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It works extremely well - it guarantees you know* someone on the social network. No empty feeds, no literally-no-one to talk at, you have someone you can ask q
by Groxx 3y ago
It works extremely well - it guarantees you know* someone on the social network. No empty feeds, no literally-no-one to talk at, you have someone you can ask questions about the site, etc.
Speaking from experience working on a social site with loads of signup flow experiments: the results are consistently wild. It's no competition on all the normally-valued metrics like interactions and retention.
*for some degree of "know" anyway. Better in most cases than "the news talked about this tweeter thing"
(edit: I do think they may have missed what might be the biggest boat sailing party, which was probably a mistake. But invite-only is quite reasonable.)
- motoxpro 3y agoGreat great point
- paxys 3y agoIt guarantees you know one person on the network. And if you like it and want to invite everyone else – tough luck. Threads solved the cold start problem by not having a personal feed at all at launch. There is only a single algorithmically curated one, prioritizing first/second/third/etc degree connections and otherwise showing content from everyone else. So the place always felt alive from day 1.
- cyanydeez 3y agoUnfortunately, they likely used AI to sock puppet and prime that pump, along with simply already having a user base. Nothing very special about those shortcuts. Had they had a standalone system, it's not be much better than all the other attempts. This is akin to how Snoy launched the playstation.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tshaddox 3y agoThere’s not much value in knowing “someone” on a social network. Especially someone who was already able to send me an invite out-of-band.