this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Instagram’s new Twitter competitor, Threads, is off to a rocket start. Mark Zuckerberg announced 30 million activated profiles, while internal data shows over 95 million posts and 190 million likes in less than one day,

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Am I the only one who finds those numbers abnormally high? The sourcing also seems suspect - going through the verge posts, they're just quoting internal numbers with no sourcing.

Here's my question - it says activated profiles, not 30 million signups. If a large chunk of those are Insta and FB users, it seems more than likely that a lot of those profiles could be activated internally (I work with databases, this could be as easy as changing a 0 to 1 in a field in the profile table if they've got it integrated right). I'm also curious as to the content of the 95 million posts - how many of those are an automated "Hi I'm on threads!" message when the profile starts up?

That being said, I'm not curious nor stupid enough to actually signup and let them Zuck my data, but this smacks of astroturfing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Instagram has more than 2 billion active users, and each (non-EU) Instagram user can conveniently login Threads just pressing a button. If they're fudging the numbers, activating only 1.5% of their potential userbase seems odd. Why not activating hundreds of millions of accounts?

As for the posts, an average of 3.2 posts/users for just the first day sounds reasonable to me.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Meta has several billion active users across their platforms. 30M is nothing to them.

Also don’t forget that we’re talking about a microblog, so it will inherently generate a large amount of individual posts, much more so than e.g Instagram. The quality is however likely very low initially and a lot of users are probably just trying out the current talk of the day.

I do suspect that Threads will probably grow to a few hundred million users before the end of the year; anything less would probably be regarded as a colossal failure for Meta.