Technology

Typical fear of missing out behavior. Folks flock to Threads to see what it's all about, see that it actually sucks, and bail.

In other news lemmy engagement is up 200% on the week

Don't fact check me I pulled this out my ass

They gave up all their personal data to see a crappy algo-driven social media site. Meta still considers this a win.

"Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days."

LOL The biggest bullshit of the year... Meta just created shadow accounts of all Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent...

It's Google Plus all over again.

If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don't like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.

It feels like the same reason that Reels isn't doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can't force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.

I mean, to be honest, I feel like it's the quality of the content in there. I used my old phone (the one I use for apps like threads) to get a threads account and people are using Threads as if they're using instagram.

For example, you see a pocture of someone or a drawing, you get into the post to see the 45 comments people left and all of them are:

Comment #1: "Magnificent 🥰😍" #2: "Amazing 🤩" #3: "WOW!! 🔥🔥"

And so on.

At least in twitter there is more "discussion" (albeit toxic and usually useless) or at least more people sometimes talking about interesting things.

But, he added, Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.

strange. my "engagement" on lemmy is... "all day". strange indeed.

well everyone downloaded it to get their usernames

I'm one of the many who deactivated not too long after it launched. My dashboard was just being filled with so many users (mostly celebrities and influencers) who I don't recall ever following or even being on my sphere of interest. It doesn't help that their posts are inorganic attempts to spur engagement.

No hashtags, no anonymity…. Threads has no purpose and is likely to fail unless this changes

I wonder why.

This is the issue with the new "own nothing, subscription only" and "if you're not the customer, you're the product" type models. Everyone went to Threads to take a look at the brand new thing, but now everyone has seen the new thing they're gone.

All the hype that was built up initially based on that curiosity comes across as arrogance and empty promises as users inevitably get bored of the new shiny thing that's really just another attempt to harvest them for their metadata and ad-sense.

Is it because it's filled to the brim with old memes? That would make me want to leave a new place. Tried kbin social the other day and the first three pages were all full of the old memes being posted here and i spent half an hour or so trying to figure out how to filter them out but couldn't so I just uninstalled.

Reminds me of the old saying: "how do you make a million dollars in the stock market? Start with a billion"

Start with a billion visitors, then snag 100 million, then keep 1 million then blaghole the site

They launched it without addressing the obvious issues like spam and low-quality content. The easy migration from Instagram basically turned threads into... Instragram. Literally the same low quality posts and low quality engagement of Instagram transfered over. Seriously, have you ever read comments on Instagram? It's the bottom of the barrel in the every sense of the expression. That's Threads now.

Also, poetically threads on Threads are even harder to follow and navigate than Twitter.

Makes sense. People are thirsty for a something along the lines of "Twitter, but fewer nazis", so tons of people checked it out, but it still lacks feature parity with Twitter since it was a rushed-to-market MVP.

I think once it adds on a handful of new features, it's only a matter of time before audiences gravitate to Threads over a platform whose owner is bragging about funnelling money to human traffickers.

The honeymoon phase is reaching its end

Yeah, the novelty of it will fizzle out. Some will call it their new home. Others will go back to Twitter or other. Some will check back in periodically.

I played around with it and it’s basically useless without a follower only feed. And the posts tend to just basically disappear forever after a feed refresh.

But if they follow through on ActivityPub integration I’ll be stoked to follow all the normies that couldn’t get by on mastodon that are using threads. More content = more better.

Doesn't seem surprising. It's the new shiny thing and then interest wanes a bit. Probably same holds true of Lemmy IMO. That said Threads is now a viable replacement for Twitter and advertisers might decide one platform is a toxic cesspit and the other isn't (and has some big crossover influencers) and spend accordingly. Even if it only hurts Twitter by a few % of revenue, that still more losses for Musk's ego purchase and it should be seen as a good thing.

Threads is allegedly going to support ActivityPub so theoretically itself and Mastodon, and Lemmy could all have some kind of federated access to each other. But Threads is an enormous whale in a pond of minows so how that would work is anyone's guess.

Unoriginal Social Media Gimmicks - The next big thing, or just another flash in the pan?