But secondly, I'm skeptical that it's even fair to talk about Threads stats using the same measurements as any "new" app, since it's really an extension of Instagram. You don't make a new account for Threads, you just use your Instagram account. They are one in the same, the only difference being which app you use to access which features. It's most closely analogous to Facebook and the Messenger app - do you count the users of each of those separately?
(It's also funny how I get a noticeable amount of seemingly emotional downvotes to any comment critical of Threads or supportive of Twitter/Musk - you are giving away the plot.)
If I implement Google oauth into my app, it doesn't make my app an extention of Google. It just reduces the friction of people making a new account for my app.
Even just having a few people automatically followed can make a difference, even if most people diverge quickly after joining.
Additionally, 90+% of my Threads feed is photos, so, like, what’s the point?
I’ve opened it a couple of times and scrolled for maybe 30 seconds and lost interest.
I’m sure if I put a little effort into it I could find more interesting accounts to follow, but at least in my experience the “bootstrapping” hasn’t really worked.
Plenty of good developer-focused content now, and they implemented a following-only feed. Worth having, for me so far.
I and half the people I know on Twitter are not owners of Instagram accounts. It's absurd to require Insta to login to Threads.
The account linking was a quick fix, the app was released early, and the accounts will not be forcibly linked later on. You won't need an Instagram account to sign up to Threads. But still, if you don't have one, just sign up to Instagram as you would Threads, and you already have your account made.
So what you claim to be a problem isn't a problem because you and every other prospective user knows how to create a Threads account.
Porting over the Instagram graph to Threads is literally how they created the network effect that made it the fastest growing app ever.
Engineerbrained.
I agree, but will that prevent the majority of the public from signing up? A bridge will collapse regardless of what the motorists think, but people being ignorant of Meta's misdeeds does mean that Meta's untrustworthiness won't—can't—factor into their decision regarding signups. Maybe Meta will make the news again with another scummy decision, and maybe that'll drive users away—but how many? I suspect it's a small fraction.
'Course, one might be able to make the argument about "the most important N% of users who create most of the content", who are also unusually savvy... I don't know empirical details here.
Perhaps but the login thing seems totally tangential to this..
Well, you could compared it to Instagram's previous Threads app, which no one used https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/17/instagram-will-shut-down-i...
Twitter/threads is (or should be) a highly viral application.
New users should find themselves compelled to use the product and compelled to encourage others to use it.
With a 100 million user head start, if they were succeeding this shoukd have immediately resulted in the viral loop being triggered into explosive growth.
It’s a huge failure.
Not necessarily unrecoverable, but absolutely a gargantuan fail.
100,000,000 signups should ignite your viral engine and blast into orbit. Enough functionality to be viral was the MV part of “Minimum Viable” for Threads.
Threads attracted two kinds of people: 1. People coming mostly from instagram / tiktok who had never considered using Twitter because it had an established reputation and they knew it wasn't the kind of product for them, and 2. People switching from Twitter because they love Twitter-the-idea but can no longer stand Twitter-the-actual-product-today.
Most of people from group #1 tried it and concluded that yep, it wasn't for them. There is zero surprising about that, and it's where the giant initial numbers came from. But if any of those people stuck around, that's pure bonus.
The more interesting question is what's going on with group #2. Certainly lots of them decided there were too many missing features at launch and kept using Twitter mostly. But that is not a "they'll never check back", those people are still in play for any of Twitter to keep or its competitors to win eventually. But the current DAUs wouldn't be where they are if a significant portion of this group hadn't decided to actually stick around. And that's pretty surprising.
For years the conventional wisdom has been that you can't actually convert users from one social network to another in the exact same niche. You can cut off growth - like instagram adding stories corresponding to Snapchat's growth plateau - but people stay where their existing networks are.
But not this time!
Whereas most social media apps have the cold start problem (the stars need to align such that creators and users show up at the exact same time), Zuckerberg has solved it for Meta.
Threads doesn't need to be a hit on day 1 or even 100 because it has the existing Meta user base that counted on to consume Thread content (whether they like it or not).
For example, I have a FB account but am too lazy/old to sign up for Instagram but I did/do see a lot of Instagram reels that are converted into FB reels - particularly as Instagram reels was starting to take off. I am sure when it is monetizing those views for content creators and advertisers the converted reels get counted.
So while the power Instagram/Thread creaters will likely only push/consume the content in the corresponding app, Meta has the unique platform level ability to push the content to users of all 3 apps (i.e. FB/Insta/Threads).
What percentage have left twitter for threads? Unknown.
Yet not only is Twitter not growing but it’s shrinking.
I think your expectations for success in this vertical are off.
I’d say that’s probably broadly the number of potential Twitter users.
If you think user growth should be exponential to all people in the planet, then that is false.
Source? Musk just tweeted about a new all-time monthly user record. It's not impossible that he would lie, but my impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
There's a whole lot of discussion about Twitter shrinking and high profile people leaving, but they don't. Stephen king comes to mind as a big critic that threatened over and over to leave, but he hasn't.
On the rare occasion he makes non-trivial, falsifiable claims, its pretty common that they turn out to be other-than-accurate, yes.
> but my impression is not at all that Twitter is shrinking.
My impression is that the set of advertisers (not regular Blue users, though they are a different kind of advertiser paying for reach) are narrowing and moving downmarket in a way which would take truly enormous numbers of Blue users to compensate for.
Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the point.
> Whether its shrinking or not is somewhat beside the point.
In a thread entirely about Twitter/threads user count, whether it's shrinking is the entire point.
I have been using Twitter almost since the beginning.
Never have I ever seen this many bots and fake accounts on the platform.
So I would be highly dubious of that user record count.
People were battering down the door for access.
You seriously compare growth at the planet scale with a growth at few universities?
The viral growth you're talking about pretty much never occurs after a huge launch event like this, and is reserved for more methodical releases and/or lower initial starting user counts, e.g. Instagram testing Stories, Facebook growing from college to college.
For all it’s faults I quite enjoying pre-musky Twitter but I completely abandoned the shitshow even before the insane rename. I was an early FB user but left that many years ago around the time of the CA scandal.
Mastrodon is too quirky and challenging to go mainstream which is why I think it will remain great and I’m loving it there.
The same statement holds for Mark Zuckerberg. ;-) (EDIT: and perhaps also Steve Huffman)
These are awful companies (not all awful employees) with awful leadership.
Can you say more on this?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2023/07/27/twitter-...
around here the only desire that exceeded the desire to watch Meta fail was the desire to see Threads kill Twitter first on its way down
How many years/decades of grinding growth will it take to get back to the initial DAU numbers?
It's not very reasonable to consider it a new app when it's in many ways just a shell on top of instagram.
Facebook Marketplace seems to have totally replaced Craiglist as well, where I live, for buying/selling. Facebook Messenger took over e.g. MSN for a lot of people, the News Feed replaced a dedicated news site for a lot of people, and so forth. Events replaced Evite I think (or similar?), FB Photos basically replaced Flickr back in the day...
(I’d say that twitter killed clubhouse also)
Also, keep in mind this is Threads “2.0”. Threads was first launched in 2019[1]. As such, it may even be a stretch to call it new. They have taken several years to test the market and iterate on that earlier MVP to finally find a fit that found up to ~100 million users. Not exactly an overnight success.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/26/20833903/facebook-instagr...
They totally may fail. But even after that 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 launch.
And if there’s one thing Meta knows how to do is to copy successful idea and slowly grind the growth till it dominates market.