Threads Usage Drops by Half from Initial Surge

40 31 3 years ago

Pxtl2• 3 years ago

Iirc (can't fins the post) this was predicted by the man running Threads. This is a normal part of launching a new platform with a big brand -- an initial burst of interest then backing off and the question is always how to keep the rest.

coltonweaver• 3 years ago

DAU is still ~24 million so while dropping by half is a steep decline, it’s still pretty good.

I’m more curious to see this number in 6 months.

melling2• 3 years ago

My first post to Threads:

“A little competition is a good thing. Welcome to Threads…”

Competition is critical to get the best systems. Apple vs Windows. Android vs iOS,Intel vs AMD…

agentgumshoe4• 3 years ago

Would be slightly better if the competition wasn't coming from the megacorp across the road...

snarkyturtle2• 3 years ago

The megacorp who actively designed algorithms that boosted content that made people angry, and allowed for third-parties to manipulate their APIs into influencing elections.

hdior2• 3 years ago

Intel vs AMD… but x86 sucks; spectre and the like, power hungry ornate designs

Apple vs Windows… closed source and otherwise encumbered

Android vs iOS… App Store pay to play, restricted or 100% closed in iOS’ case

As “systems” your choices of “best” come with numerous drawbacks

melling2• 3 years ago

Sorry, the point I wanted to make was that without competition, companies have little incentive to improve their products. Sure, Linux rules, the Motorola 68000 was nicer than x86, Beta beat VHS, … in a perfect world,…

agentgumshoe4• 3 years ago

Isn't this the captain obvious outcome?

Or were people seriously thinking Threads would completely eat up Twitter's lunch and they could finally announce "the king is dead, long live the king."?

dotnet00• 3 years ago

A reasonable chunk of this site has been proclaiming the imminent sudden death of Twitter any day now for any and every reason ever since the layoffs happened.

kemotep• 3 years ago

Well, for me at least twitter is dead since I can no longer visit the site without an account. As someone who used twitter for a decade without an account my twitter usage is now zero since that change.

_2z1p• 3 years ago

I think a lot of it is good old fashioned Elon Musk hate. There’s a similar pattern when it comes to Tesla and SpaceX.

hajile• 3 years ago

Twitter handing out part of ad revenue shortly after Threads launched was the end of Threads IMO.

solumunus• 3 years ago

It is silly to make such a definite statement at this early stage.

Pxtl2• 3 years ago

On the other hand, handing ad revenue to the worst people on the internet was the final straw to get me to kick my twitter habit again, since at that point not only were the hateful bluechecks annoying, at that point they were actively being funded by my complicity.

foderking• 3 years ago

don't just make noise on hackernews, make sure you follow through and delete your Twitter account

jyxent• 3 years ago

I don't think it is sustainable for Twitter to hand out ad revenue site-wide at this point. All they have done so far is to pay out to a small group of people. Musk has said that ad revenue is down 50% and that they are not currently profitable.

matthewdgreen2• 3 years ago

It’s entirely possible that Threads never succeeds to the level of Twitter, but still sucks up enough eyeballs and revenue to make Twitter unworkable as a business.

snarkyturtle2• 3 years ago

It's possible sure but unlikely. There's a reason why there are countless news channels that span the political spectrum. Just because some orgs jump ship from Twitter, doesn't mean that all of them will, and there will be some orgs who tolerate it.

Twitter has a large user base who just use it because it has 500M daily active users.

matthewdgreen2• 3 years ago

Not every user is the same from a revenue perspective. I find Threads to be obnoxious because it's full of boring athletes and influencers, rather than interesting scientists and people writing sarcastic jokes. But (based on the advertising on network TV) I'm willing to accept the possibility that there might be more money in advertising to the kind of audience that likes athletes and influencers than in advertising to weirdos like me.

All it takes is for a solid chunk of the high-revenue "boring mainstream" audience to exit in order for Twitter to be permanently damaged as a revenue-generating enterprise, even if it still has lots of users. (And as a Twitter addict I think that would be sad! Not sure why the downvotes over a legitimate concern.)

hooverd• 3 years ago

I think Threads' content moderation is what will do it in. No NSFW and no "main characters" to drive engagement.

dvngnt_• 3 years ago

Banning nsfw makes the platform more valuable to ads.

it just means that Twitter has it's niche that's harder to replace

knaik94• 3 years ago

Threads is still lacking a proper discovery algorithm, desktop interface, and compatibility with ActivityPub/Fediverse. Desktop viewing currently only works for reading, but not for interacting.

Meta was very tactical about the timing. Each additional main feature will likely bring a new wave of users that stay.

asadotzler• 3 years ago

What makes you add the "stay" part when they've shows that most users don't stay after more than a couple days of playing around?

dawnerd• 3 years ago

Needs to be mentioned anytime data like this comes from u related third parties: you can’t trust their data, it’s all best effort guesses.

AustinDev• 3 years ago

In another life I used to be one of those third parties that scraped social media for usage metrics back when the APIs were much more permissible. I can tell you that when we got to see internal numbers, we were at most 5%-10% off on all our key metrics. Importantly we were consistently off by a similar margin on each metric so overall our data was very high quality for this type of comparison.

tehbeard• 3 years ago

Given how Meta has played about with numbers in the past (see video view counts), I'm more inclined to believe the third parties over Meta.

ChrisArchitect• 3 years ago

[dupe]

Discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36766734

Threads Usage Drops by Half from Initial Surge

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