8 ms·

Threads has passed 2M sign ups in the first 2 hours

265 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

paxys 3y ago
Not having a news feed with just people I follow makes it near unusable. At the moment there is just too much garbage content from "influencers" cluttering the app, and very little you can do to curate it.
- fotta 3y ago
  Apparently it’s coming https://www.threads.net/t/CuVlg88I84C/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.threads.net/t/CuVlg88I84C/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA...
  - runarberg 3y ago
    Unrelated. But this web interface is weird. There is no UI outside of the content except for their icon at the top. When you click it, instead of taking you to a home view, it toggles dark mode (!) If you go to https://www.threads.net https://www.threads.net you only get one button instructing you to get the app. Is there any way to use this without the app?
    - joegahona 3y ago
      I noticed that bizarre dark-mode thing too — it feels like going into a room and flipping the light switch, and a water faucet turns on.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Apparently only crusty old weird people (like me) use computers to access the web in 2023. Why even bother with a website?
- impulser_ 3y ago
  They said it coming soon, but the more you follow people the more your feed becomes filled with posts and replies from the people you follow. It's not as bad as when you first join.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Great strategy: start off with a horrible first impression, then promise it gets better. It's like sex with someone who comes in 10 seconds.
awb 3y ago
Odd UI on mobile. Can’t navigate to the homepage. The logo toggles darkmode. When I went directly to threads.net the only content is a link to the app store. No way for a web user to browse content.
- vehemenz 3y ago
  It looks like threads are indexable at least, unlike Twitter (lol). Try a few "site:threads.net" searches on Google.
meghan_rain 3y ago
The cookie banner got to be the most disgustingly illegal thing I've ever seen.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cottsak 3y ago
good luck Zuck!
m3kw9 3y ago
I signed up but not gonna use it because it’s just twitter with less content
- vehemenz 3y ago
  Yes, but they have meaningful verification (apparently), while Twitter doesn't.
  - cottsak 3y ago
    What does that mean? Doesn’t the blue tick verification on Twitter require a valid credit card ?
    - vehemenz 3y ago
      Twitter had verification based on the account's noteworthiness, and now it doesn't. That was one of the main features of Twitter, and now Threads.net has it.
      - Alupis 3y ago
        What does "noteworthy" mean? Who decides what's noteworthy?
        RockRobotRock 3y ago
        You can look that up yourself.
        jtriangle 3y ago
        It's always, eventually, exactly the people who you don't want deciding what is/isn't noteworthy.
        vehemenz 3y ago
        Twitter did before, based on their own internal criteria. The system was flawed, but having a flawed system is better than no system at all, as we are seeing now.
pcurve 3y ago
Still trying to figure out the 110MB download size.
- danboy4 3y ago
  All those tracking libraries gotta go somewhere
- klabb3 3y ago
  110 Mb so far. In just a few months, HN will be full of comments praising the original version of the app for being so much snappier compared to whatever they have then.
- hbn 3y ago
  Uncompressed assets and libraries. As is tradition.
dvt 3y ago
That feels oddly low. It was released at 5ish PM PST on a Wednesday, and considering they have literally all of Instagram + Facebook's userbase to push it on, it seems pretty low. The "sign up" was also just a "log in with FB/Instagram" button where the form was already auto-filled. So it's not like people had to convert, it's pretty much about as pure a product-market-fit test you can get. Discoverability is also pretty awful with a ton of cringe "influencer content" polluting my main feed. I don't want to necessarily block MrBeast, I just don't want to see him when I don't follow him. In any case, my prediction is that this experiment is going to be comparable to when they tried to copy Snapchat's story feature or when reels were meant to replace TikTok. These were nice cute distractions, but didn't materially impact Snapchat's business or TikTok's popularity. And in spite of their blunders, I think Twitter is here to stay.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gtirloni 3y ago
  I never saw a sign up form or any kind of indication. I learned about the trick to search for "saymore" from a family member and see the red invite button on the search bar. She learned from some random.
- firecall 3y ago
  I opened it and immediately saw a post from GaryVee. Who was sanctimoniously instructing people to 'collectively be more civil'. Not a platform I want to use, but the App seemed decent; smooth UI animations, clean interface, simple onboarding with an overall decent UX. I think Instagram people who are Twitter curious will jump on it. If they can get Celeb style Tweets and memes without having to interact with the Garbage Fire that is Twitter, then I think it's going to be a nice easy win for Meta. Not a raging multi-billion dollar success like Instagram, but an OK casual slow burn that offers value to Instagram users.
  - pc86 3y ago
    My Twitter is full of two things - people doing exactly the same thing they were doing a year, two years, three years ago, and people saying how Twitter is such a dumpster fire now and everything is so bad and it's the end and Twitter will be dead soon (but they're still on it). I'm not saying Twitter is going to be around 20 years from now, but I do think the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.
jfoutz 3y ago
That's amazing. The website seems to be crumbling a bit, everything redirects to get the app. Hope they can scale up a few instances so browsing returns.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  There is no website from what I can tell. Yes you can link to and view a post, but no sign up or general access to browse etc. I figured I'd maybe take a look, but I won't install on my phone anyways. And I barely use my phone. So that's that.
dukeofdoom 3y ago
[flagged]
- vehemenz 3y ago
  It's no worse than obsessively refreshing Hacker News on your PinePhone.
  - seabrookmx 3y ago
    I feel attacked.
  - 1attice 3y ago
    This is slander. I check HN on my Librem 5
  - unshavedyak 3y ago
    While i agree with you on principle... i hope it's worse than HN lol. If not, i need to get rid of HN because of all the horrible behavior Facebook and Co have fostered in their community for the sake of engagement.
- spike021 3y ago
  Sounds unnecessarily rude. Plenty of people use social media to keep in touch with non-local friends, among many other useful things.
geenat 3y ago
App required = not so sure about this.. not in a rush to try it out.
- cottsak 3y ago
  My thoughts too. I don’t need more apps
- mgkimsal 3y ago
  that was the reaction from more than a few friends and family I mentioned it to.
- pickingdinner 3y ago
  Especially another facebook app. Those in the category of "app only heavy social media consumers" have been addicted to tiktok for too long already. Any offering less than that by the place they left is not good enough. And those like myself who are no longer interested in the current iteration of social apps do not need another offering from this iteration of social apps.
- whateveracct 3y ago
  A nice website goes a long way for something text-based. You want to capture the lurking top of the funnel that reads without being logged in.
- cfiggers 3y ago
  Yep, that was the turn-off for me too. I only use Twitter and Facebook in a browser, even on mobile—I noticed serious battery life improvements upon uninstalling the Facebook app in particular.
NotYourLawyer 3y ago
Oh cool a twitter knockoff, that’s a new idea.
- fomine3 3y ago
  Moderate idea, ideal timing by capable infrastructure
tehwebguy 3y ago
So far it kind of sucks, scrolls really clunky and my feed is 100% people i don’t follow since there’s so few people posting this early. I imagine that may improve but up until this week I was a heavy twitter used and I won’t spend 5 minutes on this terrible “curated” feed.
colesantiago 3y ago
Network Effects > Privacy With all the privacy invasive things that Threads tracks people with on its app, this is still proof that network effects trump privacy any day when it comes to social networks. Privacy as a feature that Mastodon touts is simply and clearly not enough to sway normal users to use it, after many Twitter fuck ups by Elon and over 6 years of Mastodon's existence.
- matthasfun 3y ago
  Yeah I was thinking the same. 2 million accounts in 2 hours is wild. Not surprising just wild to me. According to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount there are about 13m mastodon accounts across all instances. Threads might pass this by the time I wake up.
olliecornelia 3y ago
"Nice job team :)"
tsunamifury 3y ago
A failed product Google Allo passed 10 million in that period of time.
- hbn 3y ago
  No it didn't. It got to 5 million downloads in 5 days[0] (and that's downloads, not sign-ups), and took a few months to break 10 million downloads. Threads got that many sign-ups in 4 hours[1], and I assume we'll see the 10 million mark this week. [0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/11/29/google-allo-hit-5-million-downloads-in-5-days-two-months-later-its-momentum-seems-utterly-stalled/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/11/29/google-allo-hit-5-m... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/over-2-million-signups-2-hours-threads-twitter-mark-zuckerberg-2023-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/over-2-million-signups-2-hou...
  - heartbreak 3y ago
    Threads exceeded 10 million a few hours ago.
    - hbn 3y ago
      And now 25 million https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/6/23785630/instagrams-threads-app-already-has-over-25-million-registered-accounts https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/6/23785630/instagrams-thread...
relyks 3y ago
Is this working for people in Firefox? I can't get the site to work for me
- beatthatflight 3y ago
  yup, working for me in 115.0
- yk 3y ago
  Tried it, FF with NoScript, Disconnect and uBlock and that didn't work even if given site permissions for NoScript. (Didn't seem to be able to debug it quickly.)
- grandpoobah 3y ago
  'Facebook Container' plugin stops it from loading.
  - sp332 3y ago
    Hm, last official release was 8 months ago. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont... The github page looks fairly active, and there is a fix merged already for this https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/pull/936 https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/pull/936 and once issue #933 gets merged, it will generate a source release for 2.3.11 at https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/releases https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/releases which will probably become 2.3.12 on AMO after some manual intervention.
- Nas808 3y ago
  It won't load for me in Firefox either, even with all extensions disabled.
- re 3y ago
  Disable "Enhanced Tracking Protection" for the domain, since it needs to load scripts from fbcdn.net domains.
Lammy 3y ago
I wonder how much the threads.net domain cost Updated Date: 2023-04-07T13:53:29Z Creation Date: 1997-05-27T23:00:00Z
- paxys 3y ago
  .net domains aren't all that valuable. Funny enough threads.com seems to be a random Slack clone which will probably get acquired by Meta down the line for their domain name.
- vehemenz 3y ago
  I'd be surprised if it was more than $20k. Maybe in the $3-10k range? Seems to be the going rate. .Nets usually aren't that valuable, but I suppose if you have the network of Meta you can _make_ anything valuable.
  - w-ll 3y ago
    Idk, if they need something quick, og owner might have said a price they thought was way to high, and FB just said, "yea ok". I'd prob put it in the 50-100k range, but wouldnt be suprised to see 500k-1m
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - w-ll 3y ago
      someone replied and delete while i was typing: here is my thoughts... Well i guess we will see. I think threads.net works in multiple ways, and the .net stigma doesnt matter anymore with so many TLDs, and kinda makes sense for social app. I know someone that sold a .io for a ridonculous sum. And again I think if fb/meta wants to do something they are in a place to make an offer the holder wont refuse.
    - Supermancho 3y ago
      Meta likely didn't buy the domain. Some shell company does, then sells it to Meta.
asadotzler 3y ago
Let's see, FB has about 2 billion daily actives, Insta has like 3 to 4 billion? Assume half of them are sleeping there should still be a couple billion Meta user online about now and only 2 million of them so far have downloaded it? We got 8 million downloads (not updates, full downloads) in one day back in the desktop era when there were only a couple billion people online in total. This feels pretty weak to me. I wonder if that's intentional, get the enthusiasts on first, for free, as it were, then turn on the firehose later on to get the "olds" over from FB and the "influencers" over from Insta?
- asadotzler 3y ago
  Oops, forgot to say who "we" is there. I'm talking about our Firefox Guinness record download day back in 2008-ish.
- duped 3y ago
  People haven't written the bots yet
- joegahona 3y ago
  Are there large banners or advertisements on Instagram or Facebook pushing people to use Threads? (I’m on neither.) A few more things that might affect signup numbers: Threads requires an app to use, and it’s not available in the EU yet. Also the announced go-live was tomorrow.
  - jcpst 3y ago
    It doesn’t require an app to check it out. I clicked on the HN link and was able to navigate through the web app.
- chimeracoder 3y ago
  > Let's see, FB has about 2 billion daily actives, Insta has like 3 to 4 billion? I agree that 2M "signups" is not actually impressive, but I'm not sure where you're getting the figure of 3-4 billion DAUs for Instagram. Everything I'm seeing is significantly lower than that.
baggy_trough 3y ago
No chronological feed - not interested.
imrehg 3y ago
Amazing naming, still. Searching on the Android Play Store, just in case, first thing that comes up is "Threads" -- that has to put in an all capitals discalimer: > [NOT AFFILIATED W/ THREADS BY INSTAGRAM] All in-one team communication platform I bet they had a bump due to the name clash, and loads of support request too!
revskill 3y ago
I never use Tiktok (I hate most of videos content), or any kind of "content creator" which uses videos as main source of delivering serious content. The problem with videos (compare to blog writing) is i can't just fast read the whole content first. I need to second by second go to it. And due to current target of Threads same as Tiktoker (instagram user = tiktok user) ? I can't use it, too. But for entertaining purpose, short videos is fine.
dagmx 3y ago
First impressions of the app are that it’s a bit slow and need some work. Some taps take several seconds to complete or just fail without feedback. But I guess that’s just server load that will even out and be designed around. Scrolling is not as fluid as either FB or IG, which is surprising given how much Meta invest in their feed. But better than most mastodon apps I’ve tried. Interface is pretty minimal and pleasant. Navigation is very intuitive. I like that I can import all my Instagram data but still keep it separate. I used Twitter and Instagram to primarily follow artists , and so the connection is nice. I appreciate that they allow keeping it separate if needed. I’m also interested to see what their fediverse integration will be like. Feed content feels less chaotic than Twitter with more priority towards accounts I follow and less advertising noise. It feels like Twitter from a few years ago which is what I want. Overall I am interested to see how this evolves. I’m not a fan of meta but I think this is right in their wheelhouse. I miss Twitter for the wealth of knowledge and culture that one could find on there if you curated your circles.(emphasis on curation). Elon ruined curation and I hope Threads does it better.
- joegahona 3y ago
  > Interface is pretty minimal and pleasant. Agreed, but I don’t see any ads yet. Guessing they’re coming soon.
- x86x87 3y ago
  all those FB engineers that have designed twitter in an interview thousands of times and they cannot get this to be fast out of the gate? guess actually building a system is different than a power trip in an interview
2h 3y ago
> @zuck seeing that freaks face made me physically shudder. If they were smart they would distance this product from him as much as possible. it should be painfully obvious that he is toxic for this and any brand. pay him whatever, let him stay in charge, but please for the love of god STOP PUTTING him as the face of anything.
- nmfisher 3y ago
  Elon was the best thing that could have happened to Zuck. He looks sane and reasonable by comparison.
- grandpoobah 3y ago
  I dunno, he's kinda growing on me. If people can like Elon, why can't they like the Zuck? Zuck is clearly more level headed than Elon, which to me makes him more likeable. Embracing the zuck monikor was a real power move, given that up until this point most people use that name in a disparaging manner :D
  - 2h 3y ago
    SMOKIN MEATS https://youtube.com/watch?v=SVyLlFezj2E https://youtube.com/watch?v=SVyLlFezj2E
  - elforce002 3y ago
    "Dumb fucks" pretty much sealed it for me, haha.
yalogin 3y ago
Why is it a separate app and not integrated into FB and insta apps? May be as a separate tab?
yalogin 3y ago
How is threads going to be different from Instagram? The tools available for content creators will be different but if I am just browsing they should be similar, no?
- vehemenz 3y ago
  It's a separate app like Twitter, mostly text with some photos instead of all photos. The list of people you follow is also different (important).
- rodgerd 3y ago
  It's more text-oriented than photo-oriented, and it follows the Twitter convention of replies being the same "class" in the feed, rather than the Insta/FB convention of them being a small hierarchy off of the original post.
edandersen 3y ago
Whats the consensus over on Mastadon at the moment? Will the major Mastodon instances block federation with Threads purely out of spite I wonder.
- colesantiago 3y ago
  We know that Mastodon.social will not.
  - Freeboots 3y ago
    Won't block Threads? Oh god.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  There's a good dynamic if the eternal September people stay on Twitter/Threads, letting the smaller networks remain smaller and worthwhile.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Doubtful if federation will happen in the short term, seems like a few months away. If they even bother.
- anotherevan 3y ago
  Recent blog post (which I haven't read yet) may be relevant. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-thr...
- dahwolf 3y ago
  Who cares? As I write this, Threads has 30 million users, 3 times the entirety of the Fediverse. But yes, surely they will block :)
renewiltord 3y ago
Is there an API? Ultimately, I want to follow my friends' threads/tweets whatever and talk in our private Slack. First there was native integration with Slack, then I could jury rig mine, but now they made it hard on Twitter. Does Threads have the ability to do this? I will not puppeteer this. I want to fire and forget, not arms-race someone.
- m4thfr34k 3y ago
  None that I could find just yet. Have been loving the Bluesky API the past few days and had high hopes something would be ready for threads from the start.
impissedoff1 3y ago
How about we not support data mining and go to Lemmy?
- anonym29 3y ago
  I'm starting to become convinced that a significant portion of internet users in 2023 not only tolerate data mining, but have some kind of Stockholm-Syndrome-induced personal data exhibitionism fetish. I miss the era when the internet was just broadband desktop users, with none of the people who exclusively access it via smartphone.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Dear god it's not even the data mining that I find disturbing. It's the blatant manipulation, the locked/closed spaces that can't be searched or linked to, the deliberate cultivation of outrage or other engagement hacks, crappy moderation, etc. etc. I got put in Facebook jail for a month for posting an "indecent photo" which was just a picture of my son at the beach in his bathing suit that some algorithm misidentified... when I appealed, they punished me even harder; but when I report actual neo-NAZI content, death threats, disturbing content, illegal sales on marketplace... reports rejected. I miss the fantasy we had about the web in 90s. How naive we were.
    - anonym29 3y ago
      Did it ever occur to you that maybe your one-day-adult son would object to Facebook having a bunch of his biometric data (facial recognition, etc) without his consent?
LeoPanthera 3y ago
I signed up. And the first thing I saw was a whole bunch of posts from people I don't follow. They had the opportunity to learn directly from Twitter's mistakes, and they failed right from the start.
- rockinghigh 3y ago
  How would you bootstrap the feed?
  - LeoPanthera 3y ago
    Let me CHOOSE if I want to see "suggested" or "promoted" content. Have "followers only" and "monetized influencer crap" tabs. At least make it an option.
    - personjerry 3y ago
      There's plenty of platforms that start like that. You never saw them because they died.
      - chrisco255 3y ago
        Ok, I'll shoot: AOL Instant Messenger. Runaway success, 20ish year run. MySpace also started like that and so did Facebook itself. You had to add friends and visit their pages manually to see what they were up to, feeds came later.
        weeblewobble 3y ago
        AIM was 1:1 not broadcast, apples and oranges Facebook was bootstrapped off existing IRL social networks (i.e. Harvard undergrads)
        chrisco255 3y ago
        It had group chats too, but still, the chat rooms themselves in AOL were ephemeral. No one knew who you were on AOL unless you let it be known, and you could make up a persona if you wanted. As for word-of-mouth spread at Harvard about Facebook, well that's not different than anything else. Word of mouth is always a part of marketing for any product. You still needed to manually look up your friends or your friend's friends and even to see what was up you'd have to visit their profile (until the feed came out later). Facebook didn't start off by showing you thousands of people you didn't care about, it did the opposite, it wanted you to connect with people you knew IRL.
u2077 3y ago
Feels like they were too eager to scoop up Twitter refugees. The platform is still missing basic features and new users turn away immediately. Nobody’s going to join a platform and then keep their account open for 6 months while the platform plays catch-up. The launch would have been much more successful if they waited another month. I understand this is a peak time to capture former Twitter users, but in the long run it may have been a mistake. Will be interesting to see how they market it as things develop.
- aembleton 3y ago
  You can't close your account without also closing your Instagram account so that might make it more sticky.
  - TechnicolorByte 3y ago
    You can still deactivate account separately. Looks like they’ll eventually get some proper delete functionality: https://www.threads.net/t/CuXRXDdNOtH/ https://www.threads.net/t/CuXRXDdNOtH/
impissedoff1 3y ago
How is this any better than twitter when you still have to log in?
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  Yeah, seems like just a different master. What was wrong with mastadon?
  - nobody9999 3y ago
    >What was wrong with mastadon? It doesn't make Meta any money. Can't you see how wrong that is?
- afruitpie 3y ago
  Maybe it’s A/B testing, but I can see the linked post without an account.
  - nerdbert 3y ago
    I just get a blank screen with the threads logo.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
With the crazy success of TikTok, do people care about text based content?
- antod 3y ago
  Personally the crazy success of TikTok makes me care more about text based content. Threads won't be it for me though.
  - elforce002 3y ago
    Ditto. I use ig just for business and twitter to stay up to date with everything else. I won't mix these together.
WiSaGaN 3y ago
For comparison, "Google Plus had 10 million users two weeks after its launch on June 28, 2011."
- aio2 3y ago
  This is 'in the first two hours'. We gotta give it another 2 weeks
  - hbn 3y ago
    Also you really can't compare anything to Google+ cause they used every trick in the dark pattern book to convert every Google and YouTube account to be a Google+ """user""", whereas Threads requires installing an app and going through the (short, if you have an IG account) sign-up process. YouTube constantly harassed you to convert your account to be a Google+ account, and there was a point where commenting on any YouTube video would automatically make a post on Google+, as if you shared the video with that comment as a caption. They're totally not comparable.
- WiSaGaN 3y ago
  Didn't expect this comment to get downvoted. This is just a comparable number that is closest to the definition in title we can get. There is no information on the "first two hours signup" in a social network app launched by a large technology company that has the means to push their existing user to signup the new service. There is nothing implied.
- aio2 3y ago
  Just found this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/06/threads-instagram-app-zuckerberg-twitter/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/06/threads...
Barrin92 3y ago
clicking on the threads.net badge on a profile (https://www.threads.net/@zuck https://www.threads.net/@zuck) says "Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, like @zuck@threads.net." That seems to be a pretty strong commitment. If they pull this off and manage to bring the Fediverse into the mainstream and kill Twitter off in the process this is far from just a clone. Genuinely excited for this one.
- coolandsmartrr 3y ago
  It's pretty interesting to see Meta uncharacteristically embrace an open social networking protocol. They may see that their social graph alone will not be enough to create critical mass adoption for their new social network. I'm assuming, but hoping they're not following Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.
coolandsmartrr 3y ago
It looks like you can't compose a new thread on desktop. For a text-centric app, the lack of computer keyboard access is disheartening. I understand that the Threads team may want to focus on their core market on mobile. However, mobile prioritization will lead to posting content best composed on mobile, namely curt text and memes. I hope giving these types of content an early start won't affect the the culture on Threads in the long-run.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Unfortunately there seems to be a class of product managers who truly believe that "mobile only" is a mark of pride and excellence and that having desktop access to their product is either irrelevant/too-much-work ... or even so, a bad idea. I ran into these types on things I worked on at Google, and they seem to be out there generally. Instagram was like this for years, really. Which made some sense as it was a photo-taking app originally. But for something like this? Someone made some choices here, and I think they're the wrong ones. I guess it says something that out of the thousands of comments I've seen about threads, I've only seen one or two that even noticed that there's no desktop/web site? Are people really that phone centric now? My poor old "elderly" Gen-X self doesn't get it. Yes, you appear to be able to view individual threads if you have a link, but not sign up to the product, author threads, or browse?
- amluto 3y ago
  Twitter was rather extensively used for long form multi-tweet posts. Composing this type of content in a mobile app does not sound fun. (I don’t like Twitter as a medium for long posts like this, but the bottom line doesn’t care what I like.)
hospitalJail 3y ago
I'm amazed that people are willing to give facebook another try. Facebook filled our lives with rage-bait. (Not even going to touch the elections manip) They took over instagram and removed the time based sorting with their algorithm. So fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again.
- jacooper 3y ago
  Anything is better than twitter at this point.
  - joegahona 3y ago
    Well there’s plenty to choose from. Threads, Mastodon, Substack Notes, Post.News, Bluesky, and all the tangential copycats (Nostr, Spill, T2 Social, Truth Social, Hive). We have to be reaching oversaturation in this space. I really wonder if all these projects are misjudging the appetite for a Twitter replacement.
    - s3p 3y ago
      In reality I think the need for a Twitter competitor was never stronger. Bluesky didn't catch on, they're not even out of private beta. Mastodon is riddled with issues that prevent it from reaching the mainstream. At present, Meta has the only product with the reach and scale capable of rivaling twitter. Even if you think the alternatives are "good enough", it doesn't matter because no one is using them. This will be different.
    - jacooper 3y ago
      None of them other than threads has reached enough traction, threads is growing incredibly fast, and will have critical mass for users to migrate. Also there is nothing new to learn, just use your existing Instagram account/create one and you are ready.
    - treyd 3y ago
      Truth Social is just a fork of Mastodon and is a terminal grift on followers of that particular political personality. Hive was a school project by 2 people that managed to secure funding without a real strategy and afaik hasn't really been able to reach a critical mass.
poomer 3y ago
I'm very skeptical that this will succeed. As with other extremely hyped social medias (anyone remember Clubhouse?) it's already filled with influencers and e-celebs trying to get in early, but these people always poison the well with insincere, low-quality, monetization-oriented content. AFAIK, every successful social media platform grew more or less organically and only had these folks latch on later (usually causing the degradation of the platform when they did).
- SecretDracula 3y ago
  I agree, but I also think that, at this moment, the conditions are right. People are hungry for a twitter alternative and this could lead to a lot of sincere and authentic users joining Threads.
- afavour 3y ago
  I’m amazed they didn’t provide a feed of only people you follow. Not doing so made the garbage influencer stuff inevitable.
  - Turskarama 3y ago
    Showing you more content you're not interested in is how they get you to scroll past more ads, it's how they make money. Traditionally they don't need to care about showing you good content to keep you interested, you're generally logging in anyway. The proof is in the pudding: if you want a curated feed go to Tumblr or Mastodon. These spaces exist yet they're significantly less mainstream.
    - afavour 3y ago
      > if you want a curated feed go to Tumblr or Mastodon. These spaces exist yet they're significantly less mainstream. Why would we ignore the very mainstream Instagram as an example? > you're generally logging in anyway. When an app is established, sure. But providing new users a shitty experience in order to prioritise revenue is how new social networks fail.
- 3y ago
afavour 3y ago
I feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem for Threads: it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account. Of course FB is going to do that otherwise they lose a massive edge against any competitor. But for me at least my Twitter is a very different social space to my Instagram and there’s very little crossover. So Threads looks like it’ll be text posts with your Instagram friends. Which is fine, I suppose. But not a Twitter replacement.
- FormerBandmate 3y ago
  Even the recommended page is completely different. It’s Twitter when celebrities used it before Donald Trump completely reshaped the platform
- 88913527 3y ago
  Text posts with your Meta friends sounds like Facebook from 2010. What is old is new again, I suppose.
  - qbasic_forever 3y ago
    Facebook minus all your annoying boomer parents/relatives (who have no idea what Instagram is or how to install an app) and their political posts and screeds sounds amazing.
    - dboreham 3y ago
      Also the same thing as Facebook prior to 2010.
      - anshumankmr 3y ago
        Facebook was pretty good in the early 2010s also, in my anecdotal experience when the most popular thing on my feed used to funny iPhone chat memes and 9Gag
    - chrisco255 3y ago
lakomen 3y ago
I wonder if there'll be as much right wing propaganda as on Facebook video
h1t35h 3y ago
I understand the push to use the app for collecting my data for ads and what not but good lord is it too difficult to keep the web channels open? Why is this not available on browser :(
- jacooper 3y ago
  Supposedly "coming soon"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cactusplant7374 3y ago
I wish it were a standalone app. Not interested in linking something else to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. Come to think of it, Meta is building the everything app. They have all the components. I think Elon won’t have any success with his X / everything app.
mullingitover 3y ago
Called it [1]. Threads is wildly feature-incomplete, but there's so much demand for a twitter alternative that this is an embarrassingly one-sided product fight. For a 0.0.1-alpha version to steamroll into the space like this, it's now just a matter of the long goodbye for twitter as it becomes a space where you go to find someone's Threads handle. I give it 24 hours, tops, until it eclipses the entire Fediverse, and Bluesky becomes an obscure historical footnote. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669
- asadotzler 3y ago
  Neither of your predictions are at all surprising or interesting. The fediverse and Bluesky are tiny. It'd be an absolute Joke if FB couldn't double their size in a day or two.
  - s3p 3y ago
    Useless criticism. It didn't seem like they were trying to amaze or surprise anyone with that comment.
- ergocoder 3y ago
  This is the boldest prediction of this decade. I still couldn't believe you are right.
smrtinsert 3y ago
Anything is a welcome alternative to Musk Twitter. Congrats to Zuck. There's nothing wrong with good ole fashioned competition!
alphabet9000 3y ago
yeah, and they've effectively trapped those 2M users, because when you go to delete your Threads account, it will say [0] that by doing so it will also delete your Instagram account as well... ouch [0] https://i.jollo.org/xNFu9Qvd.png https://i.jollo.org/xNFu9Qvd.png
- troymc 3y ago
  You can check out any time you like But you can never leave from https://genius.com/Eagles-hotel-california-lyrics https://genius.com/Eagles-hotel-california-lyrics
- Tepix 3y ago
  So you need a little browser extension that will delete all your posts for you.
  - RMPR 3y ago
    Which won't exist because threads is app-only?
luxuryballs 3y ago
The question is, will TV, news, and media hosts quote things people said on “Threads” rather than Tweets?
tradewinds 3y ago
I am really still trying to figure out what the problem is with Twitter...
- nkozyra 3y ago
  Bad incentives, broken promises, pay-to-play, often broken app, weird decisions made and reverted with dubious reasons ...
- chx 3y ago
  https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitter/ https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...
- worrycue 3y ago
  Can’t view anything unless you sign up for an account. Even with an account you are rated limited in the number of posts you can view. Darn thing seems to be falling apart. No better timing to launch competitor.
- ch4s3 3y ago
  I’m tempted to say it’s mostly just the users but I’m afraid that I’m pointing four fingers back at myself.
- alxmng 3y ago
  I think Twitter is the best it’s ever been. Edit button, longform posts instead of threads, better videos, paid posts/subscriptions, and more. I’ve never understood the complaints about hate speech or content, since you choose who to follow, can mute phrases, people, retweets, etc. I think community notes is probably the best anti-disinformation/fact check feature of any platform. I don’t agree with everything they’ve done, but Musk clearly has made a better effort on product than any of the previous management.
  - tradewinds 3y ago
    That's exactly how I feel. If you look at the responses to my original comment, it's mostly unclear rambling or extremely mild exceptions. "Bad incentives", "weird decisions", "needing an account". My experience has been perfectly fine. I haven't seen anything I'd consider far-right or extremist, I don't pay a cent, I haven't hit a 1000-post daily limit because I have no use for 1000 Tweets in one day, and I've found a few new interesting groups of accounts to follow (mostly AI). When I hear some of these apparent negatives, I really don't understand what they mean or how that impacts anyone's actual user experience.
danielvaughn 3y ago
I cherish the fact that I got my Twitter account in 2009 and thus have my actual name "danielvaughn" as my handle. It's gonna take something really special to pull me away from Twitter, much as I dislike the direction it's going in. Threads is not special enough to pull me away.
- jakebasile 3y ago
  I reserve my True Name anywhere I can, even if I don't think I'll use the service. If I can't get it, it's very likely I'll never use the service.
lawgimenez 3y ago
The app size is somewhere around 497MB. Crazy.
wfme 3y ago
It feels exactly like the explore feed on instagram, but textual. Perhaps a little too early to call it but that's already a little off putting.
shrimpx 3y ago
I was surprised to see the invitation to follow all my Instagram friends. Now I’m getting follow requests for my friends. I use Instagram to network with friends “outside of work” and largely outside of the political sphere, and scroll through memes and silly content. It’s kind of like “friends + America’s funniest home videos”. Twitter is all about politics, current events, thought influencers, and work networking. Totally different sphere. I don’t want to share silly stuff with friends on Twitter, or share work and my thoughts about current events and my industry on Instagram. Not to mention that my Instagram account, as well as virtually all of by friends’ accounts, are private. I feel like by inviting people to follow their Instagram friends, Meta immediately precluded “taking on Twitter.”
- ahahahahah 3y ago
  Instagram has pretty good support for multiple accounts (including, for example, having a feed that shows content from multiple accounts). Even if they don't ever fully decouple threads accounts from Instagram ones, you could still basically have one for each.
- creatonez 3y ago
  > Twitter is all about politics, current events, thought influencers, and work networking. This is a rather narrow view of what the site is used for. It's also about media, art, and live music -- things that overlap heavily with Instagram. For example, I've found that you unfortunately can't avoid Twitter when keeping up with the underground electronic music scene in the US. Discord and Reddit have made some strides in replacing it, but not much.
  - shrimpx 3y ago
    Interested in underground electronic music in general. Any recommendations for artists or accounts to follow?
    - creatonez 3y ago
      I quite enjoy: Xenolinguist, Mindex, Voljum, TheBusiness, Maxfield, ToneVizion, Omnist, Josh Teed, Nyquist, EOS, Tripp St, Aleph, Lemondoza, kLL sMTH Most of these names are on Soundcloud and/or Bandcamp. It's Americanized electronic bass, dubstep, halftime, and IDM with a psychedelic slant. This kind of stuff might not be everyone's cup of tea :)
rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago
Instagram users are hardly the crowd to have intelligent discussions with. It’s all shallow people who caption their photos with platitudes. At least Twitter, for all its warts, has academics and industry leaders. As it is, I don’t see how Threads will survive in the long run, considering how Instagram users are the sort of people who have short attention spans unless their apps dazzle them with something animated or with video in it.
- siquick 3y ago
  [flagged]
nprateem 3y ago
For a community of entrepreneurs who understand iteration to find product-market fit, the comments here are very shortsighted. I'm pretty sure they won't age well. No competitor could ask for a better time to launch with Twitter and Reddit users disaffected. FB have the experience, reach, resources and timing to win here. Their biggest problems will be other well-funded attempts, but I can't think of any other blue-chips with the same experience or initial advantages (eg social userbase) to bootstrap with. I'll be buying some FB shares later.
- enufstuff 3y ago
  > For a community of entrepreneurs who understand iteration to find product-market fit, the comments here are very shortsighted. I don't get the response either. But I've def seen HN folks react without any sort of logic to things so maybe this is one of those times...? > No competitor could ask for a better time to launch with Twitter and Reddit users disaffected. I immediately noticed it's branded with Instagram and not Facebook which I think is smart. Insta is seen as "for old people" by the gen Z crowd (that's a direct quote from a friend's kid) but not nearly as old as the FB crowd. I suspect that the disaffected Reddit crowd and the Twitter users more likely fit this demographic. With that said, my god I would be so happy if something overtook Twitter. As much as I'm not a fan of Meta, Twitter is on the bottom of my list.
- Emma_Goldman 3y ago
  I have little faith. FB degenerated year after year, in a blazing arc of self-destruction that almost everyone understood was going to kill the app. Yet these user-hostile changes were continually justified internally as 'increasing views and clicks', which must have required an unbelievable degree of institutional obtuseness. I can already see similarities in Threads, and it's only just begun: 1. Threads is app-only, there is no desktop version. 2. Your feed is populated by algorithmically sourced content, not just the posts of the accounts you follow. 3. You can't delete threads without deleting the Instagram account it's coupled with. I would also argue: 4. You can't make a threads account without signing up to Instagram. All four are attempts to increase company metrics, but which are clearly user-hostile, and will ultimately backfire. I actually find (1) to be inexplicably stupid.
anotherevan 3y ago
The permissions[1] the android app wants are rather terrifying. Think I'll pass. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.instagram.barcelona https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.instagr...
- afavour 3y ago
  Same with the App Store. Apparently the app is going to collect health and wellness data about me. Wonderful.
  - hbn 3y ago
    What does that even mean though? Firstly if you don't use Apple's Health app it probably means nothing. And if you do, maybe an iOS dev could give us some insights, but I assume Apple doesn't provide an API to just freely peep at all your Health data. It doesn't even let apps access your photos, or push notifications, or location without a runtime consent prompt. There's no way Apple will just tell any app that wants it when a woman is on her period.
    - afavour 3y ago
      All I know is that the App Store lists that permission for Threads and not other apps I use. Given how much I trust Facebook (not at all) I’m happy to skip.
    - faizmokh 3y ago
      My guess is they just use the same "privacy nutrition labels" as Facebook app. Probably because they use the Graph API. It's If the app uses health data through Apple HealthKit you would probably noticed it because the app would have to ask for permission first.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    How can this be legal? I'm pretty sure that in order to legally process health data, an entity must have a plausible reason for doing so, at least in some jurisdictions. What could that reason possibly be for a social media app?
mjfl 3y ago
Really makes me feel like I'm a cow being herded when its phone-app only.
sergiotapia 3y ago
Looks nice! No website means I won't use it though, I need my casual pop-ins from my computer. Unrelated: Poor bastards: https://threads.com/ https://threads.com/ Overnight eclipsed. I think they'll rebrand, like Clubhouse rebranded to Shortcut because of the Clubhouse voicechat app rise in popularity.
inopinatus 3y ago
I too name my applications after unrelentingly grim post-apocalyptic British films¹ that harrowingly depict the catastrophic failure of institutions and the dire social and cultural outcomes that accompany the collapse of civilization. This does seem perfectly on-brand for Facebook. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)
- loeber 3y ago
  After? You're seriously going to claim that Threads -- an app entirely for threaded conversations -- is named not after the ubiquitous term of art from Twitter, but it's named after a 39-year-old animated horror film that most people have never even heard of, let alone seen? That's your contention?
  - inopinatus 3y ago
    Of course not - it is live action drama, not animation
AbraKdabra 3y ago
"Threads, an Instagram app" Yeah, no.
jitl 3y ago
The front page it showed me I do not want.
jimt1234 3y ago
So, it's app only, no browser? LAME.
vagab0nd 3y ago
All I really want to know is did Zuck reserve his username, or did he try to sign up like the rest of us.
- Shank 3y ago
  All Instagram names were automatically reserved for existing users.
WoodenChair 3y ago
Did they build Threads using React or is it UIKit/Android SDK?
wnevets 3y ago
Does it have a limit on the number of post you can read per day? If not it's already better than Twitter.
deafpolygon 3y ago
Not available in my region. Btw, it's just Instagram without the photos.
ChrisRR 3y ago
> Sign up to threads > Instantly see a list of posts from celebrity accounts that I don't follow > Close the app
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
bathtub365 3y ago
6 or 7 seconds on a loading screen and I get a page with 30-odd words on it. What an incredibly bloated website
tim333 3y ago
I was one. I was curious, clicked 'sign up' which actually just linked my Insta account rather than making a new one, had a look for like 10 seconds, thought this is kinda rubbish and closed the app. It superficially looks much like Instagram - similar people making similar posts.
master_reb00t 3y ago
[flagged]

265 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

Not having a news feed with just people I follow makes it near unusable. At the moment there is just too much garbage content from "influencers" cluttering the app, and very little you can do to curate it.

fotta 3y ago
Apparently it’s coming https://www.threads.net/t/CuVlg88I84C/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.threads.net/t/CuVlg88I84C/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA...
- runarberg 3y ago
  Unrelated. But this web interface is weird. There is no UI outside of the content except for their icon at the top. When you click it, instead of taking you to a home view, it toggles dark mode (!) If you go to https://www.threads.net https://www.threads.net you only get one button instructing you to get the app. Is there any way to use this without the app?
  - joegahona 3y ago
    I noticed that bizarre dark-mode thing too — it feels like going into a room and flipping the light switch, and a water faucet turns on.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Apparently only crusty old weird people (like me) use computers to access the web in 2023. Why even bother with a website?
impulser_ 3y ago
They said it coming soon, but the more you follow people the more your feed becomes filled with posts and replies from the people you follow. It's not as bad as when you first join.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Great strategy: start off with a horrible first impression, then promise it gets better. It's like sex with someone who comes in 10 seconds.

awb 3y ago

Odd UI on mobile. Can’t navigate to the homepage. The logo toggles darkmode. When I went directly to threads.net the only content is a link to the app store. No way for a web user to browse content.

vehemenz 3y ago
It looks like threads are indexable at least, unlike Twitter (lol). Try a few "site:threads.net" searches on Google.

meghan_rain 3y ago

The cookie banner got to be the most disgustingly illegal thing I've ever seen.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cottsak 3y ago

good luck Zuck!

m3kw9 3y ago

I signed up but not gonna use it because it’s just twitter with less content

vehemenz 3y ago
Yes, but they have meaningful verification (apparently), while Twitter doesn't.
- cottsak 3y ago
  What does that mean? Doesn’t the blue tick verification on Twitter require a valid credit card ?
  - vehemenz 3y ago
    Twitter had verification based on the account's noteworthiness, and now it doesn't. That was one of the main features of Twitter, and now Threads.net has it.
    - Alupis 3y ago
      What does "noteworthy" mean? Who decides what's noteworthy?
      - RockRobotRock 3y ago
        You can look that up yourself.
      - jtriangle 3y ago
        It's always, eventually, exactly the people who you don't want deciding what is/isn't noteworthy.
      - vehemenz 3y ago
        Twitter did before, based on their own internal criteria. The system was flawed, but having a flawed system is better than no system at all, as we are seeing now.

pcurve 3y ago

Still trying to figure out the 110MB download size.

danboy4 3y ago
All those tracking libraries gotta go somewhere
klabb3 3y ago
110 Mb so far. In just a few months, HN will be full of comments praising the original version of the app for being so much snappier compared to whatever they have then.
hbn 3y ago
Uncompressed assets and libraries. As is tradition.

dvt 3y ago

That feels oddly low. It was released at 5ish PM PST on a Wednesday, and considering they have literally all of Instagram + Facebook's userbase to push it on, it seems pretty low. The "sign up" was also just a "log in with FB/Instagram" button where the form was already auto-filled. So it's not like people had to convert, it's pretty much about as pure a product-market-fit test you can get. Discoverability is also pretty awful with a ton of cringe "influencer content" polluting my main feed. I don't want to necessarily block MrBeast, I just don't want to see him when I don't follow him. In any case, my prediction is that this experiment is going to be comparable to when they tried to copy Snapchat's story feature or when reels were meant to replace TikTok. These were nice cute distractions, but didn't materially impact Snapchat's business or TikTok's popularity. And in spite of their blunders, I think Twitter is here to stay.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gtirloni 3y ago
I never saw a sign up form or any kind of indication. I learned about the trick to search for "saymore" from a family member and see the red invite button on the search bar. She learned from some random.
firecall 3y ago
I opened it and immediately saw a post from GaryVee. Who was sanctimoniously instructing people to 'collectively be more civil'. Not a platform I want to use, but the App seemed decent; smooth UI animations, clean interface, simple onboarding with an overall decent UX. I think Instagram people who are Twitter curious will jump on it. If they can get Celeb style Tweets and memes without having to interact with the Garbage Fire that is Twitter, then I think it's going to be a nice easy win for Meta. Not a raging multi-billion dollar success like Instagram, but an OK casual slow burn that offers value to Instagram users.
- pc86 3y ago
  My Twitter is full of two things - people doing exactly the same thing they were doing a year, two years, three years ago, and people saying how Twitter is such a dumpster fire now and everything is so bad and it's the end and Twitter will be dead soon (but they're still on it). I'm not saying Twitter is going to be around 20 years from now, but I do think the reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.

jfoutz 3y ago

That's amazing. The website seems to be crumbling a bit, everything redirects to get the app. Hope they can scale up a few instances so browsing returns.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
There is no website from what I can tell. Yes you can link to and view a post, but no sign up or general access to browse etc. I figured I'd maybe take a look, but I won't install on my phone anyways. And I barely use my phone. So that's that.

dukeofdoom 3y ago

[flagged]

vehemenz 3y ago
It's no worse than obsessively refreshing Hacker News on your PinePhone.
- seabrookmx 3y ago
  I feel attacked.
- 1attice 3y ago
  This is slander. I check HN on my Librem 5
- unshavedyak 3y ago
  While i agree with you on principle... i hope it's worse than HN lol. If not, i need to get rid of HN because of all the horrible behavior Facebook and Co have fostered in their community for the sake of engagement.
spike021 3y ago
Sounds unnecessarily rude. Plenty of people use social media to keep in touch with non-local friends, among many other useful things.

geenat 3y ago

App required = not so sure about this.. not in a rush to try it out.

cottsak 3y ago
My thoughts too. I don’t need more apps
mgkimsal 3y ago
that was the reaction from more than a few friends and family I mentioned it to.
pickingdinner 3y ago
Especially another facebook app. Those in the category of "app only heavy social media consumers" have been addicted to tiktok for too long already. Any offering less than that by the place they left is not good enough. And those like myself who are no longer interested in the current iteration of social apps do not need another offering from this iteration of social apps.
whateveracct 3y ago
A nice website goes a long way for something text-based. You want to capture the lurking top of the funnel that reads without being logged in.
cfiggers 3y ago
Yep, that was the turn-off for me too. I only use Twitter and Facebook in a browser, even on mobile—I noticed serious battery life improvements upon uninstalling the Facebook app in particular.

NotYourLawyer 3y ago

Oh cool a twitter knockoff, that’s a new idea.

fomine3 3y ago
Moderate idea, ideal timing by capable infrastructure

tehwebguy 3y ago

So far it kind of sucks, scrolls really clunky and my feed is 100% people i don’t follow since there’s so few people posting this early. I imagine that may improve but up until this week I was a heavy twitter used and I won’t spend 5 minutes on this terrible “curated” feed.

colesantiago 3y ago

Network Effects > Privacy With all the privacy invasive things that Threads tracks people with on its app, this is still proof that network effects trump privacy any day when it comes to social networks. Privacy as a feature that Mastodon touts is simply and clearly not enough to sway normal users to use it, after many Twitter fuck ups by Elon and over 6 years of Mastodon's existence.

matthasfun 3y ago
Yeah I was thinking the same. 2 million accounts in 2 hours is wild. Not surprising just wild to me. According to https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount there are about 13m mastodon accounts across all instances. Threads might pass this by the time I wake up.

olliecornelia 3y ago

"Nice job team :)"

tsunamifury 3y ago

A failed product Google Allo passed 10 million in that period of time.

hbn 3y ago
No it didn't. It got to 5 million downloads in 5 days[0] (and that's downloads, not sign-ups), and took a few months to break 10 million downloads. Threads got that many sign-ups in 4 hours[1], and I assume we'll see the 10 million mark this week. [0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/11/29/google-allo-hit-5-million-downloads-in-5-days-two-months-later-its-momentum-seems-utterly-stalled/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/11/29/google-allo-hit-5-m... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/over-2-million-signups-2-hours-threads-twitter-mark-zuckerberg-2023-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/over-2-million-signups-2-hou...
- heartbreak 3y ago
  Threads exceeded 10 million a few hours ago.
  - hbn 3y ago
    And now 25 million https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/6/23785630/instagrams-threads-app-already-has-over-25-million-registered-accounts https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/6/23785630/instagrams-thread...

relyks 3y ago

Is this working for people in Firefox? I can't get the site to work for me

beatthatflight 3y ago
yup, working for me in 115.0
yk 3y ago
Tried it, FF with NoScript, Disconnect and uBlock and that didn't work even if given site permissions for NoScript. (Didn't seem to be able to debug it quickly.)
grandpoobah 3y ago
'Facebook Container' plugin stops it from loading.
- sp332 3y ago
  Hm, last official release was 8 months ago. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont... The github page looks fairly active, and there is a fix merged already for this https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/pull/936 https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/pull/936 and once issue #933 gets merged, it will generate a source release for 2.3.11 at https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/releases https://github.com/mozilla/contain-facebook/releases which will probably become 2.3.12 on AMO after some manual intervention.
Nas808 3y ago
It won't load for me in Firefox either, even with all extensions disabled.
re 3y ago
Disable "Enhanced Tracking Protection" for the domain, since it needs to load scripts from fbcdn.net domains.

Lammy 3y ago

I wonder how much the threads.net domain cost Updated Date: 2023-04-07T13:53:29Z Creation Date: 1997-05-27T23:00:00Z

paxys 3y ago
.net domains aren't all that valuable. Funny enough threads.com seems to be a random Slack clone which will probably get acquired by Meta down the line for their domain name.
vehemenz 3y ago
I'd be surprised if it was more than $20k. Maybe in the $3-10k range? Seems to be the going rate. .Nets usually aren't that valuable, but I suppose if you have the network of Meta you can _make_ anything valuable.
- w-ll 3y ago
  Idk, if they need something quick, og owner might have said a price they thought was way to high, and FB just said, "yea ok". I'd prob put it in the 50-100k range, but wouldnt be suprised to see 500k-1m
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - w-ll 3y ago
    someone replied and delete while i was typing: here is my thoughts... Well i guess we will see. I think threads.net works in multiple ways, and the .net stigma doesnt matter anymore with so many TLDs, and kinda makes sense for social app. I know someone that sold a .io for a ridonculous sum. And again I think if fb/meta wants to do something they are in a place to make an offer the holder wont refuse.
  - Supermancho 3y ago
    Meta likely didn't buy the domain. Some shell company does, then sells it to Meta.

asadotzler 3y ago

Let's see, FB has about 2 billion daily actives, Insta has like 3 to 4 billion? Assume half of them are sleeping there should still be a couple billion Meta user online about now and only 2 million of them so far have downloaded it? We got 8 million downloads (not updates, full downloads) in one day back in the desktop era when there were only a couple billion people online in total. This feels pretty weak to me. I wonder if that's intentional, get the enthusiasts on first, for free, as it were, then turn on the firehose later on to get the "olds" over from FB and the "influencers" over from Insta?

asadotzler 3y ago
Oops, forgot to say who "we" is there. I'm talking about our Firefox Guinness record download day back in 2008-ish.
duped 3y ago
People haven't written the bots yet
joegahona 3y ago
Are there large banners or advertisements on Instagram or Facebook pushing people to use Threads? (I’m on neither.) A few more things that might affect signup numbers: Threads requires an app to use, and it’s not available in the EU yet. Also the announced go-live was tomorrow.
- jcpst 3y ago
  It doesn’t require an app to check it out. I clicked on the HN link and was able to navigate through the web app.
chimeracoder 3y ago
> Let's see, FB has about 2 billion daily actives, Insta has like 3 to 4 billion? I agree that 2M "signups" is not actually impressive, but I'm not sure where you're getting the figure of 3-4 billion DAUs for Instagram. Everything I'm seeing is significantly lower than that.

baggy_trough 3y ago

No chronological feed - not interested.

imrehg 3y ago

Amazing naming, still. Searching on the Android Play Store, just in case, first thing that comes up is "Threads" -- that has to put in an all capitals discalimer: > [NOT AFFILIATED W/ THREADS BY INSTAGRAM] All in-one team communication platform I bet they had a bump due to the name clash, and loads of support request too!

revskill 3y ago

I never use Tiktok (I hate most of videos content), or any kind of "content creator" which uses videos as main source of delivering serious content. The problem with videos (compare to blog writing) is i can't just fast read the whole content first. I need to second by second go to it. And due to current target of Threads same as Tiktoker (instagram user = tiktok user) ? I can't use it, too. But for entertaining purpose, short videos is fine.

dagmx 3y ago

First impressions of the app are that it’s a bit slow and need some work. Some taps take several seconds to complete or just fail without feedback. But I guess that’s just server load that will even out and be designed around. Scrolling is not as fluid as either FB or IG, which is surprising given how much Meta invest in their feed. But better than most mastodon apps I’ve tried. Interface is pretty minimal and pleasant. Navigation is very intuitive. I like that I can import all my Instagram data but still keep it separate. I used Twitter and Instagram to primarily follow artists , and so the connection is nice. I appreciate that they allow keeping it separate if needed. I’m also interested to see what their fediverse integration will be like. Feed content feels less chaotic than Twitter with more priority towards accounts I follow and less advertising noise. It feels like Twitter from a few years ago which is what I want. Overall I am interested to see how this evolves. I’m not a fan of meta but I think this is right in their wheelhouse. I miss Twitter for the wealth of knowledge and culture that one could find on there if you curated your circles.(emphasis on curation). Elon ruined curation and I hope Threads does it better.

joegahona 3y ago
> Interface is pretty minimal and pleasant. Agreed, but I don’t see any ads yet. Guessing they’re coming soon.
x86x87 3y ago
all those FB engineers that have designed twitter in an interview thousands of times and they cannot get this to be fast out of the gate? guess actually building a system is different than a power trip in an interview

2h 3y ago

> @zuck seeing that freaks face made me physically shudder. If they were smart they would distance this product from him as much as possible. it should be painfully obvious that he is toxic for this and any brand. pay him whatever, let him stay in charge, but please for the love of god STOP PUTTING him as the face of anything.

nmfisher 3y ago
Elon was the best thing that could have happened to Zuck. He looks sane and reasonable by comparison.
grandpoobah 3y ago
I dunno, he's kinda growing on me. If people can like Elon, why can't they like the Zuck? Zuck is clearly more level headed than Elon, which to me makes him more likeable. Embracing the zuck monikor was a real power move, given that up until this point most people use that name in a disparaging manner :D
- 2h 3y ago
  SMOKIN MEATS https://youtube.com/watch?v=SVyLlFezj2E https://youtube.com/watch?v=SVyLlFezj2E
- elforce002 3y ago
  "Dumb fucks" pretty much sealed it for me, haha.

yalogin 3y ago

Why is it a separate app and not integrated into FB and insta apps? May be as a separate tab?

yalogin 3y ago

How is threads going to be different from Instagram? The tools available for content creators will be different but if I am just browsing they should be similar, no?

vehemenz 3y ago
It's a separate app like Twitter, mostly text with some photos instead of all photos. The list of people you follow is also different (important).
rodgerd 3y ago
It's more text-oriented than photo-oriented, and it follows the Twitter convention of replies being the same "class" in the feed, rather than the Insta/FB convention of them being a small hierarchy off of the original post.

edandersen 3y ago

Whats the consensus over on Mastadon at the moment? Will the major Mastodon instances block federation with Threads purely out of spite I wonder.

colesantiago 3y ago
We know that Mastodon.social will not.
- Freeboots 3y ago
  Won't block Threads? Oh god.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
There's a good dynamic if the eternal September people stay on Twitter/Threads, letting the smaller networks remain smaller and worthwhile.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Doubtful if federation will happen in the short term, seems like a few months away. If they even bother.
anotherevan 3y ago
Recent blog post (which I haven't read yet) may be relevant. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-thr...
dahwolf 3y ago
Who cares? As I write this, Threads has 30 million users, 3 times the entirety of the Fediverse. But yes, surely they will block :)

renewiltord 3y ago

Is there an API? Ultimately, I want to follow my friends' threads/tweets whatever and talk in our private Slack. First there was native integration with Slack, then I could jury rig mine, but now they made it hard on Twitter. Does Threads have the ability to do this? I will not puppeteer this. I want to fire and forget, not arms-race someone.

m4thfr34k 3y ago
None that I could find just yet. Have been loving the Bluesky API the past few days and had high hopes something would be ready for threads from the start.

impissedoff1 3y ago

How about we not support data mining and go to Lemmy?

anonym29 3y ago
I'm starting to become convinced that a significant portion of internet users in 2023 not only tolerate data mining, but have some kind of Stockholm-Syndrome-induced personal data exhibitionism fetish. I miss the era when the internet was just broadband desktop users, with none of the people who exclusively access it via smartphone.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Dear god it's not even the data mining that I find disturbing. It's the blatant manipulation, the locked/closed spaces that can't be searched or linked to, the deliberate cultivation of outrage or other engagement hacks, crappy moderation, etc. etc. I got put in Facebook jail for a month for posting an "indecent photo" which was just a picture of my son at the beach in his bathing suit that some algorithm misidentified... when I appealed, they punished me even harder; but when I report actual neo-NAZI content, death threats, disturbing content, illegal sales on marketplace... reports rejected. I miss the fantasy we had about the web in 90s. How naive we were.
  - anonym29 3y ago
    Did it ever occur to you that maybe your one-day-adult son would object to Facebook having a bunch of his biometric data (facial recognition, etc) without his consent?

LeoPanthera 3y ago

I signed up. And the first thing I saw was a whole bunch of posts from people I don't follow. They had the opportunity to learn directly from Twitter's mistakes, and they failed right from the start.

rockinghigh 3y ago
How would you bootstrap the feed?
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  Let me CHOOSE if I want to see "suggested" or "promoted" content. Have "followers only" and "monetized influencer crap" tabs. At least make it an option.
  - personjerry 3y ago
    There's plenty of platforms that start like that. You never saw them because they died.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      Ok, I'll shoot: AOL Instant Messenger. Runaway success, 20ish year run. MySpace also started like that and so did Facebook itself. You had to add friends and visit their pages manually to see what they were up to, feeds came later.
      - weeblewobble 3y ago
        AIM was 1:1 not broadcast, apples and oranges Facebook was bootstrapped off existing IRL social networks (i.e. Harvard undergrads)
        chrisco255 3y ago
        It had group chats too, but still, the chat rooms themselves in AOL were ephemeral. No one knew who you were on AOL unless you let it be known, and you could make up a persona if you wanted. As for word-of-mouth spread at Harvard about Facebook, well that's not different than anything else. Word of mouth is always a part of marketing for any product. You still needed to manually look up your friends or your friend's friends and even to see what was up you'd have to visit their profile (until the feed came out later). Facebook didn't start off by showing you thousands of people you didn't care about, it did the opposite, it wanted you to connect with people you knew IRL.

u2077 3y ago

Feels like they were too eager to scoop up Twitter refugees. The platform is still missing basic features and new users turn away immediately. Nobody’s going to join a platform and then keep their account open for 6 months while the platform plays catch-up. The launch would have been much more successful if they waited another month. I understand this is a peak time to capture former Twitter users, but in the long run it may have been a mistake. Will be interesting to see how they market it as things develop.

aembleton 3y ago
You can't close your account without also closing your Instagram account so that might make it more sticky.
- TechnicolorByte 3y ago
  You can still deactivate account separately. Looks like they’ll eventually get some proper delete functionality: https://www.threads.net/t/CuXRXDdNOtH/ https://www.threads.net/t/CuXRXDdNOtH/

impissedoff1 3y ago

How is this any better than twitter when you still have to log in?

hospitalJail 3y ago
Yeah, seems like just a different master. What was wrong with mastadon?
- nobody9999 3y ago
  >What was wrong with mastadon? It doesn't make Meta any money. Can't you see how wrong that is?
afruitpie 3y ago
Maybe it’s A/B testing, but I can see the linked post without an account.
- nerdbert 3y ago
  I just get a blank screen with the threads logo.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

With the crazy success of TikTok, do people care about text based content?

antod 3y ago
Personally the crazy success of TikTok makes me care more about text based content. Threads won't be it for me though.
- elforce002 3y ago
  Ditto. I use ig just for business and twitter to stay up to date with everything else. I won't mix these together.

WiSaGaN 3y ago

For comparison, "Google Plus had 10 million users two weeks after its launch on June 28, 2011."

aio2 3y ago
This is 'in the first two hours'. We gotta give it another 2 weeks
- hbn 3y ago
  Also you really can't compare anything to Google+ cause they used every trick in the dark pattern book to convert every Google and YouTube account to be a Google+ """user""", whereas Threads requires installing an app and going through the (short, if you have an IG account) sign-up process. YouTube constantly harassed you to convert your account to be a Google+ account, and there was a point where commenting on any YouTube video would automatically make a post on Google+, as if you shared the video with that comment as a caption. They're totally not comparable.
WiSaGaN 3y ago
Didn't expect this comment to get downvoted. This is just a comparable number that is closest to the definition in title we can get. There is no information on the "first two hours signup" in a social network app launched by a large technology company that has the means to push their existing user to signup the new service. There is nothing implied.
aio2 3y ago
Just found this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/06/threads-instagram-app-zuckerberg-twitter/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/06/threads...

Barrin92 3y ago

clicking on the threads.net badge on a profile (https://www.threads.net/@zuck https://www.threads.net/@zuck) says "Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, like @zuck@threads.net." That seems to be a pretty strong commitment. If they pull this off and manage to bring the Fediverse into the mainstream and kill Twitter off in the process this is far from just a clone. Genuinely excited for this one.

coolandsmartrr 3y ago
It's pretty interesting to see Meta uncharacteristically embrace an open social networking protocol. They may see that their social graph alone will not be enough to create critical mass adoption for their new social network. I'm assuming, but hoping they're not following Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.

coolandsmartrr 3y ago

It looks like you can't compose a new thread on desktop. For a text-centric app, the lack of computer keyboard access is disheartening. I understand that the Threads team may want to focus on their core market on mobile. However, mobile prioritization will lead to posting content best composed on mobile, namely curt text and memes. I hope giving these types of content an early start won't affect the the culture on Threads in the long-run.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Unfortunately there seems to be a class of product managers who truly believe that "mobile only" is a mark of pride and excellence and that having desktop access to their product is either irrelevant/too-much-work ... or even so, a bad idea. I ran into these types on things I worked on at Google, and they seem to be out there generally. Instagram was like this for years, really. Which made some sense as it was a photo-taking app originally. But for something like this? Someone made some choices here, and I think they're the wrong ones. I guess it says something that out of the thousands of comments I've seen about threads, I've only seen one or two that even noticed that there's no desktop/web site? Are people really that phone centric now? My poor old "elderly" Gen-X self doesn't get it. Yes, you appear to be able to view individual threads if you have a link, but not sign up to the product, author threads, or browse?
amluto 3y ago
Twitter was rather extensively used for long form multi-tweet posts. Composing this type of content in a mobile app does not sound fun. (I don’t like Twitter as a medium for long posts like this, but the bottom line doesn’t care what I like.)

hospitalJail 3y ago

I'm amazed that people are willing to give facebook another try. Facebook filled our lives with rage-bait. (Not even going to touch the elections manip) They took over instagram and removed the time based sorting with their algorithm. So fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can't get fooled again.

jacooper 3y ago
Anything is better than twitter at this point.
- joegahona 3y ago
  Well there’s plenty to choose from. Threads, Mastodon, Substack Notes, Post.News, Bluesky, and all the tangential copycats (Nostr, Spill, T2 Social, Truth Social, Hive). We have to be reaching oversaturation in this space. I really wonder if all these projects are misjudging the appetite for a Twitter replacement.
  - s3p 3y ago
    In reality I think the need for a Twitter competitor was never stronger. Bluesky didn't catch on, they're not even out of private beta. Mastodon is riddled with issues that prevent it from reaching the mainstream. At present, Meta has the only product with the reach and scale capable of rivaling twitter. Even if you think the alternatives are "good enough", it doesn't matter because no one is using them. This will be different.
  - jacooper 3y ago
    None of them other than threads has reached enough traction, threads is growing incredibly fast, and will have critical mass for users to migrate. Also there is nothing new to learn, just use your existing Instagram account/create one and you are ready.
  - treyd 3y ago
    Truth Social is just a fork of Mastodon and is a terminal grift on followers of that particular political personality. Hive was a school project by 2 people that managed to secure funding without a real strategy and afaik hasn't really been able to reach a critical mass.

poomer 3y ago

I'm very skeptical that this will succeed. As with other extremely hyped social medias (anyone remember Clubhouse?) it's already filled with influencers and e-celebs trying to get in early, but these people always poison the well with insincere, low-quality, monetization-oriented content. AFAIK, every successful social media platform grew more or less organically and only had these folks latch on later (usually causing the degradation of the platform when they did).

SecretDracula 3y ago
I agree, but I also think that, at this moment, the conditions are right. People are hungry for a twitter alternative and this could lead to a lot of sincere and authentic users joining Threads.
afavour 3y ago
I’m amazed they didn’t provide a feed of only people you follow. Not doing so made the garbage influencer stuff inevitable.
- Turskarama 3y ago
  Showing you more content you're not interested in is how they get you to scroll past more ads, it's how they make money. Traditionally they don't need to care about showing you good content to keep you interested, you're generally logging in anyway. The proof is in the pudding: if you want a curated feed go to Tumblr or Mastodon. These spaces exist yet they're significantly less mainstream.
  - afavour 3y ago
    > if you want a curated feed go to Tumblr or Mastodon. These spaces exist yet they're significantly less mainstream. Why would we ignore the very mainstream Instagram as an example? > you're generally logging in anyway. When an app is established, sure. But providing new users a shitty experience in order to prioritise revenue is how new social networks fail.
3y ago

afavour 3y ago

I feel like there’s a chicken and egg problem for Threads: it uses your existing Instagram social graph to populate your Threads account. Of course FB is going to do that otherwise they lose a massive edge against any competitor. But for me at least my Twitter is a very different social space to my Instagram and there’s very little crossover. So Threads looks like it’ll be text posts with your Instagram friends. Which is fine, I suppose. But not a Twitter replacement.

FormerBandmate 3y ago
Even the recommended page is completely different. It’s Twitter when celebrities used it before Donald Trump completely reshaped the platform
88913527 3y ago
Text posts with your Meta friends sounds like Facebook from 2010. What is old is new again, I suppose.
- qbasic_forever 3y ago
  Facebook minus all your annoying boomer parents/relatives (who have no idea what Instagram is or how to install an app) and their political posts and screeds sounds amazing.
  - dboreham 3y ago
    Also the same thing as Facebook prior to 2010.
    - anshumankmr 3y ago
      Facebook was pretty good in the early 2010s also, in my anecdotal experience when the most popular thing on my feed used to funny iPhone chat memes and 9Gag
  - chrisco255 3y ago

lakomen 3y ago

I wonder if there'll be as much right wing propaganda as on Facebook video

h1t35h 3y ago

I understand the push to use the app for collecting my data for ads and what not but good lord is it too difficult to keep the web channels open? Why is this not available on browser :(

jacooper 3y ago
Supposedly "coming soon"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cactusplant7374 3y ago

I wish it were a standalone app. Not interested in linking something else to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. Come to think of it, Meta is building the everything app. They have all the components. I think Elon won’t have any success with his X / everything app.

mullingitover 3y ago

Called it [1]. Threads is wildly feature-incomplete, but there's so much demand for a twitter alternative that this is an embarrassingly one-sided product fight. For a 0.0.1-alpha version to steamroll into the space like this, it's now just a matter of the long goodbye for twitter as it becomes a space where you go to find someone's Threads handle. I give it 24 hours, tops, until it eclipses the entire Fediverse, and Bluesky becomes an obscure historical footnote. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36580669

asadotzler 3y ago
Neither of your predictions are at all surprising or interesting. The fediverse and Bluesky are tiny. It'd be an absolute Joke if FB couldn't double their size in a day or two.
- s3p 3y ago
  Useless criticism. It didn't seem like they were trying to amaze or surprise anyone with that comment.
ergocoder 3y ago
This is the boldest prediction of this decade. I still couldn't believe you are right.

smrtinsert 3y ago

Anything is a welcome alternative to Musk Twitter. Congrats to Zuck. There's nothing wrong with good ole fashioned competition!

alphabet9000 3y ago

yeah, and they've effectively trapped those 2M users, because when you go to delete your Threads account, it will say [0] that by doing so it will also delete your Instagram account as well... ouch [0] https://i.jollo.org/xNFu9Qvd.png https://i.jollo.org/xNFu9Qvd.png

troymc 3y ago
You can check out any time you like But you can never leave from https://genius.com/Eagles-hotel-california-lyrics https://genius.com/Eagles-hotel-california-lyrics
Tepix 3y ago
So you need a little browser extension that will delete all your posts for you.
- RMPR 3y ago
  Which won't exist because threads is app-only?

luxuryballs 3y ago

The question is, will TV, news, and media hosts quote things people said on “Threads” rather than Tweets?

tradewinds 3y ago

I am really still trying to figure out what the problem is with Twitter...

nkozyra 3y ago
Bad incentives, broken promises, pay-to-play, often broken app, weird decisions made and reverted with dubious reasons ...
chx 3y ago
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitter/ https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-slow-sad-death-of-twitt...
worrycue 3y ago
Can’t view anything unless you sign up for an account. Even with an account you are rated limited in the number of posts you can view. Darn thing seems to be falling apart. No better timing to launch competitor.
ch4s3 3y ago
I’m tempted to say it’s mostly just the users but I’m afraid that I’m pointing four fingers back at myself.
alxmng 3y ago
I think Twitter is the best it’s ever been. Edit button, longform posts instead of threads, better videos, paid posts/subscriptions, and more. I’ve never understood the complaints about hate speech or content, since you choose who to follow, can mute phrases, people, retweets, etc. I think community notes is probably the best anti-disinformation/fact check feature of any platform. I don’t agree with everything they’ve done, but Musk clearly has made a better effort on product than any of the previous management.
- tradewinds 3y ago
  That's exactly how I feel. If you look at the responses to my original comment, it's mostly unclear rambling or extremely mild exceptions. "Bad incentives", "weird decisions", "needing an account". My experience has been perfectly fine. I haven't seen anything I'd consider far-right or extremist, I don't pay a cent, I haven't hit a 1000-post daily limit because I have no use for 1000 Tweets in one day, and I've found a few new interesting groups of accounts to follow (mostly AI). When I hear some of these apparent negatives, I really don't understand what they mean or how that impacts anyone's actual user experience.

danielvaughn 3y ago

I cherish the fact that I got my Twitter account in 2009 and thus have my actual name "danielvaughn" as my handle. It's gonna take something really special to pull me away from Twitter, much as I dislike the direction it's going in. Threads is not special enough to pull me away.

jakebasile 3y ago
I reserve my True Name anywhere I can, even if I don't think I'll use the service. If I can't get it, it's very likely I'll never use the service.

lawgimenez 3y ago

The app size is somewhere around 497MB. Crazy.

wfme 3y ago

It feels exactly like the explore feed on instagram, but textual. Perhaps a little too early to call it but that's already a little off putting.

shrimpx 3y ago

I was surprised to see the invitation to follow all my Instagram friends. Now I’m getting follow requests for my friends. I use Instagram to network with friends “outside of work” and largely outside of the political sphere, and scroll through memes and silly content. It’s kind of like “friends + America’s funniest home videos”. Twitter is all about politics, current events, thought influencers, and work networking. Totally different sphere. I don’t want to share silly stuff with friends on Twitter, or share work and my thoughts about current events and my industry on Instagram. Not to mention that my Instagram account, as well as virtually all of by friends’ accounts, are private. I feel like by inviting people to follow their Instagram friends, Meta immediately precluded “taking on Twitter.”

ahahahahah 3y ago
Instagram has pretty good support for multiple accounts (including, for example, having a feed that shows content from multiple accounts). Even if they don't ever fully decouple threads accounts from Instagram ones, you could still basically have one for each.
creatonez 3y ago
> Twitter is all about politics, current events, thought influencers, and work networking. This is a rather narrow view of what the site is used for. It's also about media, art, and live music -- things that overlap heavily with Instagram. For example, I've found that you unfortunately can't avoid Twitter when keeping up with the underground electronic music scene in the US. Discord and Reddit have made some strides in replacing it, but not much.
- shrimpx 3y ago
  Interested in underground electronic music in general. Any recommendations for artists or accounts to follow?
  - creatonez 3y ago
    I quite enjoy: Xenolinguist, Mindex, Voljum, TheBusiness, Maxfield, ToneVizion, Omnist, Josh Teed, Nyquist, EOS, Tripp St, Aleph, Lemondoza, kLL sMTH Most of these names are on Soundcloud and/or Bandcamp. It's Americanized electronic bass, dubstep, halftime, and IDM with a psychedelic slant. This kind of stuff might not be everyone's cup of tea :)

rTX5CMRXIfFG 3y ago

Instagram users are hardly the crowd to have intelligent discussions with. It’s all shallow people who caption their photos with platitudes. At least Twitter, for all its warts, has academics and industry leaders. As it is, I don’t see how Threads will survive in the long run, considering how Instagram users are the sort of people who have short attention spans unless their apps dazzle them with something animated or with video in it.

siquick 3y ago
[flagged]

nprateem 3y ago

For a community of entrepreneurs who understand iteration to find product-market fit, the comments here are very shortsighted. I'm pretty sure they won't age well. No competitor could ask for a better time to launch with Twitter and Reddit users disaffected. FB have the experience, reach, resources and timing to win here. Their biggest problems will be other well-funded attempts, but I can't think of any other blue-chips with the same experience or initial advantages (eg social userbase) to bootstrap with. I'll be buying some FB shares later.

enufstuff 3y ago
> For a community of entrepreneurs who understand iteration to find product-market fit, the comments here are very shortsighted. I don't get the response either. But I've def seen HN folks react without any sort of logic to things so maybe this is one of those times...? > No competitor could ask for a better time to launch with Twitter and Reddit users disaffected. I immediately noticed it's branded with Instagram and not Facebook which I think is smart. Insta is seen as "for old people" by the gen Z crowd (that's a direct quote from a friend's kid) but not nearly as old as the FB crowd. I suspect that the disaffected Reddit crowd and the Twitter users more likely fit this demographic. With that said, my god I would be so happy if something overtook Twitter. As much as I'm not a fan of Meta, Twitter is on the bottom of my list.
Emma_Goldman 3y ago
I have little faith. FB degenerated year after year, in a blazing arc of self-destruction that almost everyone understood was going to kill the app. Yet these user-hostile changes were continually justified internally as 'increasing views and clicks', which must have required an unbelievable degree of institutional obtuseness. I can already see similarities in Threads, and it's only just begun: 1. Threads is app-only, there is no desktop version. 2. Your feed is populated by algorithmically sourced content, not just the posts of the accounts you follow. 3. You can't delete threads without deleting the Instagram account it's coupled with. I would also argue: 4. You can't make a threads account without signing up to Instagram. All four are attempts to increase company metrics, but which are clearly user-hostile, and will ultimately backfire. I actually find (1) to be inexplicably stupid.

anotherevan 3y ago

The permissions[1] the android app wants are rather terrifying. Think I'll pass. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.instagram.barcelona https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.instagr...

afavour 3y ago
Same with the App Store. Apparently the app is going to collect health and wellness data about me. Wonderful.
- hbn 3y ago
  What does that even mean though? Firstly if you don't use Apple's Health app it probably means nothing. And if you do, maybe an iOS dev could give us some insights, but I assume Apple doesn't provide an API to just freely peep at all your Health data. It doesn't even let apps access your photos, or push notifications, or location without a runtime consent prompt. There's no way Apple will just tell any app that wants it when a woman is on her period.
  - afavour 3y ago
    All I know is that the App Store lists that permission for Threads and not other apps I use. Given how much I trust Facebook (not at all) I’m happy to skip.
  - faizmokh 3y ago
    My guess is they just use the same "privacy nutrition labels" as Facebook app. Probably because they use the Graph API. It's If the app uses health data through Apple HealthKit you would probably noticed it because the app would have to ask for permission first.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  How can this be legal? I'm pretty sure that in order to legally process health data, an entity must have a plausible reason for doing so, at least in some jurisdictions. What could that reason possibly be for a social media app?

mjfl 3y ago

Really makes me feel like I'm a cow being herded when its phone-app only.

sergiotapia 3y ago

Looks nice! No website means I won't use it though, I need my casual pop-ins from my computer. Unrelated: Poor bastards: https://threads.com/ https://threads.com/ Overnight eclipsed. I think they'll rebrand, like Clubhouse rebranded to Shortcut because of the Clubhouse voicechat app rise in popularity.

inopinatus 3y ago

I too name my applications after unrelentingly grim post-apocalyptic British films¹ that harrowingly depict the catastrophic failure of institutions and the dire social and cultural outcomes that accompany the collapse of civilization. This does seem perfectly on-brand for Facebook. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)

loeber 3y ago
After? You're seriously going to claim that Threads -- an app entirely for threaded conversations -- is named not after the ubiquitous term of art from Twitter, but it's named after a 39-year-old animated horror film that most people have never even heard of, let alone seen? That's your contention?
- inopinatus 3y ago
  Of course not - it is live action drama, not animation

AbraKdabra 3y ago

"Threads, an Instagram app" Yeah, no.

jitl 3y ago

The front page it showed me I do not want.

jimt1234 3y ago

So, it's app only, no browser? LAME.

vagab0nd 3y ago

All I really want to know is did Zuck reserve his username, or did he try to sign up like the rest of us.

Shank 3y ago
All Instagram names were automatically reserved for existing users.

WoodenChair 3y ago

Did they build Threads using React or is it UIKit/Android SDK?

wnevets 3y ago

Does it have a limit on the number of post you can read per day? If not it's already better than Twitter.

deafpolygon 3y ago

Not available in my region. Btw, it's just Instagram without the photos.

ChrisRR 3y ago

> Sign up to threads > Instantly see a list of posts from celebrity accounts that I don't follow > Close the app

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

bathtub365 3y ago

6 or 7 seconds on a loading screen and I get a page with 30-odd words on it. What an incredibly bloated website

tim333 3y ago

I was one. I was curious, clicked 'sign up' which actually just linked my Insta account rather than making a new one, had a look for like 10 seconds, thought this is kinda rubbish and closed the app. It superficially looks much like Instagram - similar people making similar posts.

master_reb00t 3y ago

[flagged]