A week in, Threads has lost half of its active users
https://boingboing.net/2023/07/18/a-week-in-threads-has-lost-half-of-its-active-users.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml455
Comments72https://boingboing.net/2023/07/18/a-week-in-threads-has-lost-half-of-its-active-users.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml
Let's not forget that thread's data collection is so atrocious that it didn't launch in small and exotic markets like... Say.... The whole of the EU.
I sure wish the United States would write some pro-consumer privacy legislation...
But what about my Quarterly Profits!?!
Man, they should change the saying to “the road to hell is paved with quarterly profits”
Do you know how this works? I understood if you have Instagram a threads account is already created for you, but is it the App Store location you downloaded from or IP or user set location?
i imagine it’s just very straightforward based on your app store region, because if you spoof that then you’re probably already breaking some ToS so you have no legal ground to stand on
Is the law based on your geographical location or your citizenship? If I'm an EU citizen and travel to California, can these companies store/sell that California data differently? Also say while in Cali I download Threads. Does that mean they can continue to store my data when I return home to the EU?
For real?
Yep. One reason might be that FB just took a biiiig blow on their entire business model from the highest court in the EU (which came in front of court after an action by in turn the biggest sub-market (Germany)'s anti-trust watchdog bureau got active against them):
NYT article
(Mirror)
Also a source for the actual claim from above:
https://www.independent.ie/business/technology/no-instagram-threads-app-in-the-eu-irish-dpc-says-metas-new-twitter-rival-wont-be-launched-here/a1927220337.html
Edit; also this: https://lemmy.world/post/1732201
Is this a surprise? User retention is hard, and I'd expect this to hit even harder as time goes by. It'll keep going up until the point where user growth matches attrition and I'd guess in the early days of a social platform, it's going to take a while for background growth to increase that much and attrition will be pretty high given the lack of attachment.
It's also worth mentioning that on launch day, people in Europe were able to access it via VPN (not sure how big of a number of users that was), but they've since blocked those users. I'm sure that's not a massive chunk, but it's a chunk nonetheless
How do you block people using a VPN by region? Just block the whole VPN?
Since it's Facebook, probably by account
Big companies like Facebook can just block IPs coming from the VPNs, it's not feasible for someone smaller but they could 100% do it
@Kinga @radarsat1 That’s weird because I only access Facebook with my VPN on via browser and it doesn’t break it. I would think all of MetaZuck’s stuff would be VPN blocked, but it’s not.
They collect all kinds of data, and it's tied to users Instagram account. There are tons of data that could indicate given users geographical location without IP (gps, phone service provider, credit card uses, user profile, etc.)
It's not a surprise, but it gets upvoted because "threads bad".
Oh get out of here w/ that. It’s not bad as much as it’s just stupid - it’s literally a top down approach to social media. Fb & instagram have already made it big so of course they can launch & pull whatever bs they want.
It wasn’t organic & they hadn’t built anything w/ true merit & people are still tired of Zuck. He’s marginally better than musk these days at best. And maybe people aren’t as crazy about celebs & influencers wanting to be seen & heard as we all thought - as that’s not social media - that’s a Coca-cola commercial.
You're proving my point. It's a shitty platform and nobody likes it, so this was completely expected. Because it's expected, it's not notable, but posts about it get upvoted because people like to shit on it.
I'm probably one of those. I joined because it was a low hanging fruit for an instagram user. It is basically twitter culture all over again. People complain that you're just posting into a void on Mastodon but I get tons of responses over there. The real void is any mainstream social media where only the voice of influencers are amplified. The whole main feed is just 90% suggested posts. Why the fuck do I wanna see a post from Jake Paul or Mr. Beast?
My experience as well. I blitzed and grinded followers cuz it was easy and why not. My feed is okay in general, but I had to follower 1.5kish people to get it that way.
But I still get more than twice the engagement and meaningful engagement at that on Mastadon and Kbin, with less than half the followers. I also get little out of twitter, but I may be bad at it.
how do you grind followers
Put out robot bait and the follows just rack up.
what's the point of having robot followers tho
I get why that matters for big accounts. I will never understand why normal people prefer that, though. I much prefer engagement with people over consumption of content produced by popular influencers
I feel like that's gotta be pretty normal for hyped up product launches, a lot of people just join to see what it is at first.
What, are the bots on strike?
It begins.
I don't mean this comment to be facetious towards OP.
Seeing reports that interest died down on a newly released item, be it a game, social media, or tv series, is just to be expected. May as well report that water is still wet.
Mastodon is so much better
I left Twitter back in 2016 when I realised I wasn't using it anymore and it had come up in a you've been pwnd result. Figured I'd just delete the account instead of resetting the password and didn't miss it.
But I signed up to Mastodon today, because why not? I don't really see why it's being called hard to use. There's some nice apps as well, which is making me more excited for a Kbin app when I wasn't so bothered before...
It’s somewhat harder to find friends on there, but once you do they’ll be quality over quantity. And besides, they even have a cool poll-based RPG account.
I used the time honoured technique of posting a cute picture of my cats and hashtagging it. Also found some interesting people to follow - liking it a lot!
Remember to make your intro post! Tag it with #introduction plus the tags for whatever else you're into. Let the people come to you! 😄
Ha! I've come to you!
I've created a separate Mastodon profile so you'll have to guess who I am though 🤔
Truly you are a master of disguise
If you post it they will come. (But you’ll have to guess my profile, it existed prior to my discovery of lemmy so I didn’t register using my lemmy.world account)
They didn’t lose anyone, its only been out for a short time. With the recent changes at twitter breaking all sorts of long time features Threads is poised to be its replacement.
They lost plenty of people, at least for now.
What none of these articles seem to want to highlight is that this is completely normal retention behaviour. 50% week 1 retention isn't excellent by any stretch of the imagination, but it's well, well within the span of what's normal.
And Threads is still half baked.
Yeah, this "Omg Facetrash lost all their users, they have such a dead platform lol" is stupid. I dislike Meta, but it's a new social media, of course not every single user who checks it out will stay, that's how it is for all new social medias, video games, anything
If half of the users who tried it out stuck around, then they're incredibly successful.
boing boing sounds like a reliable source ...
Fediverse boycott did it!
Lol jk
Good news tho. Hope everyone over at zuck corp is starting to feel bad about themselves again.
The article doesn't really explain why this is the case.
because it makes for a catchy phrase
I never used twitter, facebook or instagram or any of those social stuff except forums and slashdot or slashdot-likes. But I kinda don't mind tech companies launching shit like this every few months and see it dissolve into the sludge from which it came. I also wish sites like youtube and google the same fate... the sooner the better...
YouTube and Google are unlikely to fall, but when and if Google ever does so will YouTube. YouTube is a money pit and has no competitors because it's not viable, video hosting is too expensive relative to the money they make from the platform. Google has been seeding YouTube with capital from their own more successful services, but Google's search engine isn't nearly as good as it used to be and their cloud and web stuff isn't nearly as popular as Amazon or Microsoft, so we'll see.
Probably cause it’s just scrolling through a timeline of random peoples thoughts. Most of which you don’t even follow or care about
To be fair, that's microblogging in general. Mastadon, KBin, Bluesky, Twitter, and Threads all fall victim to this to varying degrees.
I use it to follow people I used to follow on Twitter that haven't done the Fediverse thing. I mostly just read though.
I hate the fact that there's no feed and I also hate that on Android when you switch back to the app it refreshes and jumps to the top so you can't find anything. :/
I signed up/in once and haven’t used it again.
Honestly, keeping half is pretty good.
IKR? The massive influx of near-zero-friction signups is bound to create a large userbase of new/shiny window shoppers who quickly lose interest. I've got a couple of friends who seem to be attempting to create a presence there, but otherwise it's a terrible feed. Of course it's a terrible feed for me because I've done jack-shit on instagram and the algorithm is just throwing stuff at my wall to see what sticks. I've got ladies with large asses in spandex, some quote-meme spammers, and Jair Bolsonaro filling up my feed - that's just a fucking dumpster fire.
I'll keep the app (properly sandboxed) but I doubt I'll interact with it any more than mastodon or Post - which is monthly at best. I'd say that I dropper Twitter last year, but really I dropped it a decade ago as being useless as both a location for discourse and a source for, well, anything of interest to me.
Honestly, I'm surprised the algorithm doesn't start with more benign stuff. The best tuned algorithms start with low-controversy popular content, like pictures of cats, then slowly as it learns about the user begins introducing personal interests and rage bait depending on what the user interacts with.
I'd probably use it more if there was a browser/desktop app. But I've got like 1% as many followers there as I do on Mastodon, so I don't think I'd post anything regardless.
i’m just over here waiting for the federation to happen so i can spy on Threads stuff from the safety (and sanity) of my own mastodon instance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd recommend watching that movie if you want to scare the shit out of yourself. After the blast is worse than the blast itself.
https://youtu.be/MrHoMSRZOS4
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/MrHoMSRZOS4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I find it funny that no one in Meta involved with the upcoming new social media had ever heard of the movie when the name was suggested.
@igalmarino leave it to Fuckerberg to fuck up a simple task of making a privacy focused social media site. Idiots.
Why would any corporate anything want a privacy focused social media site? There's no way to extract data or money from it. It's not like they're in the game to give you a service you want to use. Just enough to keep you generating data so they can sell you.