Ask HN: Meta Threads – no dotcom domain name, no desktop site, MVP gone mad? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Meta Threads – no dotcom domain name, no desktop site, MVP gone mad?

6 pointsandrewstuart12 comments

Alright, the MVP concept is about getting something rapidly to market. That's great for startups testing the water.

But does that really apply to companies the size of Meta?

How can this be launched without even a desktop user interface?

Even more of a mystery, who approved launch of a service without owning the dotcom domain name? I know facebook itself started out without the domain name, but it wasn't a 744 billion $ company.

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Why gone mad? They proved that MVP is what matters and all that other stuff is gravy.

Twitter DDOS'd itself on Saturday and four days later Meta shipped a competing app that had 10 million signups in 7 hours. Who cares if they don't have a desktop site or .com... they're signing up a million people every hour and they don't even have a signup page.

I think what we're seeing is that the people behind some of the only platforms to serve billions of people know how to ship a new platform to serve billions of people better than all the tech commentators who've never done anything at scale.

Everything I have heard about the importance of .com is signalling, particularly from that Paul Graham article. Basically, you need .com to signal to investors and users that the company is a serious endeavour.

Meta has no need to signal that it is a serious player. Nobody is going to wonder if a Meta product is a Nigerian scam.

I wonder how much of this flood is botfarms taking a signal from Meta saying, essentially, "Here's your bot-friendly, privacy-violating sales and communication platform to replace twitter. C'mon in, the spam is fine!"

It's on pace to hit 100M users in a few days, so if anything I think it's evidence that (at least in social media) those things simply aren't that important these days.

Disclosure: work at Meta, not on Threads

Given the '.net' link is going to be embedded all over the place now, I wouldn't be surprised if we never see 'threads.com'

100m sign ups, via a frictionless process embedded in IG. Those may or may not be users. It's difficult to tell as this is a fairly unique situation.

And if they are user will they come - given where they came from - at the expense of IG? Or will Twitter feel it.

Time will tell. But if this ends up being an over-sell - a la the Metaverse - Wall Street will be quick to judge. Again?

Timing is everything. People are flooding out of Twitter and looking for somewhere to go. The product doesn’t have to be good to start getting customers, it only has to be better than Twitter. And since Twitter is blocking and rate-limiting access, this iteration is still pulling in huge amounts of users.

The other huge factor is that this is bolted onto instagram and your followers and accounts you follow copy over from instagram.

Oh, fantastic. It's not as if their audience are independent thinkers who make their own decisions. No, their targets are just mindless sheep, following blindly wherever they're directed.

And that's not even the worse part of it

It seems optimized to be a "firehose of influencers" more than a discussion place (think the text version of TikTok)

Why do you need the desktop user interface or the domain name when you have such powerful branding of the app?

To get even more users.

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