anymore because of this.
> Meta has since added new features, such as separate "following" and "for you"' feeds
I haven't used Threads, but it's 2023. People have years of experience and expectations using social media, also probably shorter attention spans. I'm fairly sure that an launch ready MVP in 2023 should be WAY more feature full than 5-10 years ago.
I know there are other factors at play here as well regarding retention, but I don't think one can easily recover from a highly popular lauch with uncompetitive features.
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 algorithmic feed on Twitter made a lot of people skeptical of that. Throw in the phone-app-only interface and it’s not where my people want to be. It’s a chicken and egg problem to be sure, and I don’t know where the new writer bar is going to be. It might end up being Threads ultimately, but the big challenge is for whatever new platform to get the movement happening.
If I had to guess what the indicator of where the new writer bar ends up, it will be wherever Joyce Carol Oates goes. Not because people like her or her tweets necessarily, but that she’s kind of like the black hole at the center of a galaxy, you don’t want to get too close (she’s the queen of the bizarre takes, not to mention her post with a rather disturbing picture of her feet), and yet everything kind of ineluctably ends up orbiting around her anyway.
> Threads failed the smell test early on because it started out with algorithmic feed
That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting with people you care more about.
A common complaint with Threads was that, no after who you blocked or muted, it's near impossible to get away from a feed filled with influencers and common celebrity gossip nonsense. That seems to be part of the ongoing design intent - not just an aspect of how they wanted to bootstrap the service.
Agree, they rolled out the "Following" tab and it's a ghost town. Shipping it with the algorithmic feed at least made it look like a lively, if somehwat chaotic place.
I'd like to see some semi centralized but social benefit Corp create a Twitter that utilizes the h factor score that scientific researchers have.
ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are accurate.
Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more respected the brighter the blue color.
> 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 use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?
And if you don't pay for twitter blue you can't DM people anymore unless they know to explicitly turn off that new filter. You also are limited in how many tweets you can view in a day, and without paying your reach is also shortened.
At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.
If you're using twitter web, the Control Panel for Twitter browser extension takes the 'for you' abomination behind the back of the barn and gives it both barrels.
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 decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.
The network Twitter has will be hard to break for sure. But I think it's already worth much less than what he paid. Musk needs to be careful here, it is possible to lose.
It couldn’t be more fundamentally different for people who just want to read content without an account. Previously, Twitter was a thing that existed, now it’s not a thing that exists.
99.9% of people will just click the google login button and continue on as if nothing had happened. i sympathize with you. i had to make a throwaway google account. but it's not even close to relevant to the vast majority of users. not saying that's a good thing but it's reality.
Based on the most recent estimates of Twitter's value, Musk has already train wrecked 10s of billions of dollars.
You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.
It doesn’t usually matter to the user “why” a product is no longer appealing.
Financial woes though will usually produce change that impacts the user, for better or worse (a good kick in the ass, or craven desperation may follow).
I never made the claim that a user should. The guy I was replying to said "Musk isn't going to train-wreck 10s of billions" and I was responding to that.
I'm pretty sure the limit was one of his experiments that he's since rolled back on. It may even have been an emergency measure to mitigate the worst effects of another bug, but I'm not sure if he's ever been openly honest about any of this. There was certainly a weekend where the limit was imposed, then raised, then—I think—raised again... and I don't think we've really heard anything about it since.
I had hit the rate limit a few trimes when it was new, but never since then. I think the limit has been either removed or vastly reduced from that experience. I don't see any of the people I follow complaining about it either.
The feed could be somewhat overlooked, at least for the time being, if hashtags and searching were properly implemented. If no interesting conversations appear in my feed then there's no way for me to spend more time on Threads. Open, Look, Close. Repeat that a few times and give up. I gave it a chance but there's just so little to do.
> 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.
First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't.
My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly revert back to their familiar network that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).
Last year Mastodon went through a hype cycle. Everyone was declaring Twitter over. You had people stating they were leaving for good, dual-posting, etc. Funnily enough many of those same people are back on Twitter today with little mention of Mastodon.
It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave.
Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be the most avid hardcore fans.
It did peak in December last year, but then it "declined" and stabilized at more than double the active users it had before Elon bought Twitter: https://mastodon-analytics.com/
That chart is missing the big late-june/early-july burst that came when Twitter locked out non-registered users and put a cap on read tweets. Big bump in new registrations and since then activity has been up a bunch as well. Not as big as December, but mostly because it was short lived.
It’s so funny to me watching everyone debate about what is or isn’t going to be the next ultimate single massive platform.
I, and many Fediverse people, are on the Fedi explicitly hoping it isn’t in that list. Mastodon is a success to me because of the thousands of people on it and that I interact with, and that it is precisely not containing the masses.
So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter.
Mastodon and Lemmy/etc are a smash success to me. They have more traffic, users and activity than the other comparable options combined (citation needed). And most importantly, they did it without becoming the next big thing.
Plus if, god forbid, it does become the next big thing - It can still isolate and be a small forum. That alone is lovely to me.
The Mastodon "hype cycle" was jam packed with people saying "this isn't it"[1]. The choice of server, account migration issues (partly resolved), and just some aesthetic reasons made it obvious it wasn't going to be the thing. There was a strong, I would say majority sentiment that everyone was waiting for some more Twitter-like competitor.
"Everyone was declaring Twitter over."
I mean...Twitter is very much over. References to Twitter, or Twitter being the canonical source, has utterly disappeared. Whole media spheres have made Twitter just another place, not the place. Whole fields have dried up on Twitter.
If you're hardcore into culture wars, Twitter is probably your place. Probably feels as alive as ever. In virtually any other field (sports, media, tech), while some people with big accounts are still trying to hang on -- for obvious reasons as other platforms just set them back -- engagement and "the crowd" has absolutely dissolved. Governments, agencies and groups used Twitter as a public space, and not only have many pulled back, I cannot fathom anyone making that choice today.
And that doesn't mean one needs to cite where someone replaced their "Twitter-like" activity. Many people just took it as an opportunity to assess the joy that sort of site was bringing them and decoupled. In the same way that the decline of blogger didn't mean that other sites grew the same amount...many people just stopped blogging.
[1] isn't it for a "general public, all topics" solution. Mastodon absolutely is a technical solution for niche spaces and groups and is absolutely flourishing in those realms.
> ...As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave...
But, i would posit that there is a rhetorical currency exchange at play here. The "value" that one might assign to a silo like Facebook or Threads is not the same "value" one might assign to various software stacks and/or networks on the Fediverse. Like, its not enough for me to state that they're different/like comparing apples vs oranges. I mean, for example, if I only have a single kid/offspring, does that mean that i have not grown the "value" of my family, because i have not maximized my partner's reproductive capabilities, or resorted to adoption to extend that, etc.? That's sill of course. Well, i assure you, the intent of networks on the Fediverse is NOT the same as the goals and intent of silos like Facebook, twitter, threads, etc.
I think @unshavedyak stated it great with their comments, but this is my favorite of theirs: "...So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter..."
> 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 "get big fast or die trying" so that VCs can make their big ROI back. Slow, steady improvement is fine. Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in decline. (1)
I'd say - to write the above in a clearer way: "Twitter peaked in November 2022 and then went into decline. Musk's antics might prop twitter up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users of twitter will be the most avid hardcore fans."
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".
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 all the fedoverse stuff but I think that’s just due to a lack of effort so far.
Mastodon has been really cool recently. It was bare at first, but I've been back since November and there's a critical mass of awesome shit and cool people imo.
People are certainly going somewhere (outside?), what isn't happening is for all of them going to the same place. IMO, that's a very good thing, but it does break any ambition of social world domination large companies may have.
Xitter has moved from offering 50% off ad purchases of $250k a couple months ago to threatening removal of "gold checks" from companies that don't spend $1k.
That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.
The thing is that what matters is not the total number of users but who those users are. Anecdotally, there has been a slow exodus of people in my writer circles from Twitter, either deleting their accounts or just not using them as much. I’ve found less to bring me back each day. There might be people engaging more to make up for it, but they’re not the people in my circles.
Mastodon (actually, the Fediverse as a whole) is still growing in a very healthy, organic rate. Threads just tried to buy its way into a bootstrapped network.
> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
Just about all the people whose opinions I'm interested in hearing are on Mastodon now. I don't really care if anyone else shows up. Maybe it's better that they don't.
Right. Hell, I wasn't among those saying Mastodon was going to be the "new place" or that Twitter was otherwise on its way out. Even with my proximity to tech circles, Mastodon seemed to me hardly a blip on most people's radars.
I only finally checked it out during all the Reddit protests and am thoroughly amazed to simply see content without all the cruft.
It is only now that I don't feel as sure; Twitter still has its login wall today. I reactivate my facebook account only when, say, I absolutely need to interact with a particular small page/business. I don't use Instagram. I have only since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following list and make a first pass at building my Fedifeed by seeing who's moved over (incidentally, most of the people I follow that are still active). This time, I might actually check my feed regularly while logged in, since I'm not seeing a sponsored submission or ad every other post.
Yeah, same here. For my purposes, Mastodon is superior to what Twitter was at its peak.
I only look at Xitter for Ukraine news - that community hasn't migrated elsewhere. But that's mostly on third-party pages, I don't log in anymore, so the site itself is useless to me.
you're here, and your old blog is about tech stuff, so there's a decent chance you follow a lot of tech people. there are plenty of _those_ on mastodon, because tech people will suffer through bad UX if the product has certain qualities that that community values (federation being the big one in this case)
that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols (most people) throw up their hands and leave at the first notion of needing to choose an instance or needing a JS bookmarklet to follow someone not on your instance
plenty of those people are experts in their field and write interesting content i wouldn't otherwise encounter, but they aren't migrating to mastodon because of that, and there's a decent chance they won't migrate anywhere and will return to sharing their work in niche walled garden academic journals and conferences
sure, mastodon maybe keeps out the garbage firstnamelastname9023285023 accounts that do nothing but send low-content replies and retweet inane celebrity(s' social media managers') posts, but it's keeping them out because only a very specific population will bother to get in, which is a bad filter
> that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols
It is a startup wisdom that it is better to have less users who love your product than many who merely like it. Tech-savy people often have a strong opinions (both positive and negative). By the mentioned startup wisdom, it can be very valuable to have them as users.
I don't go to Twitter to read takes by other programmers about a world which exists only online. I go to Twitter to discuss the world in front of us, a world which hasn't been so exciting and full of conflict for a very long time.
Mastodon is great if you want to read nerds talking with other nerds. For the rest of the population though, we need some takes from outside the nerd-cage.
VC money is tight right now, and Twitter was never profitable. If I were an investor, you'd have to have some kind of revenue story if you were selling me a Twitter killer.
Mastodon works for the people who are willing to "pay" (in social labor or hosting money) the startup costs. Threads very likely has the limitations it has because that's what Meta thinks will generate useful advertising data — their bread and butter.
For tech people, I think the most likely way to get a Twitter killer in the near-medium term would be to convince Microsoft to add that feature to Github. As usual, you're the product.
> First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
Mastodon is chugging along, still growing steadily, unglamorously. I don't see a boom and bust there. It is unbacked by VC "get big or die trying" money, not buoyed by big tech or media hype. Don't write it off in a week or a month.
I completely agree that Mastodon isn't the new place, and I am increasingly thinking Threads may not be either (at least not to Twitter level, or not for a few years), however I'm very convinced that Twitter is no longer the place either.
The technology is crumbling (see rate limiting, interaction counts), the product is moving further away from what people want not towards it (see Zuck's tweets about Threads to see what popular product direction looks like, even if it's not perfect), the ad quality has dropped very noticeably suggesting they've lost good top paying advertisers, the new ad payout program suggests that their ad inventory is low anyway (see also interaction numbers here too), and the culture has gone from pretty bad to openly hostile to large swathes of the population, at least among English speakers (see anti-trans trending topics, rise of hate speech).
I'd agree that reversion to the mean and people going back to what they know is the most likely course of action in most circumstances, but these are not most circumstances. Twitter can't recover from this, at least not without a change of leadership and many years to rebuild.
Mastodon was really never going to be that place where most of the internet moved. It would've been nice in a perfect world, but it's simply not set up as an advertiser-friendly social networking site that would attract celebrities and brands, and quite frankly I think the vast majority of its userbase considers that a feature and not a bug.
Still, I believe that BlueSky and Threads remain a looming existential threat to Twitter. One important role that Twitter filled was being the de-facto centralized RSS feed. It is by far the thing that I see that Twitter is still used for, even by ex-Twitter users and people like me who never used the site in the first place.
To be the centralized RSS feed, you need a web-facing interface, so you can pass links around over the clearnet. Threads doesn't have one. BlueSky isn't even open to the greater public yet. But either one of those could change overnight.
I'm getting regular bluesky invites, and people use them. It looks like the most "correct" implementation to me at this stage, although the having to jump through hoops to share videos is frustrating.
That tracks with what I'm seeing - BlueSky is where most of my twitter-addict friends have either already ended up or are angling to get into. A few of them have Mastodon accounts too.
A. Attention-seekers have gone to Threads or stayed on Twitter
B. People who are into niche interests and not part of group A are very active on Mastodon.
Mastodon to me very much feels like early-days Twitter. I truly I hope it stays like this. Threads might even be blessing in disguise for Mastodon network when it develops into a network similar to Instagram (content creators, brands, attention-seekers).
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.
I use Twitter daily and unless you're looking at major threads (like an Elon tweet) it's rarely more than a single verified user (if at all). And they are rarely better/worse than the average Tweet normally is in those mega threads.
It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO
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 improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)
The X Window System allows applications to present bitmap images on a display, and receive mouse and keyboard input. The main implementation is X.Org, shepherded by the X.Org Foundation: https://x.org/. Originally for Unix-like systems, it is now available on many other architectures, such as Microsoft Windows: I find ssh's X forwarding feature especially useful there.
The chaos monkeys aren’t Twitter users, they’re changes to the site that Musk dictates.
A not implausible theory I’ve seen bandied about is that Musk isn’t happy about having been forced into buying Twitter so he’s trashing the place out of spite.
It seems a rather expensive bit of spite, but it makes as much sense as anything else.
> 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
For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe.
"But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing my responses are effectively zero.
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 extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.
While Twitter hosts some services on its own servers, the company has long contracted with Google and Amazon to complement its infrastructure. Prior to Musk buying Twitter last year, the company signed a multi-year contract with Google to host services related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things.
No they have contracts with all of them because of acquisitions and attempts to be less reliant on just the data centers. Google cloud was another attempt to move some workloads or extend into it. But like I said earlier, nothing significant. Real work is done on the data center machines
Yeah, that's exactly the "Cold Start Problem". You must get the "hard side" of the network (drivers for Uber, content creator for social networks) asap and they must be happy to use your platform, otherwise your product is going to be a failure
You can switch to a following-only view, but it resets whenever the app is re-launched, which is a real scummy pattern.
Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app.
Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.
People have spent years getting followers and algorithmic advantage based on previous engagement. Social media is not a shopping app - content creators will not just bolt for something better as they are invested.
Do they want to? Definitely, but it's not a simple lift and shift. It will only happen once Musk either terminally runs Twitter into the ground (bankruptcy), or makes it completely unbearable.
As the dust is settling on the last 15 years of this insanity, and the monopolies are being cemented, is Zuck not the only one left standing independently? Of the big guys, the early "wizkid founder" types, who else is left towing the line and controlling the destiny of their company? And who else is maintaining that techno-utopianist optimism publicly? I sort of admire the guy, if only for how every time he speaks, it feels like a time portal to 2009.
So wait, using an alternative social media platform just because the bourgeoisie doesn’t like the market leader‘s owner’s politics isn’t as convincing for the plebs as it is for the bourgeoisie? who would’ve thought?
They launched it at a very opportune time when Twitter was having massive technical issues.
That was enough to get millions of people to kick the tires and more importantly, create awareness.
The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now, people will again flock to Threads and notice that it got a little better. Twitter will get fixed again, and a lower percentage of Threads users go back again.
And when it hits the E.U market Threads will gain more popularity. If they can just sort out the 'privacy problem' they apparently have. I don't understand the delay here. FB & Insta already has E.U people's data.
If I understand correctly, the DMA says you can’t leverage one social network to support another (ie, you can’t drive Threads signups via the IG Network).
> The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now
People have been saying this since the day Elon took over... but has it really gone down that much? More than other tech products? E.g. how many outages have the big cloud providers had in the last year? When I hear people say 'any day now' it reads like they are looking for any excuse to say 'mars man bad'.
I don't know about outages, but Twitter's website has become completely erratic for me. Sometime it will load replies, sometimes it won't. Sometimes it will login-wall content, sometimes it won't. Sometimes I just get an error page. Clicking on a Twitter link today is like rolling the dice on whether you'll actually see anything or not.
Everything that people were complaining about on Twitter is also true of Threads, other than that Musk doesn't own Threads. The solution to DMs being limited or filtered on Twitter can't be to move to a platform without DMs at all. Various trolls are already partying on Threads, and targeting people that used to get them banned on Twitter. Commercial people and celebrities are seeing no engagement.
Also, the idea that Threads will be better than Twitter is simply a promise based on nothing. The concept I heard is that they were going to mod out politics, but that's a) impossible at scale, ask China, and b) Facebook couldn't care less about politics; the reason they censored anything other than nipples was by government demand, and Facebook has promised to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee that it was hiding documents from until a few days ago under pain of contempt of Congress, personally, against Zuckerberg.
I don't think he's hero enough to go to prison for the sake of this administration, especially since he started censoring for the last administration. He doesn't care about the politics at all, so who would he be going to prison on behalf of? Movement Democrats will certainly make him a hero, like Cheney, Comey, etc., but what will that get him if the Democrats go down in the next general? All this is to say is that he's motivated to govern Threads with a light touch.
This is a relatively common phenomenon in multiplayer games. The most famous (infamous?) recent case is probably New World, which peaked at 900k+ concurrent users and lately peaks at ~20k every day [1]
Facebook has done enough feature launches that they train their teams to look for and expect a huge initial engagement peak as people explore the product. It's Deltoid 101.
The best thing about (maybe this didn't make it to deltoid) was that they counted degrees of freedom for the t stats based on the number of days the experiment was running, which was incredibly effective in stopping people launching broken crap.
There's Bluesky the platform, and then there are Bluesky's users. The platform itself still looks promising, but bsky.social is captured by some of the worst people on the Internet. At the end of the day, I don't think it's realistic for normal people to bring their own network.
BlueSky is going to win. Domain verification and custom feeds (user-generated firehose filters) are its killer features. It's already better than Twitter, and it's still behind invite codes as they refine it.
Once brands realize that they can utilize custom feeds to reach potential customers granularly instead of -- or in addition to -- paying for advertising, it's going to be over for Twitter. Twitter could introduce something similar to compete, but they shit-canned all of their talent, and in the process hamstrung their ability to innovate.
Maybe it'd have done better if it launched worldwide. I still haven't seen the app and I do use twitter. A lot of people I follow are from Europe so threads won't have most of the content I'd want anyway.
The reason Threads is failing is that, for whatever reason, they chose to launch without a desktop experience. I can't imagine how many users went to threads.net, clicked around for a few minutes while being extremely confused on how to sign up or access the product, then left permanently. No, I'm not going to download your mobile app, and most people won't either.
What % of users do you think care about a desktop experience? I expect the vast majority of users would be mobile-only. I'm sure you can find relevant statistics about Twitters desktop vs mobile usage.
I don't know a single person who willingly prefers a limited, bogged-down experience of any product (social media or otherwise) over a full-fledged desktop client.
Of course I prefer doing all of my computing on my desktop computer. But I don't take my desktop computer with me to the grocery store. And I use Twitter to entertain myself when I'm waiting in line at the grocery store, for example. When I am at my desktop computer, I'm much less likely to be interested in using Twitter.
That said, one of many reasons I didn't bother creating a Threads account is precisely that reason: no desktop client. Unless forced, I won't use anything that is exclusively available on mobile devices.
I have mod rights on a general subreddit (a city), and I see that mobile is consistently 75-80% of the traffic. That seems consistent with the numbers above.
That data is biased by the small minority of super active users who spend 4-5 hours/day on Twitter.
The relevant number would be to condition on only the 20th to 80th percentile users (by time spent/day) and see their breakdown. I am going to bet that number is more biased towards desktop, while both the 0-20% (occasional users) and 80-100% percentiles will be mobile focused.
The other confounding effect is the bots and the pseudo-bots (humans operating many accounts). I don't know how they change these numbers.
I know I gave up on it anyway without desktop. But what I really gave up on was lack of discovery on how to get my twitter network replicated. I was at least able to do that with Mastodon for all its UX sins.
"Users" yes, but that's not why Twitter was "big" (in quotes because, by user base, Twitter wasn't big at all).
Twitter's cultural cachet was because you could link and embed Tweets. Whatever platform you're on, viewing things on Twitter "just works" if you have a URL. That means journalists can point to things on Twitter, post things on Twitter, and the normal mechanisms of internet virality mean they can spread through basically any medium (i.e. how many times are Twitter links shown on other platforms?)
It's also worth noting that "influencer" types don't - or didn't - use Twitter directly. They used various bits of API management software to curate their appearance.
Threads has none of that: without a web browser experience, you can't share and link things on Threads in other mediums. There's no possibility of embedded Threads posts being a thing. And that means, fundamentally, Threads can never actually pull sign-ups by organic virality - or pull views from it either. It's notable the big sign up wave happened right as it looked like Twitter was going to block viewing Tweets for users without an account - that was (correctly) interpreted as the final nail in the coffin (and was rolled back).
You do realize that even after the 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 lunch?
I followed people who post yet when I open the app my first 2 posts (the only posts visible) are from accounts I'd never follow (right now Paris Hilton and ESPN) and could care less about. I don't want to scroll through their suggested bullshit trying to get to what I actually want to read. Maybe this works when you are following no one.
This is what killed it for me. There was also no obvious way for me to "train" their recommendations, even if I was willing to tolerate an algorithmic-only feed.
Meta has no ability to not try to control your attention and divert it toward ads. They are institutionally incapable of anything other than control and divert. It is why I didn’t sign up for Threads and wouldn’t use Oculus if I were given one for free. The only Meta product I have access to is Facebook because my community is obsessed with FB Marketplace and posting upcoming IRL events on FB rather than email. I hate how Meta infiltrated our lives and now cannot be excised.
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[ 12.5 ms ] story [ 464 ms ] threadThis is even without launching in the EU, so as soon as Threads is available in the EU, they can get another 100M+ easily anyway.
This is what I call 'early days'. We'll see what happens in 6 months or a year whether if people want to continue using Threads rather than initial sign ups. Retention is what matters.
Edit I'm here: https://www.threads.net/@davidnwelton
Edit2 If I think about it some, the biggest drawback about Threads for me is swapping one egocentric billionaire who is rapidly going off the rails for another who is, for the moment, more stable, but has still accumulated a godawful amount of wealth and power. Mastodon seems like the alternative if you really hate that kind of setup, but... it doesn't seem to have much traction.
People keep saying this as if the only "success" mastadon can have is by being in everyone's pocket. It's not an SV unicorn startup, it's not trying to buy out some investors. It's doing exactly what it is designed to do: be a user owned platform. Not everyone will want that all the time, and some people will never want that, and that's fine, not everyone spent 24/7 on the forums of the old web either.
We could stop considering "Everyone is using it all the time" as the desired end goal maybe?
My view too. Not the best service ever offered, but allows me to continue distancing myself from Twitter.
Would I much prefer it if Twitter was a public company and/or ran by anyone else? Sure, but that isn't happening, so, I'll take Mastodon and any other reasonable alternative. We'll see how the market pans out.
An aspect of me wants Mastodon to win... but there's a deep cynicism in it ever working at Twitter scale (which may be the point, in the end).
> Mr Zuckerberg [...] described the situation as "normal" and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.
I think if it was normal, they wouldn't have publicly spiked the football after the admittedly incredible signup numbers. They would have been a bit more humble, said they expected most users to leave soon after, but that this is an encouraging sign (or something to that effect). Maybe a bit more celebratory, but playing with expectations a bit more. They started off with INCREDIBLY humble talking points about likelihood of failure and then I think just got too excited.
None of this is to suggest they have no chance. They still have a ton of users and I'd still consider the launch a success overall.
I have yet to see a single Threads post get linked anywhere -- not here, not Reddit, not even from Facebook.
(Edit: Or at least, I'm too ignorant to realize what such a post would look like, in which case, branding fail.)
I stand corrected on other Meta properties linking it, but, of course, they have to get links outside of that sphere to compete with Twitter on mindshare.
https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/CvPrxHdr4Y2/?igsh...
Since the recent changes, on Twitter you can't see replies if you're linked to a tweet while not logged in, and you don't even have any indicator that replies exist and that you could see them with an account. The whole implementation of the changes in that area is a real baffler.
Seriously dude. It takes more effort to break the web than just use it.
I don't think they are doing very bad considering it's mobile only right now.
"Less than half" is significant, particularly when the CEO (to his credit) is calling it out as something that must improve. And it matters to balance the existing narrative from the Verge, which seems to just regurgitate Meta's VP's language about it being a runaway success.
Alright, forget the number. Let's focus on active users versus signups and how it's being reported for Threads.
I mean, didn't they: 1. Leverage their IG user base to get a lot of early sign-ups and then... 2. Use those early sign-ups to hype up the platform?
They got exactly what they wanted, which was a lot of articles about how fast Threads was growing.
They probably knew all along that most of those early sign-ups weren't going turn into active users.
I mean, we should? Startup valuations are full of MAU pumping and straight bullshit, so why shouldn't we judge their numbers with a cynical eye? Meta claimed a number of users the first few days, well, half of them aren't using it anymore, so they aren't "Users"
<https://www.fastcompany.com/1837332/exclusive-new-google-stu...>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977050>
The study in question is, to my surprise, still available directly online: <https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2012/05/15/new-google-plus-data-s...>
There are another 14 HN submissions matching "Google+ ghost town" at this writing: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=google%2B%20ghost%20town>
I did my own assessment of G+ later, after there was much discussion of Google's own "engagement" numbers for the platform meeting open skepticism. (I used the platform heavily myself and appreciated elements of it.)
I think we're seeing more and deserved skepticism generally in accepting statements of activity at face value, which is a Good Thing in my view.
This was nearly a year after G+ launched. The article in question here is about three weeks after the launch of threads. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison to me...
The "ghost town" label had been stuck on G+ within the first few weeks, yes.
HN discussion from September 2011 (G+ launched in July):
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3019699>
Numerous HN takes in comments from June -- September 2011: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1316822400&dateRange=custom&...>
And, FWIW, at the time I was contesting the characterisation of G+. I distinctly recall the discussions and press coverage, however.
I've given multiple examples of just such a comparison being made over a decade ago.
In both cases, the new launch was by an existing giant in the sector, with claimed performance being not entirely credible.
Google of a decade ago had launched [edit: or aquired, but in either event, run] Orkut, Friendster, Wayze, Reader, and YouTube. Several of those were modest hits, one remains a giant (YT), and one is much missed by its small but quite significant fan base (Reader).
The Social space is immensely fickle, and the ability of even an established industry giant to succeed with a new venture is fairly thin. Facebook has largely bought rather than made its own follow-on successes to date (as did Google in buying YouTube).
Note edit above. Poor language choice around pedants.
Google didn't "launch" youtube. They purchased it. It was big before they purchased it. Regarding Reader, calling something "small but quite significant" is nonsensical. Additionally you're propping up a failed application which wasn't even a social network as a success.
As I said, your comparisons included far too much conflation of several varieties for me to take them seriously.
The idea that forgetting that Google failed horribly with Google Video before buying YouTube is a "smell" of bad faith is weird.
It's often easier to search within a specific timeframe on Hacker News itself given Algolia search's excellent date-range functions, and the fact that HN itself is strongly time-oriented. There are doubtless other stories elsewhere, but it would be more tedious to track those down and verify that they actually came from the period under consideration.
It's also possible to search via comments, with one useful set of terms being "Google+" and "ghost town", an assessment which was being thrown about early on.
And we can link directly to the HN threads and see what contemporaneous discussions were like and how they characterised the issue at the time.
By contrast, date-ranged General Web Search on, say, DuckDuckGo or Google is often confounded by Web pages which have inaccurate date indicia, or have been misclassified as to time by search engines. It's much more tedious to try to find specific content matching time criteria, though the universe of total such articles is obviously larger. Fortunately for this case, Google+ was of sufficient interest to HN that there were numerous submissions concerning it submitted early on, many of course highly syncophantic, but also concerning the rather fumbling rollout and weak adoption.
Amongst other possible archives, Google+ itself is no longer extant, and so cannot be searched. Its own search features did not afford date-ranged search, though I'm well aware that there was much early hand-wringing over the "brutally unfair" stories (in the framing of G+ advocates) circulating at the time.
Reddit might be another useful trove, though I'm avoiding that for the time being. Search there is limited to only the initial story title and, in a limited number of cases, the "self-text" content of text-based posts. Pointedly, comments aren't searchable on Reddit itself, and so the potential match space is far more constrained than it is on Hacker News.
Despite those limitations, in answering your own historically uninformed vague hand wave that the response to Facebook's Threads launch is exceptional, I'd given numerous specific and quantified examples from a roughly comparable time period for Google's G+ launch strongly suggesting otherwise.
Yes, the data I brought to bear are subject to a strong availability heuristic. But the evidence presented is rather stronger than your own none-at-all offerings.
Cheers.
We have now:
- Long standing critical takes on new social media launches and claimed performance.
- Google as "running ... successful social networks".
You're litigating pedantry in a counterfactual manner. It's tedious.
I've shown this twice, which is sufficient for my tastes.
No need to continue your experience of tedium then, I'm not particularly interested in such loose arguing either.
As Facebook did with Instagram and Whatsapp.
And with the facebook.com domain name, Parakey, ConnectU, FriendFeed, Octazen, Divvyshot, Friendster patents, ShareGrove, Zenbe, Nextstop, Chai Labs, Hot Potato, Drop.io, FB.com domain name, Rel8tion, Beluga, Snaptu, RecRec, DayTum, Sofa, MailRank, Push Pop Press, Friend.ly, Strobe, Gowalla, Caffeinatedmind, Instagram, Tagtile, Glancee, Lightbox.com, Karma, Face.com, Spool, Acrylic Software, Threadsy, Atlas Solutions, osmeta, Storylane (Mixtent), Hot Studio, Spaceport, Parse, Monoidics, Jibbigo, Onavo, SportStream, Little Eye Labs, Branch, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, Ascenta, Salorix, ProtoGeo Oy, PrivateCore, LiveRail, WaveGroup Sound, Wit.ai, Quickfire Networks, TheFind, Inc., Surreal Vision, Endaga, Pebbles, MSQRD (Masquerade), Two Big Ears, Nascent Objects, Infiniled, CrowdTangle, Faciometrics, Zurich Eye, Ozlo, Fayteq AG, tbh, Confirm, Bloomsbury AI, Redkix, Vidpresso, Dreambit, Chainspace, GrokStyle, Servicefriend, CTRL-labs, Packagd, Beat Games, PlayGiga, Sanzaru Games, Scape Technologies, Giphy, Mapillary, Ready at Dawn, Lemnis Technologies, Kustomer, Downpour Interactive, Unit 2 Games, BigBox VR, AI.Reverie, Within, Twisted Pixel Games, Presize, Lofelt, Armature Studio, and Camouflaj.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...>
Neither Google nor Facebook are distinctive within the tech sector in aequiring large numbers of other firms.
The puff piece in the WSJ combined with the all the positive press over the success of Threads, with now a quite rosy view of how it has played out since. I'm personally not a believer that they internally think Threads is a success, but to each their own. I constantly hear from my engineering co-workers about how much Twitter has changed and how the sky is falling, but the user numbers don't back that up and my user experience seems to be much the same.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/zuckerberg-channeled-og-mark-to...
Really? A bunch of engineering types who work for big corporations and who also dream and or do start their own hopefully big corporations prides themselves as being "counter-cultural?" That seems like a tough generalization to support.
I think people assume that because Musk is highly successful that he is a normal person, worthy of being judged by such a standard. From the outside nothing seems normal about him to me. He is almost certainly on the spectrum, yet fairly highly functional.
I attribute half of the hatred for him not because of his behavior, but because of the general anger towards the billionaire class.
I think the sharp divide in perception of him shows that polarization within America has reached unhealthy levels. I won't invoke the terms used to describe people believed to be pro or anti Musk here, but I think most know them. I wish we could get to a point where we discuss less about people and more about their individual actions.
Business Insider in particular likes to publish articles that are either outright shameless puff pieces or occasionally contain thinly veiled attempts at spinning things in his favor.
Some examples:
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-new-logo-x-twitter...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-x-rebrand-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-asana-dustin-moskov...
And here’s a Newsweek one:
https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-has-undeniably-gotten-bette...
As for the disliking or hatred towards him, I’m not sure why this puzzles you.
He is simply an unlikable person, doing unlikable things.
Yeah sure it doesn’t help that he’s wealthy in this time and age and it also doesn’t help that he’s attributed accomplishments of mythical proportions that are mostly veneer, nor does it help that he seemingly has taken it upon himself to disprove the business acumen that people attribute to him, but all of those are just cherries on top.
Certainly not half the reason people dislike him.
Gates, Zuckerberg and Bezos are in the same order of magnitude as Musk (at least from the perspective of most people) and don’t nearly get as much hate, because they don’t act like utter tools at every single chance they get.
That’s it, that’s the reason. It’s not rocket science.
Which is why it’s weird that you seem to yearn for a time where people will judge him on his individual actions, when they already do so.
You are correct in that this was unavoidable because the original number was artificially inflated in a non-sustainable way. But well, that would be a huge red flag for a startup too. It is less so for a giant company like Meta, as they can eat the loss from forcing the market, but it is still ridiculous, even for a company as large as Meta.
There's often an early "tyre kicker" phase, with people signing up to explore a service. Or to ensure that others don't misappropriate well-known account handles.
User attrition / retention rates for sites, services, and apps are well-studied and closely watched.
E.g., "Retention rate on day 30 of mobile app installs worldwide in 3rd quarter 2022, by category"
<https://www.statista.com/statistics/259329/ios-and-android-a...>
General social media growth (or plateau) trends as of 2021 / Pew:
<https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media...>
The highest retention rate listed is 11.3%, for the news category.
As an example, Facebook (the site, distinguished from other aquisitions) has seen stagnant or falling usage in certain markets, notably the US and EU, as of about 5--6 years ago:
<https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/31/16956818/facebook-q4-2017...>
<http://www.businessinsider.sg/facebook-hits-wall-usage-falls...>
What part of my comment exactly is wrong?
Facebook is one case, and is still the largest (or among: TikTok and a few newer entrants may be giving it a run for its money).
But if you want to look at multiple platforms over time, it helps to ... well, consider other cases.
I've been something of a purveyor of niche and smaller social networks, from the beginning (Usenet). What I've observed of these is that even among those which continue for a considerable period as a viable option there is the tyre-kicker uptake, a fade back, and then ... several possible trajectories. One of those is straight to the floor, but another is to have either a steady base or a longer and slower growth.
Sure, both of those are death for a venture-backed site or service. But if that's not the foundation, then steady-state or long-steady-growth is a viable option.
And I've seen the pattern:
- On Google+: there was an initial excitement, then the site got stale (2011--2013 or so), then I (and from what I can tell, others) came back. The forced integration with YouTube annoyed a lot of people (on G+, on YouTube, and of course, Not On Either). After about 2015 things seemed to go into a long slow fade, which turned into a race for the exits after the planned shutdown was announced in 2018.
- On Diasapora*: Similar pattern, though I'd participated early on (2011-ish), after leaving G+ for a spell (around 2013--14), and then returned to the site with the G+ shutdown announcement. Some long-standing gripes and personal hardware failures had me lose interest about a year ago, though there quite honestly still is a good community there.
- Ello: It was (somewhat poisonously) plastered with the "Facebook Killer" label in 2015, and saw a few periods of excitement buzz. The site remained small (a few hundred thousand MAU, low millions of total accounts, by my own guess, verified in person with Ello staff), but had a vibrant community. The killer was sale of the site to a VC with the original staff gagged as part of the agreement. Various protections (B-Corp organisation and highly member-friendly policies) seemed to disappear at that point, and most of the small crowd I'd followed there drifted elsewhere.
- Mastodon: I'd joined in 2016/7, participated a bit, faded off, then came back. After HN it's my most active online presence. Mastodon's long-term growth has shown numerous large-influx phases where a significant influx of new members arrive, some of whom remain active. The trend is episodic but positive.
- Tildes.net: Launched by an ex-Reddit staffer, deimos, the site's been ticking along as an invite-only beta since 2016. I've given more invites in the past three months than the previous seven years, so far as I can recall. As with other sites, it seems to gain and lose activity on phases, though overall seems to be growing.
- Imzy: An ill-fated venture which followed the "crater rapidly" phase. It remains the most socially-dysfunctional online network I've ever participated in directly, strongly at odds with its "kinder, gentler Reddit" labeling.
- Hacker News: The site has seen a long steady slow growth since opening to the public in 2007. I've been studying front-page activity for the past few months, one element of which is looking at total activity (votes and comments) on those front-page stories and how that's changed over time. It's an interesting dataset as there are a fixed number of items per year (10,950, 10,980 in a leap year, based on 30 per day), but as participation increases we'll see more activity on the page, and metrics such as dist...
For those who think discussion's getting more heated, there's some evidence of that.
Note that HN's "flamewar detector" is triggered for comments > 40 and comments/votes > 1 (or 100 as I calculate it above), best as I understand.
I haven't used Threads, but it's 2023. People have years of experience and expectations using social media, also probably shorter attention spans. I'm fairly sure that an launch ready MVP in 2023 should be WAY more feature full than 5-10 years ago.
I know there are other factors at play here as well regarding retention, but I don't think one can easily recover from a highly popular lauch with uncompetitive features.
That was probably a wise decision to seed it with something for people to look at and interact with so they didn't just sign in and see a blank page. The random influencers and other people "go away" pretty quickly if you start following and interacting with people you care more about.
And even without that, the influencers mostly went away for me when I followed people I found more interesting.
And marketers. Remember: marketers ruin everything. They early adopt every up-and-coming platform and fill it with grifty posts.
Hell, it required an Instagram account to sign up. You already have their follow graph.
ie something like Reddit karma but it's based off how controversial a users posts and comments generally are, how many times posts are reported or flagged, and use ai to do sentiment analysis as well to verify the reports and scores are accurate.
Maybe have the users tweets a shade of blue and the more respected the brighter the blue color.
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 use Twitter for exposure to writers, wouldn't the proposed lifting of the character limit be a net positive for writers? Wouldn't writers use Twitter more if writing on Twitter was a source of income?
If you don't have a Twitter account, you cannot see threads on Twitter anymore.
At the same time a lot of people I never would have wanted in my feed are now showing up all the time.
(there's also a userscript version IIRC)
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 decent amount of goodwill in other ventures, would start burning through all that to deal with social media which is just super difficult to manage even in the best of cases.
What’s the point of the question mark there? Are you not sure of your statement?
You have a very, very rosy perception of login walls. All the stats I’ve see would disagree.
You mention that Twitter isn't that fundamentally different and from a product perspective, and I would mostly agree, but their finances are WAY worse than they were pre-Musk. The company has lost something like 50% of ad revenue, they've saddled themselves with something like an extra $1B dollars a year in debt payments from the buyout, and they're facing a number of large lawsuits based on how they handled layoffs.
Why would a user of the site/app care about this? How is it impacting their experience?
Financial woes though will usually produce change that impacts the user, for better or worse (a good kick in the ass, or craven desperation may follow).
I'm trying to find if there's anyone who regularly experiences hitting the limit.
First, Mastodon was going to be the new place. It wasn't.
Then Threads came along and again everyone said it would be the death knell for Twitter. It wasn't.
My takeaway would be quite the opposite. While everything that comes along might show promise at the start, people quickly revert back to their familiar network that they know and like (regardless of how much they claim not to).
It peaked in November and then went into decline. As people leave, the value of the network goes down so even more people leave.
Musk's antics might prop it up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users will be the most avid hardcore fans.
I, and many Fediverse people, are on the Fedi explicitly hoping it isn’t in that list. Mastodon is a success to me because of the thousands of people on it and that I interact with, and that it is precisely not containing the masses.
So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter.
Mastodon and Lemmy/etc are a smash success to me. They have more traffic, users and activity than the other comparable options combined (citation needed). And most importantly, they did it without becoming the next big thing.
Plus if, god forbid, it does become the next big thing - It can still isolate and be a small forum. That alone is lovely to me.
Personally, interactions feel more significant in smaller communities, too.
"Everyone was declaring Twitter over."
I mean...Twitter is very much over. References to Twitter, or Twitter being the canonical source, has utterly disappeared. Whole media spheres have made Twitter just another place, not the place. Whole fields have dried up on Twitter.
If you're hardcore into culture wars, Twitter is probably your place. Probably feels as alive as ever. In virtually any other field (sports, media, tech), while some people with big accounts are still trying to hang on -- for obvious reasons as other platforms just set them back -- engagement and "the crowd" has absolutely dissolved. Governments, agencies and groups used Twitter as a public space, and not only have many pulled back, I cannot fathom anyone making that choice today.
And that doesn't mean one needs to cite where someone replaced their "Twitter-like" activity. Many people just took it as an opportunity to assess the joy that sort of site was bringing them and decoupled. In the same way that the decline of blogger didn't mean that other sites grew the same amount...many people just stopped blogging.
[1] isn't it for a "general public, all topics" solution. Mastodon absolutely is a technical solution for niche spaces and groups and is absolutely flourishing in those realms.
https://fedidb.org/software/Mastodon
But, i would posit that there is a rhetorical currency exchange at play here. The "value" that one might assign to a silo like Facebook or Threads is not the same "value" one might assign to various software stacks and/or networks on the Fediverse. Like, its not enough for me to state that they're different/like comparing apples vs oranges. I mean, for example, if I only have a single kid/offspring, does that mean that i have not grown the "value" of my family, because i have not maximized my partner's reproductive capabilities, or resorted to adoption to extend that, etc.? That's sill of course. Well, i assure you, the intent of networks on the Fediverse is NOT the same as the goals and intent of silos like Facebook, twitter, threads, etc.
I think @unshavedyak stated it great with their comments, but this is my favorite of theirs: "...So many people think we need another Reddit and Twitter. Many of us however are looking for exactly something not Reddit or Twitter..."
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 "get big fast or die trying" so that VCs can make their big ROI back. Slow, steady improvement is fine. Scalloped growth is not evidence of a platform in decline. (1)
I'd say - to write the above in a clearer way: "Twitter peaked in November 2022 and then went into decline. Musk's antics might prop twitter up every once in a while but the long term trend doesn't look good. My prediction is in a couple of years time, the only remaining users of twitter will be the most avid hardcore fans."
1) https://doctorow.medium.com/of-course-mastodon-lost-users-c4...
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.
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".
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 all the fedoverse stuff but I think that’s just due to a lack of effort so far.
Twitter can go away without being replaced by a singular entity.
If not, maybe wait more than 3 weeks before declaring it Twitter's successor.
People are certainly going somewhere (outside?), what isn't happening is for all of them going to the same place. IMO, that's a very good thing, but it does break any ambition of social world domination large companies may have.
That is not the strategy of a healthy advertising-driven company. It isn't even a strategy, that's flop-sweat.
You might as well jabber on about tulip bulbs.
Just about all the people whose opinions I'm interested in hearing are on Mastodon now. I don't really care if anyone else shows up. Maybe it's better that they don't.
I only finally checked it out during all the Reddit protests and am thoroughly amazed to simply see content without all the cruft.
It is only now that I don't feel as sure; Twitter still has its login wall today. I reactivate my facebook account only when, say, I absolutely need to interact with a particular small page/business. I don't use Instagram. I have only since logged in to Twitter once to look at my Following list and make a first pass at building my Fedifeed by seeing who's moved over (incidentally, most of the people I follow that are still active). This time, I might actually check my feed regularly while logged in, since I'm not seeing a sponsored submission or ad every other post.
I only look at Xitter for Ukraine news - that community hasn't migrated elsewhere. But that's mostly on third-party pages, I don't log in anymore, so the site itself is useless to me.
that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols (most people) throw up their hands and leave at the first notion of needing to choose an instance or needing a JS bookmarklet to follow someone not on your instance
plenty of those people are experts in their field and write interesting content i wouldn't otherwise encounter, but they aren't migrating to mastodon because of that, and there's a decent chance they won't migrate anywhere and will return to sharing their work in niche walled garden academic journals and conferences
sure, mastodon maybe keeps out the garbage firstnamelastname9023285023 accounts that do nothing but send low-content replies and retweet inane celebrity(s' social media managers') posts, but it's keeping them out because only a very specific population will bother to get in, which is a bad filter
It is a startup wisdom that it is better to have less users who love your product than many who merely like it. Tech-savy people often have a strong opinions (both positive and negative). By the mentioned startup wisdom, it can be very valuable to have them as users.
Mastodon is great if you want to read nerds talking with other nerds. For the rest of the population though, we need some takes from outside the nerd-cage.
I assure you I genuinely do not like what Twitter has become. The lack of viable alternative doesn’t change that fact.
Mastodon works for the people who are willing to "pay" (in social labor or hosting money) the startup costs. Threads very likely has the limitations it has because that's what Meta thinks will generate useful advertising data — their bread and butter.
For tech people, I think the most likely way to get a Twitter killer in the near-medium term would be to convince Microsoft to add that feature to Github. As usual, you're the product.
Mastodon is chugging along, still growing steadily, unglamorously. I don't see a boom and bust there. It is unbacked by VC "get big or die trying" money, not buoyed by big tech or media hype. Don't write it off in a week or a month.
The technology is crumbling (see rate limiting, interaction counts), the product is moving further away from what people want not towards it (see Zuck's tweets about Threads to see what popular product direction looks like, even if it's not perfect), the ad quality has dropped very noticeably suggesting they've lost good top paying advertisers, the new ad payout program suggests that their ad inventory is low anyway (see also interaction numbers here too), and the culture has gone from pretty bad to openly hostile to large swathes of the population, at least among English speakers (see anti-trans trending topics, rise of hate speech).
I'd agree that reversion to the mean and people going back to what they know is the most likely course of action in most circumstances, but these are not most circumstances. Twitter can't recover from this, at least not without a change of leadership and many years to rebuild.
Still, I believe that BlueSky and Threads remain a looming existential threat to Twitter. One important role that Twitter filled was being the de-facto centralized RSS feed. It is by far the thing that I see that Twitter is still used for, even by ex-Twitter users and people like me who never used the site in the first place.
To be the centralized RSS feed, you need a web-facing interface, so you can pass links around over the clearnet. Threads doesn't have one. BlueSky isn't even open to the greater public yet. But either one of those could change overnight.
A. Attention-seekers have gone to Threads or stayed on Twitter
B. People who are into niche interests and not part of group A are very active on Mastodon.
Mastodon to me very much feels like early-days Twitter. I truly I hope it stays like this. Threads might even be blessing in disguise for Mastodon network when it develops into a network similar to Instagram (content creators, brands, attention-seekers).
It's got downsides for sure but I hasn't killed the UX IMO
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 improve user experience (for content providers, not professional reply guys.)
... where "any" is the number of people who paid for a blue check.
x.com
which holds a value "X"
A not implausible theory I’ve seen bandied about is that Musk isn’t happy about having been forced into buying Twitter so he’s trashing the place out of spite.
It seems a rather expensive bit of spite, but it makes as much sense as anything else.
On it’s first fucking day
Been using the new follow feed and honestly I appreciate the algo feed sprinkling some randomness here and there
For these cases, I follow the Twitter accounts on Mastodon by way of the mirror sites - bird.makeup is the most popular I believe.
"But you can't respond to people there". Yeah, but I don't care. Since Elon changed the meaning of the blue checkmark and made it effectively pay-to-play, the chances of someone seeing my responses are effectively zero.
Didn't Musk break Twitter a few weeks back in a hamfisted attempt to deal with scrapers? What that was he was fighting against?
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 extension that could help replicate the content elsewhere.
While Twitter hosts some services on its own servers, the company has long contracted with Google and Amazon to complement its infrastructure. Prior to Musk buying Twitter last year, the company signed a multi-year contract with Google to host services related to fighting spam, removing child sexual abuse material, and protecting accounts, among other things.
Relevant: https://www.xing.com/
(a site very similar so LinkedIn that rather has its mainstay in the German-speaking market instead of a more international focus like LinkedIn)
Agree on the need for a proper website that isn’t read-only. I get that most usage will come from mobile, but for the more interesting and prolific posters, tapping out blurbs and interacting with others on mobile is a second-rate experience that doesn’t feel as rich when compared to using a web app.
Meta’s working on it, so hopefully we’ll see if the culture of the service shifts away from that Instagram feel.
Do they want to? Definitely, but it's not a simple lift and shift. It will only happen once Musk either terminally runs Twitter into the ground (bankruptcy), or makes it completely unbearable.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%201-m&q=...
It's kind of interesting to see stuff like that.
And he was much, much younger than the Google founders who are the only real comparison (in that they consistently make money).
They launched it at a very opportune time when Twitter was having massive technical issues.
That was enough to get millions of people to kick the tires and more importantly, create awareness.
The next time Twitter goes down, and it will any day now, people will again flock to Threads and notice that it got a little better. Twitter will get fixed again, and a lower percentage of Threads users go back again.
And repeat.
Meta chose quick growth over European users.
People have been saying this since the day Elon took over... but has it really gone down that much? More than other tech products? E.g. how many outages have the big cloud providers had in the last year? When I hear people say 'any day now' it reads like they are looking for any excuse to say 'mars man bad'.
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
And high-volume users are who create content for the site.
Also, the idea that Threads will be better than Twitter is simply a promise based on nothing. The concept I heard is that they were going to mod out politics, but that's a) impossible at scale, ask China, and b) Facebook couldn't care less about politics; the reason they censored anything other than nipples was by government demand, and Facebook has promised to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee that it was hiding documents from until a few days ago under pain of contempt of Congress, personally, against Zuckerberg.
I don't think he's hero enough to go to prison for the sake of this administration, especially since he started censoring for the last administration. He doesn't care about the politics at all, so who would he be going to prison on behalf of? Movement Democrats will certainly make him a hero, like Cheney, Comey, etc., but what will that get him if the Democrats go down in the next general? All this is to say is that he's motivated to govern Threads with a light touch.
That's how Telegram have 700 million active users.
[1] https://steamcharts.com/app/1063730
I am earnestly trying to go all in on ActivityPub these days.
Once brands realize that they can utilize custom feeds to reach potential customers granularly instead of -- or in addition to -- paying for advertising, it's going to be over for Twitter. Twitter could introduce something similar to compete, but they shit-canned all of their talent, and in the process hamstrung their ability to innovate.
Would've expected closer to 70/30 personally.
I don't know a single person who willingly prefers a limited, bogged-down experience of any product (social media or otherwise) over a full-fledged desktop client.
Of course I prefer doing all of my computing on my desktop computer. But I don't take my desktop computer with me to the grocery store. And I use Twitter to entertain myself when I'm waiting in line at the grocery store, for example. When I am at my desktop computer, I'm much less likely to be interested in using Twitter.
That said, one of many reasons I didn't bother creating a Threads account is precisely that reason: no desktop client. Unless forced, I won't use anything that is exclusively available on mobile devices.
81% of Facebook users interact only by mobile phone: https://www.statista.com/statistics/377808/distribution-of-f...
The relevant number would be to condition on only the 20th to 80th percentile users (by time spent/day) and see their breakdown. I am going to bet that number is more biased towards desktop, while both the 0-20% (occasional users) and 80-100% percentiles will be mobile focused.
The other confounding effect is the bots and the pseudo-bots (humans operating many accounts). I don't know how they change these numbers.
Twitter's cultural cachet was because you could link and embed Tweets. Whatever platform you're on, viewing things on Twitter "just works" if you have a URL. That means journalists can point to things on Twitter, post things on Twitter, and the normal mechanisms of internet virality mean they can spread through basically any medium (i.e. how many times are Twitter links shown on other platforms?)
It's also worth noting that "influencer" types don't - or didn't - use Twitter directly. They used various bits of API management software to curate their appearance.
Threads has none of that: without a web browser experience, you can't share and link things on Threads in other mediums. There's no possibility of embedded Threads posts being a thing. And that means, fundamentally, Threads can never actually pull sign-ups by organic virality - or pull views from it either. It's notable the big sign up wave happened right as it looked like Twitter was going to block viewing Tweets for users without an account - that was (correctly) interpreted as the final nail in the coffin (and was rolled back).
You do realize that even after the 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 lunch?
Threads is like a fake internet.