4 ms·

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

17 points by DocFeind 3y ago

wkat4242 3y ago
Umm 70M is actually not a lot on meta/Twitter scale. Also, gaining users is only the the beginning. Keeping them is the tough part. Personally I'm not rooting for either. I'd rather see mastodon and Lemmy win big.
- camjohnson26 3y ago
  It’s one of the fastest growing apps in history and already a significant percentage of Twitter’s total user base. It’s surged past Mastodon in total user count. I hope ActivityPub becomes the standard, but pretending like Threads isn’t a massive hit ignores reality.
majani 3y ago
And this is without the EU. Twitter must be in a full blown panic right now
gemstones 3y ago
When Elon told the whole world that making Twitter is easy and requires a lot less people than they had, it was inevitable that competitors would take that to mean that they should develop their own versions.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Of course competitors already knew that. But this is not the difficult bit in building a competitor. The difficult bit is to make people switch en masse.
  - century19 3y ago
    100% He opened up the arena.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Elon, of course, was helpfully assisted with the difficult bit, too. If Facebook had launched a twitter-y thing two years ago, I think the general view would have been “oh, cool, it’ll probably be just as popular as Facebook Dating”.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  #thank Elon for bringing the opportunity on a silver plate. Zuck and the threads team are probably thinking about that
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  The irony of the entire situation is that you can start a new Twitter with 10 people, but you can't maintain the existing Twitter with 10 people. I don't know what his mental model of management is, but it seems severely lacking, as in maybe he has people at Tesla and SpaceX that "round him out" and fill-in gaps in his thinking. At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests. While he may drive a Tesla and use Starlink, he didn't create SpaceX or swoop in and take control of Tesla as an obsessive customer with an agenda as a customer. I don’t think that that entirely explains why Musk Twitter isn’t like Tesla or SpaceX, but I can’t imagine its not a significant factor. (I also think that, distinct from his customer-agenda, him seeing it as an opportunity to relitigate his finance app history getting booted as CEO of X.com twice before it became PayPal is an issue that impacts more than the names he has used for the companies used in the Twitter acquisition.)
    - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
      I believe the largest factor is that he never intended to buy it, tried to get out of buying it, when he had to buy it he didn't get enough investors and saddled Twitter with high debt, which made him turn to sharp "cost-cutting measures" which as a result lost him even more money and put him on a stressful downward spiral in which he's losing billion a year, and he can't stop it, and is constantly making bad decisions like an animal that the more it moves, the deeper it gets stuck into the shark's mouth.
      - rsynnott 3y ago
        It’s really the first bit that slightly stretches credulity. Like, presumably at some point some lawyer told him “this isn’t like a consumer contract, once you’ve signed you’ve signed”.
- tibbydudeza 3y ago
  In a sense that was correct as "Project 92" was started in Jan 2023 and they had the Meta infrastructure (photo storage/message storage/cloud ???) and Instagram account/content moderation to piggyback from.

17 points by DocFeind 3y ago

Umm 70M is actually not a lot on meta/Twitter scale. Also, gaining users is only the the beginning. Keeping them is the tough part. Personally I'm not rooting for either. I'd rather see mastodon and Lemmy win big.

camjohnson26 3y ago
It’s one of the fastest growing apps in history and already a significant percentage of Twitter’s total user base. It’s surged past Mastodon in total user count. I hope ActivityPub becomes the standard, but pretending like Threads isn’t a massive hit ignores reality.

majani 3y ago

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

gemstones 3y ago

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

mytailorisrich 3y ago
Of course competitors already knew that. But this is not the difficult bit in building a competitor. The difficult bit is to make people switch en masse.
- century19 3y ago
  100% He opened up the arena.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Elon, of course, was helpfully assisted with the difficult bit, too. If Facebook had launched a twitter-y thing two years ago, I think the general view would have been “oh, cool, it’ll probably be just as popular as Facebook Dating”.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gloryjulio 3y ago
#thank Elon for bringing the opportunity on a silver plate. Zuck and the threads team are probably thinking about that
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
The irony of the entire situation is that you can start a new Twitter with 10 people, but you can't maintain the existing Twitter with 10 people. I don't know what his mental model of management is, but it seems severely lacking, as in maybe he has people at Tesla and SpaceX that "round him out" and fill-in gaps in his thinking. At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests. While he may drive a Tesla and use Starlink, he didn't create SpaceX or swoop in and take control of Tesla as an obsessive customer with an agenda as a customer. I don’t think that that entirely explains why Musk Twitter isn’t like Tesla or SpaceX, but I can’t imagine its not a significant factor. (I also think that, distinct from his customer-agenda, him seeing it as an opportunity to relitigate his finance app history getting booted as CEO of X.com twice before it became PayPal is an issue that impacts more than the names he has used for the companies used in the Twitter acquisition.)
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    I believe the largest factor is that he never intended to buy it, tried to get out of buying it, when he had to buy it he didn't get enough investors and saddled Twitter with high debt, which made him turn to sharp "cost-cutting measures" which as a result lost him even more money and put him on a stressful downward spiral in which he's losing billion a year, and he can't stop it, and is constantly making bad decisions like an animal that the more it moves, the deeper it gets stuck into the shark's mouth.
    - rsynnott 3y ago
      It’s really the first bit that slightly stretches credulity. Like, presumably at some point some lawyer told him “this isn’t like a consumer contract, once you’ve signed you’ve signed”.
tibbydudeza 3y ago
In a sense that was correct as "Project 92" was started in Jan 2023 and they had the Meta infrastructure (photo storage/message storage/cloud ???) and Instagram account/content moderation to piggyback from.