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Meta Threads engagement has dropped off since red-hot debut, tracking firms say (cnbc.com)
submitted 15h ago by Bizzyguy
livefan1 90 points 14h ago
Well it's still missing key features that Twitter had, so it's a gimped version until they update it.
Like why didn't hashtags come with it if it's tied to Instagram??
Like why didn't hashtags come with it if it's tied to Instagram??
Ancalimei 29 points 11h ago
Yeah I find it useless because I can't search topics.
ROGER_CHOCS 4 points 9h ago
Or just any of the stuff mastodon has, like the edit button.
KickCautious691 2 points 9h ago
Editing is in the beta testing phase.
thecuriousiguana 2 points 4h ago
It should definitely be more like Mastodon, with it's inability to search and rampant tone-policing
DevAway22314 3 points 2h ago
You can search on Mastodon, and I've never seen any "tone-policing" (although each server has different admins, so maybe you joined a shitty one)
AverageRedditeurTM -1 points 3h ago
Because Mastodon isn't a legitimate competitor to any social media company so no one really cares what features it has.
akl78 3 points 9h ago
Threads is weird like this but to me it’s an exceptionally polished looking but very much v1 product made and released quickly to capitalise on their rival’s mistakes.
This seems like a good approach and I’d expect the feature gaps to fill in very quickly.
This seems like a good approach and I’d expect the feature gaps to fill in very quickly.
mrhouse2022 1 points 2h ago
frAgile Development
CruellyStingy 72 points 14h ago
It was just a hype
punchinglines 22 points 7h ago
According to the article itself, this is completely normal.
> Threads is still in its extremely early days, and **it’s natural for a sign-up boom to taper off as users explore a new service** and whether the community, and the topics it pushes, are a fit.
The same decline as the novelty effect wore off happened with ChatGPT.
> Threads is still in its extremely early days, and **it’s natural for a sign-up boom to taper off as users explore a new service** and whether the community, and the topics it pushes, are a fit.
The same decline as the novelty effect wore off happened with ChatGPT.
ShowBoobsPls 5 points 5h ago
ChatGPT started seeing a drop in active users only like last month. That's 6 months of growth
dracovich 3 points 1h ago
chatgpt isn't a social network, can't really compare the userbase of the two
EmbarrassedHelp 0 points 47m ago
ChatGPT has also been getting worse overtime as OpenAI lobotomizes it.
thatfreshjive 13 points 11h ago
Sponsored hype. Just like "metaverse" - remember, musk open-sourced the front end codebase after firing several thousand employees
Glissssy 1 points 5h ago
Truly sponsored, BBC ran headline news 'stories' on it two days in a row repeating the same marketing promo shite. Was very weird to see but then this is Zuckerberg, everyone has a price and he can afford it.
dangerbird2 1 points 2h ago
The difference is that literally no one other than crypto grifters wanted a "metaverse", while literally everyone (except Catturd and friends) wants a twitter alternative
LeSeanMcoy 3 points 10h ago
Yup. The app is horrible and completely unfinished. It’s literally just brands talking to each other with “funny” quips.
For some reason everyone in this subreddit, though, would mindlessly jerk off to the headlines of it “killing Twitter” lol. Seriously, go read those threads, they’re delusional. Yet everyone would some how get like 16k upvotes. Sometimes I wonder if this subreddit is just all bots or if the average user here is just that misinformed/ignorant.
For some reason everyone in this subreddit, though, would mindlessly jerk off to the headlines of it “killing Twitter” lol. Seriously, go read those threads, they’re delusional. Yet everyone would some how get like 16k upvotes. Sometimes I wonder if this subreddit is just all bots or if the average user here is just that misinformed/ignorant.
dracovich 3 points 1h ago
it's ... ok, i don't mind it, but i spend most of my time in a browser, so an app only thing naturally makes me use twitter more because i can use it from my pc
dern_the_hermit 6 points 10h ago
Twitter is killing Twitter, is the attitude I've generally been picking up. Threads wouldn't have received anywhere near as much attention otherwise. Neither would Blue Sky or Mastodon. These are all symptoms of Twitter's implosion, not excitement or praise for the "alternative" services themselves.
whoisthis238 2 points 10h ago
I wasn't even able to download it. I tried, but the Google Play wouldn't show it to me. Found the app on web based store, but it said that my device is not supported. Admittedly my phone is couple years old, but like what the fuck could actually be preventing it from working a twitter clone?
SameSea2012 1 points 1h ago
you're the flip side of the same coin. have some self-awareness.
drekmonger 1 points 24m ago
It's wishful thinking. People hate Musk enough to want to see him fail and fail quickly.
I upvoted some of those posts, but not because I think Threads is a good thing (it's not!). I upvoted those posts because it makes a bunch of racist pieces of shit sad to see their "free speech" platform die slowly.
I upvoted some of those posts, but not because I think Threads is a good thing (it's not!). I upvoted those posts because it makes a bunch of racist pieces of shit sad to see their "free speech" platform die slowly.
Tracker_Dane 41 points 15h ago
The hype around Threads was clearly fomented by external influences (press coverage and publicized celebrity platform jumps), mainly by those that took a stand agaisnt Elon' acquisition of Twitter previously. Will see if is still around in a year or goes the way of Google+...
Ryanopoly 1 points 5h ago
Ahh... Google Plus... I remember those days. The platform was pretty, but dead, and if anyone knows anything about Google, if the platform isn't strong they will kill it fast, so what's the point of wasting time on it growing your community.
notseanlinton 9 points 14h ago
Wait you mean people are waiting to use the app until it's more full of content to look at‽
wamdueCastle 37 points 14h ago
Threads is the dumbest thing recently. We all left Facebook for good reasons, why we would join another Mark Zuckerberg social media website is beyond me.
SombodiesNobody 47 points 14h ago
“We all” meanwhile Meta’s family of apps from Facebook to Instagram to threads etc has 3.81 billion users
And still growing
Lol half the planet uses their products
And still growing
Lol half the planet uses their products
iiLove_Soda 13 points 13h ago
even crazier as China has a billion+ and the market is completely different there.
makataka7 -4 points 10h ago
Eh, if you count all my accounts I've ever had on FB and insta, I'm well over a dozen.
And most people I know have had more than 2
And most people I know have had more than 2
SombodiesNobody 4 points 9h ago
These are unique users
KickCautious691 1 points 9h ago
Metrics aren't measured in just how many accounts they have. FB alone has billions of monthly active users.
teamjacobomg 1 points 3h ago
meta uses both DAU (daily active users) and DAP (daily active people) for their daily metric monitoring of accounts. They dedupe the users to come up with the DAP numbers. It's not perfect but it's over 99% accurate iirc.
Ryanopoly -3 points 4h ago
And 3.00 of that 3.81 is bots.
teamjacobomg 1 points 3h ago
That's just incorrect. Meta is doing everything they can to get their products in the hands of everyone on earth. They absolutely reach over 3 billion people regardless of your experience with spam on the platform.
reaper527 28 points 14h ago
> We all left Facebook for good reasons
very few people actually left facebook though. it was just a small, vocal minority.
it was kind of like when people would "boycott" chick fil a, but they'd see their business actually increase over the boycott period.
very few people actually left facebook though. it was just a small, vocal minority.
it was kind of like when people would "boycott" chick fil a, but they'd see their business actually increase over the boycott period.
zxyzyxz 10 points 12h ago
Same as the Reddit protests, there was a /r/dataisbeautiful post that showed that the number of comments before and after the protests was exactly the same lmao. In reality, don't base anything off vocal minorities.
jaysavings 12 points 14h ago
Younger people hardly - if ever - use Facebook. They use Instagram a lot though.
wamdueCastle 17 points 14h ago
which is Meta, but I take your point
wamdueCastle 4 points 14h ago
to be fair, I gave up on Facebook at the start of the New Year. Account is dead, I never log into it,
typesett -7 points 14h ago
to fuck over musk-face
wamdueCastle 5 points 13h ago
I get that, but why quit one website owned by a billionaire, for another website owned by a billionaire.
typesett -2 points 12h ago
So let me properly explain:
there are people like me who enjoy social media because it’s part of my hobbies and interest. I don’t do any influencer shit or do politics… I follow my sports team and I want news. There is also other thriving communities that are great for learning and interaction. Art and recipes for example.
Twitter is actually decent at it but the site has grown unreliable and unlikable. So I want threads to force it to be better or get the audience used to leaving… I hope Mastadon or another company become a viable alternative in the distant future
but let me make this clear… i use social media. Social media doesn’t use me
there are people like me who enjoy social media because it’s part of my hobbies and interest. I don’t do any influencer shit or do politics… I follow my sports team and I want news. There is also other thriving communities that are great for learning and interaction. Art and recipes for example.
Twitter is actually decent at it but the site has grown unreliable and unlikable. So I want threads to force it to be better or get the audience used to leaving… I hope Mastadon or another company become a viable alternative in the distant future
but let me make this clear… i use social media. Social media doesn’t use me
Ryanopoly 1 points 4h ago
In 6 months Threads will have an ad after each thread, on your profile, in your profile feed, in the comment section of threads, and you will most likely be forced to watch a 6 second video ad for every 10 threads you scroll by in your main Threads feed. In other words... it will be just like Instagram.
wamdueCastle 2 points 4h ago
you will be shocked to learn, I dont have an Instagram.
If there is any Meta service I might use, its Whats App. Sometimes jobs dont give me a choice in that.
If there is any Meta service I might use, its Whats App. Sometimes jobs dont give me a choice in that.
Ryanopoly 1 points 4h ago
I heard it's very good for folks who have families around the world. Is it still private and encrypted, or did Facebook take that aspect of it away?
wamdueCastle 2 points 4h ago
I dont know, I dont use it alot. However yes there are some good use cases for it, that honestly it does far better than a Facebook group. Also I dont think ive ever seen an ad on it.
teamjacobomg 2 points 2h ago
It is still encrypted (you may have to check the settings in individual conversations to confirm that it is e2e encrypted). Iirc facebook messenger is also e2e encrypted and I do not recall if it every rolled out to IG DMs.
Of course, meta could still do some strange logging where they could look at key strokes before you send a message, which would remove the effectiveness of the e2e encryption, but there are some strong regulations in Europe and Californian that would make that illegal.
Of course, meta could still do some strange logging where they could look at key strokes before you send a message, which would remove the effectiveness of the e2e encryption, but there are some strong regulations in Europe and Californian that would make that illegal.
BroForceOne 6 points 13h ago
People don't hate Elon enough to use a bad copy of Twitter with no DM's, no chronological feed, no following filter, no web app, no search, and no hashtags.
It was pretty clear the whole hype around the very unfinished Threads was a fabricated publicity stunt.
It was pretty clear the whole hype around the very unfinished Threads was a fabricated publicity stunt.
SweatyJonesy 11 points 13h ago
the app literally looks like it was made by a Meta intern in a day. It has no functionality, and an ultra bland minimalistic design. The utility of Threads crosses over with a lot of instagram functionality already. The main utility of Twitter is news and media, which will be hard for those companies to build up those bases again. The majority of the marketing for Threads was Social Media Influencers signing up (because it is their job to be on basically every platform), but again, between TikTok and IG and Twitter, it is simply redundant.
Veranova 11 points 8h ago
The app scaled to 10s of millions of concurrent users without breaking a sweat. It’s the definition of an MVP feature-wise, but you can see the most hardcore engineering work went into it surviving launch week without outages. An insane amount of engineering hours and talent go into that, but a layman would never notice because all of that effort was a success.
redditor_tx 1 points 7h ago
If they used existing Meta infra, they didn’t need to worry about scalability. I doubt scalability is a company concern at this point for any product.
Veranova 6 points 7h ago
That’s not really how software works though, access to unlimited servers is not the same as designing and hosting database schemas, caching, APIs, and making sure everything scales up and down beautifully.
Everyone has access to AWS/Azure and yet teams still mess up scaling all the time, because it’s not the availability of hardware and monitoring tools which actually causes outages
Everyone has access to AWS/Azure and yet teams still mess up scaling all the time, because it’s not the availability of hardware and monitoring tools which actually causes outages
redditor_tx 0 points 4h ago
What I meant was Meta should have highly abstracted infrastructure where things like caching, APIs, database partitioning, etc. should be taken care of. I’ve seen well-architected systems that make it very easy to launch full-blown apps.
When people use AWS/Azure, they build their own abstraction layers on top of public cloud. I’d be extremely surprised if Threads leveraged raw services.
When people use AWS/Azure, they build their own abstraction layers on top of public cloud. I’d be extremely surprised if Threads leveraged raw services.
EmbarrassedHelp 1 points 45m ago
Threads is built on the open source ActivityPub protocol that powers the Fediverse. So Meta didn't have to make everything from scratch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
teamjacobomg 1 points 2h ago
It was made by a team of 10 engineers. Meta was caught off guard by how successful it would be. I'm sure IG is reorging right now to scale up production on the app. The demand is clearly there, they just have to move quickly and intelligently to keep the users they've gained. I believe edit button and chronological feed are the first features they'll be shipping
thatfreshjive 4 points 11h ago
To the surprise of literally no one. A few million folks created an account to reserve their name. Probably some brands and bots too.
teamjacobomg 1 points 2h ago
Is it even possible to have a different name than your IG account? It was an incredibly simple sign up process and I don't recall being prompted to enter a user name.
RecalledBurger 6 points 14h ago
Oh no!
​
Anyway...
​
Anyway...
typesett 4 points 14h ago
i mean, the opening of the app is of course not going to be sustainable lol
Rare_Polnareff 4 points 12h ago
Well of course. Social media is so saturated and it had absolutely nothing original. Prob will be dead in a year like google+
Moomanta 3 points 9h ago
Exactly.
My bet is that in less than 2 years Threads will be shut down again, and some of the features will be rolled into Instagram itself.
My bet is that in less than 2 years Threads will be shut down again, and some of the features will be rolled into Instagram itself.
Rare_Polnareff 1 points 9h ago
Zucked into a black hole
New-Two-9964 2 points 13h ago
they only pretend moved to spite twitter and came crawling back
pmotiveforce 4 points 10h ago
Jesus Christ, didn't it just come out a few weeks ago? What kind of goldfish attention span having mother fucker points to it right now and says "see, engagement is down!!!".
"Guise, it's 11pm on Friday night, and ticket sales from Blockbuster Move #f7ae5 are down from 8pm numbers! Wtf guise!"
"Guise, it's 11pm on Friday night, and ticket sales from Blockbuster Move #f7ae5 are down from 8pm numbers! Wtf guise!"
teamjacobomg 2 points 2h ago
It came out last Wednesday.
manny_unever 2 points 14h ago
Most of the accounts are bots
teamjacobomg 0 points 2h ago
Have you used the app? Nearly everything in the algorithmic feed is large content creators, brands, or your direct follows. The only bot I've seen is the musk jet tracker and that's because I follow it directly.
manny_unever 1 points 1h ago
It is highly likely that 90 percent of the accounts consist of bots, possibly created by Meta in order to inflate the numbers.
reaper527 2 points 15h ago
of course it did. it was a poorly designed publicity stunt with an artificially inflated user count relying on instagram users.
the_than_then_guy 6 points 15h ago
This talking point is so off the mark. Yes, Instagram users could move over their accounts to the new platform, but they still had to do it as individuals.
teamjacobomg 1 points 2h ago
Exactly. Maybe you could argue they made the sign up process too easy and folks dropped off because they didn't have any intent to stay and checked it out because of curiosity (but who didn't sign up out of curiosity?), but I'm seeing a few of my IG follows remain and play around with posting. It's been interesting seeing how folks are using it.
Marchello_E 2 points 14h ago
uh-oh. When polyester fiber gets hot...
rando_commenter 2 points 11h ago
Why would you want the same algorithmic "show you everything except the people you actually follow" BS all over again from Insta and FB? If Facebook had just stayed in its original form with a chronological feed without the ads and smutty OF video bait pushed to the top before your content, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
trustfundbaby 2 points 13h ago
its honestly kind of boring tbh. I really want it to succeed, but whenever I get on there, I have to stifle a yawn.
teamjacobomg 1 points 2h ago
I find some things stay at the top of my feed for far too long after I've clearly viewed them multiple times. IG definitely tracks this and I'm sure the threads team is looking into this to change how long content stays on your personal feed.
It'll also help to have the chronological feed.
It'll also help to have the chronological feed.
dgdio -2 points 15h ago
As long as Twitter fails, I don't care.
Cranky0ldguy 1 points 14h ago
This is my shocked face.
redditor_tx 1 points 7h ago
It’ll be a ghost town soon.
NoiseyTurbulence 0 points 9h ago
I don’t use Twitter and have no intention of using Threads either. Dumb.
Crack_uv_N0on -1 points 7h ago
Ditto.
mouseeeeee 0 points 4h ago
Thats because the whole world who uses these platforms already joined lol
WreckitWrecksy -5 points 11h ago
Because they walked back misinformation rules within the first day
PrinceCastanzaCapone 1 points 11h ago
If I didn’t need an instragram account just to sign up I’d already be a member. But being forced to first download and sign up for a completely different app has made me shy away.
Dapper_Archer_4376 1 points 8h ago
Even though I’ve Meta and Threads been discussed. I found out about what is that about from the first comment here. Whatever they do doesn’t work, because I’m online pretty much all the time.
frsti 1 points 8h ago
Said it elsewhere but:
The core of Threads' users are those migrating from Instagram but Instagram users do not have anything to \*say\*.
Twitter has TONS of accounts created in the late noughties/early 2010's with maybe one "hello" tweet and nothing else. The vast majority of people do not have anything interesting to say which is why photo apps took off - they're easy to generate content for mindlessly.
It sounds like I'm being snobby but this is exactly why Facebook is very very light on text posts
The core of Threads' users are those migrating from Instagram but Instagram users do not have anything to \*say\*.
Twitter has TONS of accounts created in the late noughties/early 2010's with maybe one "hello" tweet and nothing else. The vast majority of people do not have anything interesting to say which is why photo apps took off - they're easy to generate content for mindlessly.
It sounds like I'm being snobby but this is exactly why Facebook is very very light on text posts
Simple_Jach 1 points 4h ago
I'm too old for this chit
Mission_Paramount 1 points 4h ago
I bet the data collection hasn't stopped though
Exotic_Treacle7438 1 points 3h ago
Reddit “oMg We HaTe ZuCk” but still download and use his app.
Interesting-Sir-9776 1 points 2h ago
I wonder if it's the fact that people are getting checks from Twitter or that a shitty knock off app can't retain people that only came to it out of spite for twitter and Elon musk.
Hortos 1 points 1h ago
This app was kicked out the door to fuck over Spill from gaining any traction or market share. They launched an app that let everyone migrate their entire instagram with 3 clicks that didn’t have DMs, hashtags, OR A WORKING SEARCH FUNCTION.
nicholasdwork 1 points 58m ago
Reminds me of Google Buzz. People used it for about an hour and a half.
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