Zuckerberg’s ‘Twitter killer’ Threads hits 70M sign-ups in two days

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/07/mark-zuckerberg-twitter-killer-threads-hits-sign-ups-two-days

by DocFeind • 3 years ago

17 15 3 years ago

gemstones• 3 years ago

When Elon told the whole world that making Twitter is easy and requires a lot less people than they had, it was inevitable that competitors would take that to mean that they should develop their own versions.

mytailorisrich• 3 years ago

Of course competitors already knew that.

But this is not the difficult bit in building a competitor. The difficult bit is to make people switch en masse.

century19• 3 years ago

100%

He opened up the arena.

rsynnott2• 3 years ago

Elon, of course, was helpfully assisted with the difficult bit, too. If Facebook had launched a twitter-y thing two years ago, I think the general view would have been “oh, cool, it’ll probably be just as popular as Facebook Dating”.

gloryjulio• 3 years ago

#thank Elon for bringing the opportunity on a silver plate.

Zuck and the threads team are probably thinking about that

3cats-in-a-coat3• 3 years ago

The irony of the entire situation is that you can start a new Twitter with 10 people, but you can't maintain the existing Twitter with 10 people. I don't know what his mental model of management is, but it seems severely lacking, as in maybe he has people at Tesla and SpaceX that "round him out" and fill-in gaps in his thinking. At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests.

While he may drive a Tesla and use Starlink, he didn't create SpaceX or swoop in and take control of Tesla as an obsessive customer with an agenda as a customer.

I don’t think that that entirely explains why Musk Twitter isn’t like Tesla or SpaceX, but I can’t imagine its not a significant factor.

(I also think that, distinct from his customer-agenda, him seeing it as an opportunity to relitigate his finance app history getting booted as CEO of X.com twice before it became PayPal is an issue that impacts more than the names he has used for the companies used in the Twitter acquisition.)

tibbydudeza• 3 years ago

In a sense that was correct as "Project 92" was started in Jan 2023 and they had the Meta infrastructure (photo storage/message storage/cloud ???) and Instagram account/content moderation to piggyback from.

wkat42422• 3 years ago

Umm 70M is actually not a lot on meta/Twitter scale.

Also, gaining users is only the the beginning. Keeping them is the tough part.

Personally I'm not rooting for either. I'd rather see mastodon and Lemmy win big.

camjohnson26• 3 years ago

It’s one of the fastest growing apps in history and already a significant percentage of Twitter’s total user base. It’s surged past Mastodon in total user count. I hope ActivityPub becomes the standard, but pretending like Threads isn’t a massive hit ignores reality.

majani• 3 years ago

And this is without the EU. Twitter must be in a full blown panic right now

Zuckerberg’s ‘Twitter killer’ Threads hits 70M sign-ups in two days

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