Threads has "just under" 100M monthly active users
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
And now its built, I'd have done a better job advertising and marketing it.
Let me ask you - when the latest Mission Impossible movie came out, when the latest Spiderman movie came out, did you see ads absolutely fucking everywhere? Yes you did - bus stops, TV, YouTube - everywhere you turned, that message was being sold to you. When the latest Apple phone came out, were you even able to escape the Apple advertising on radio, TV, YouTube, magazines, whatever? No, you were not able to escape.
Let me ask you - how many slick, stylish, compelling ads have you seen for Threads? Is the answer "absolutely everywhere", or is the answer "nowhere, never, none"? Or is the answer "damn facebook is pushing Threads down my throat".
The incompetence firstly of the technical build then secondly of the marketing is startling.
The conclusion has to be either facebook genuinely doesn't care about Threads, it's just a distraction from trying to make the metaverse, OR they genuinely care but they genuinely have no idea what they are doing, despite having all the money in the world.
I say I'd be better at making Threads than Zuckerberg because almost anyone would be better - for gods sake all you need to do is picj up the phone to the top ad agencies and tell them to pitch for a $500M adverting spend. It's not rocket science.
How the heck did Zuckerberg completely MISS the utter total 100% importance of the user handle in trying to lift Twitter's user base from Musk?
Let me tell you this - Twitter users ARE their handles - handles matter.
But in Zuckerbergs's world, to join Threads, you have to get an Instagram account - and apart from all the handles already being gone there, you certainly can't get your Twitter handle on threads.
People love to get a good handle - it's a personalised number plate. So Threads should have played on this - people who are engaging, posting, building audience on Threads, well they get their choice of handle.
There should have been the biggest handle rush of all time - in return for usage and engagement. Instead - Threads got the opposite - no good handles available at all, disincentive to join. Ugh.
Why - why does Threads use Instagram for its user management system? That's a mistake that has to be fixed pronto.
If I was running that project I would have said you get to have the same Threads handle as your Twitter handle if you can prove you own it by posting a code to Twitter. Of course Musk would do his best to make that not possible, but playing that game is part of the publicity of getting people to move over. Coming up with encrypted codes, obfuscated codes to prove your identity. The newspapers would write about it, you could build talk about Threads, build the perception that there was a real movement towards Threads. But did facebook do anything like that? No, they just dumped you in the Instagram user account system and said "no good handle for you". Really, whoever it is at facebook running the Threads project lacks the imagination to be taking on the job of stealing Twitter from Musk.
a) Because it allows most people to join instantly without having to signup.
b) It leverages your existing Instagram interests, connections etc. for the feed.
c) Enhances your Instagram advertising profile with additional data.
d) It means that Threads has a robust, scalable, secure and proven auth system.
It's a fight with Musk, not development of a banking ledger system designed with UML.
And it's not just technical reasons but business ones. Feeding additional data into Instagram ads is going to improve the quality of their targeting engine. Which means Threads is contributing to Meta's bottom line without them having to run ads.
> it's failing.
I'm sorry, what?
They're obviously not advertising it due to the product being close to complete... it doesn't even have search or trending yet... Why waste money on advertising if the product isn't even done yet?
What about the 2.3 billion Instagram users who get reminded about it every so often?
Great first season.
Cancelled.
I'd have to ask colleagues that joined Meta, but I'm imagining a team that's totally checked out. You know, you like/need the $$$ you get biweekly, but your hearts not in it, so you show up everyday going through the motions and just keep pushing that boulder up the hill. Meta doesn't have the greatest reputation, and then on top of that your working on Mark Zuckerberg's spite social media project...
Right now, it seems to be blocked in half of the countries in the world. This probably affects the network effects.
Bluesky is mentioned a gazillion times more, and even that not very often.
There is no distinction of intention in this metric.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monthly-active-user-mau...
You could compute more satisfying metrics like “how active is my average user” and that does tell a story. But MAU says a lot about a product’s reach even if it feels uncompellingly broad.
That might be, by definition, "MAU", a vanity metric used by corporate-brainwashed people working to pump profit through financial quarters. Not "monthly active users", which is a phrase that has a meaning by itself - people actively using a product. Doesn't matter what Meta product managers say or other people trying to get raises by raising pageviews and calling it "MAUs".
Not coincidentally, Meta is having a hard time keeping their real active users on all their platforms. Throwing tantrums saying that this is the definition of MAU!1! won't save them.
So then Instagram gets thread notifications.
Clicking on one becomes a visit and goes part of the MAU metric.
Threads has no users.
So by definition it has users. In fact quite a lot of them.
So no notifications are not indications of people being active.
I see nothing but real people, no content farms and plenty of activity.
As with every site like this it really depends on who you follow.
Note who shares Threads screenshots: either the person itself or it's a dunk on how threads is boring/meaningless
Zuck created the AOL of short messages, it's as if the bluechecks on twitter got 10x more views than on Twitter itself
Source?
Anyways, at which point am I considered a Threads user? If I stop scrolling to show my partner how absurd it is that they’re doing this? When I accidentally press in that item in my feed?
My normal Instagram feed is at least 25% screenshots of Tweets anyway, and the Thread advertisement interstitial gives you the impression that you can press to “view more” of whatever recycled thing is in the Threads post they’ve decided to shove in your face. So it could very well just be 100M people that pressed “See more”, and that’s one of the more generous explanations.
Coming from Meta, and given Facebook, their main product, why would you think it can develop a better culture?
On Twitter/X, the reality is that people get the kind of posts they tend to interact with. The "For You" page can be curated, however. My X/Twitter feed right now has no mentions of war, or politics. It's all tech. Whenever I engage with tweets, I end up seeing similar tweets on the "For You" page, that I am then careful about curating.
The automated feed is now a feature of all social media, except for the Fediverse/Mastodon. I don't like it, because the algorithm is meant to maximize engagement whatever the cost. But have you seen Facebook's feed lately? It's much, much worse than Twitter, because on Facebook, whatever you do, you can't stop it from suggesting bullshit, drama and yellow journalism.
BTW, Mastodon is nice. But even without the algorithmic feed, people tend to gravitate toward drama and shallow subjects, such as politics and religion. Some people like complaining about shallow subjects into the void, or to pick a fight with strangers.
Instagram, being based on posts of images only, seemed to be different. Well, not anymore, right?
> On Twitter/X, the reality is that people get the kind of posts they tend to interact with. The "For You" page can be curated, however
I deleted my Twitter account late last year and created a new one that only follows a handful of local bars to keep track of their opening hours/upcoming events. I'm in Japan, all the bars only post in Japanese, my computer is set to Japanese. But when I check out the For You tab, after about 3 screenfuls of local stuff, it fades to U.S. brain-rot all in English and I stop scrolling and close the tab.
> But have you seen Facebook's feed lately?
I'm mostly on Facebook for family but also am I a handful of groups - retro tech groups, some car Youtuber groups. I see no politics or anything like that on Facebook so the feed curation there seems to work. There are a lot of really bad ads and just tons and tons of lowest-common-denominator "viral videos" like those 5 minute crafts and "look at this weird kid in china" type things so it's still not a pleasant experience.
> BTW, Mastodon is nice. But even without the algorithmic feed, people tend to gravitate toward drama and shallow subjects, such as politics and religion
Aside from people expressing exasperation about whatever the latest political tragedy is, and a lot of "trans rights" boosts, I see proportionately very little drama, politics and religion on Mastodon. Without the algorithm to reward virality from emotional posts like that, they just don't seem to get the reach they did on Twitter. Most of my Mastodon feed is technical stuff like people's pet projects, which always got buried and never surfaced properly on Twitter since it didn't trigger the algorithmic vitality.
I'm guessing that it depends on the bubble we have on each social network.
> I'm guessing that it depends on the bubble we have on each social network.
Absolutely, and it always makes these kinds of social media debates very anecdotal and hard to make any conclusions.
This is why we have regulations. If Meta wants to target that market (and I assume they want), they'll have to conform. Could also be technical reasons that slow them down.
> Coming from Meta, and given Facebook, their main product, why would you think it can develop a better culture?
Because Meta does moderate content whereas Musk advocates free speech and doesn't mind the toxicity as far as I can tell. Each side has its pros and cons, and there's room for both. Meta gets a lot of flack but I think content moderation at that scale is a hard problem, politically and technically.
Arguably even Twitter was no longer Twitter, even prior to the acquisition talks. Twitter was as much the place you would go to to get citizen journalism when big tragedies broke as it was the place you'd hear endless outrage over a person you never heard of before having done something inconsequential that everyone agreed was significant enough to try and end their career over. By the end, a common refrain was the hope never to become the "main character" because everyone's history had some rope to hang them by if presented in the most outraged and uncharitable way. But on the other hand it was also a way to be heard, a place to motivate millions for activism (as long as it didn't take any real risk or effort and could be tweeted about throughout) and to do viral marketing.
It feels like that has been replaced with niches and auto-curation either presenting userbases of similar sites with disjointed siloed experiences or with a homogeneous repetitive timeline of what advertisers might like or what Elon Musk personally wants you to see (which seems to be mostly his own posts).
Twitter feels like for a while it was the closest approximation to the "global town square" or the mythical "marketplace of ideas" but in all truth that didn't last long and once marketing departments, advertising agencies, internet trolls and state actors had caught on and mastered the new medium, it was already dead.
Twitter, on the other hand, is one of my regular hang-outs.
I'd expect, Hive, Substack Notes, Post.news, etc to follow suit.