14 ms·

Instant Messenger History: Lessons for the Threads Era of Social Media

72 points by cpeterso 3y ago

TheRealPomax 3y ago
Threads is an entire era now? Surely it's a liiiiittle too early to make that claim.
- scrumper 3y ago
  Maybe it's fair? It's the first major persistent broadcast messaging platform since Twitter popularized the concept with non-computer nerds.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    "Maybe" isn't good enough.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  I think it's fair to say that we have a post-twitter, or elon-twitter era when all of a sudden Twitter has a bunch of competition that it's never really had before. I wouldn't say it's Threads' era, but it does seem like something has happened. Something has to be said about about the fact that now Meta decided to launch a Twitter clone.
  - soperj 3y ago
    Why? Did something have to be said when Google launched Google+? Or any of the other social platforms?
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      Yes that was definitely an era of its own when there was lots of stiff competition for social networks.
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
      My memory is hazy of those years, but I do think it was a bit different. IIRC, G+ was a defensive maneuver. G was terrified of FB, who was executing successfully on many fronts and putting pressure on advertising revenues. And so G tried to make G+ happen. By contrast, in this case, Twitter keeps shooting itself in the foot. (I guess that's what happens when you lay off huge swaths of the company and demand that engineers print out their code on paper.) So Threads (and others) are moving into the vacuum that's been created. So things right now feel like much more of a competitive land-grab, and it's not entirely clear who's going to win (or even why/how they'll win, or even what the victory conditions look like).
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Pretty sure Threads has more users in less than a week than G+ ever had...
      - soperj 3y ago
        I wouldn't trust uncorroborated numbers that aren't even talking about daily active users.
  - mjfl 3y ago
    but Twitter didn't even matter when it was just Twitter. Twitter was a minor, failing social media site up until Musk bought it.
    - kalupa 3y ago
      not sure that's been corrected yet. Seems to be becoming more minor and more failing
      - nancyhn 3y ago
        By what metric?
        dspillett 3y ago
        The increased number of viable competitors (in terms of mind-share, I'm not suggesting there has been significant movement in terms of capabilities in the last twelve months) and the level of interested in then certainly makes twitter's position rather less comfortable than it might otherwise have been. There certainly seemed to be a number of advertisers who reduced, or entirely removed, their commitments to purchase space on the platform. While many have since reversed somewhat on that, many have not or have not completely unless there has been a major change this quarter (the just full figures I've seen reported in were for 2023Q2 and IIRC the total advertising sales were down >55% compared to 2022Q2). That is two fairly negative indicators with demonstrable evidence. Do you have any positive metrics in mind?
      - aksss 3y ago
        I'm guessing they're financially healthier on the opex side of things than they've ever been. I mean, they've never been profitable, the revenue loss was reactionary and it's not crazy to think that will come back as Twitter hits record user minute metrics and such. Thread is probably going to be robbing its own revenue from other Meta platforms more than Twitter's, I'm guessing. I read somebody today remarking that Twitter was an indignation machine, but I think twitter is very productive if you're following people who produce content or information rather than following political pundits and reporters.
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  It has amassed 110 million users in a week. It feels like the start of something new and noteworthy. Maybe "era" isn't the right word, but I think we can still take away the message they're trying to convey.
  - autokad 3y ago
    maybe, but massing users is not the same as massing people who actually use it. They just tied it to instagram no? It doesnt mean these users that clicked a button will actually use threads
    - spiderice 3y ago
      Correct. The 110 million users needs to have a huge asterisk next to it. I signed up for Threads to see what it was like. Haven't gotten back on since. Obviously plenty of people have. But that 110 million number is basically meaningless without knowing how many people have used it a second or third time.
      - MR4D 3y ago
        And you will continue to be a user because if you delete your account, your instagram goes too. More of Zuck cheating at life.
        dspillett 3y ago
        Not that I'm one to defend Facebook and it's robotic overlord, but that sort of essentially meaningless user counting is commonplace. What proportion of twitter's official user count are regularly active and how many have not touched it at all recently?
        MR4D 3y ago
        I agree completely. I'm trying to highlight that this is a particularly egregious way of counting users. I fully expect that if this continues past a few months, then shareholders will demand real numbers ("active" users) as you mention to in your comment.
- Jeff_Brown 3y ago
  Indeed. What lawyers call "assuming a fact not in evidence".
- catsarebetter 3y ago
  Way too early
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It threads is basically successful (say 20 million people stay engaged) and it joins with the Fedi successfully I won’t feel bad about them calling it the “Threads era”. I wouldn’t take either of the above for granted but I wouldn’t think either is impossible. What puzzles me the most is that Threads is seemingly 50 times larger than the Fedi already at which point there doesn’t seem to be any point in Thread joining it. Many people on the Fedi want to block Threads for various reasons, not least because some people don’t want to share a social network with anyone who disagrees with them, but also Threads doesn’t support features that are important to anyone who takes Fedi participation series such as image alt text and hashtags.
- blitzar 3y ago
  The argument, broadly, is that in the marketplace 2/3/4/5 years ago - anyone who launched a twitter clone, be it facebook, google, apple or god themself, was not going to get millions of users on day 1 and on day 2 would probably be shutting down. Various changes in the market place have opened up things, possibly to more competition, posisibly to less, but a new era nevertheless.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    There is no such thing as "a marketplace" when we're talking about a product with a user base of 3 billion users. There is no generalizing here: an immensely vast user base (with numbers you can't even phathom) was presented with a new service, signups for which had no downsides to click-through. This is nothing like "clone apps" on a "marketplace". This is Facebook pushing an app out, and the world pretending it's somehow not just another Facebook app that BY DEFAULT will have several percent of the Facebook/Insta userbase signing up because, again, there is no downside. Feeling cute, might cancel later. Except cancelling turns out to be a mild inconvenience compared to signing up, so people won't bother.
5- 3y ago
current pidgin lead developer has been writing rather entertaining posts on pidgin and generally im history: https://dev.to/grim https://dev.to/grim e.g. https://dev.to/grim/where-did-the-name-libpurple-come-from-478d https://dev.to/grim/where-did-the-name-libpurple-come-from-4...
Zak 3y ago
> John Gruber... has suggested... instant messaging was a dead-end technology I use Signal and WhatsApp daily. Most people I know use some sort of IM, though for some of them it's only iMessage. It's interesting and a little surprising that none of the PC-based instant messaging services popular in the early 2000s were successful in making the jump to mobile, though some did produce mobile clients.
- lintroller 3y ago
  Mobile providers had no incentive to let the instant messaging services on their network when they were charging 10 cents per SMS message.
  - toast0 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure the major messengers all had integrations with at least US mobile providers. Because if you didn't have a messaging plan, you'd get charged 10 cents per message as it was delivered over SMS. IMHO, the reason a mobile first network was more compelling than a desktop first network is that people tend to have their phones on them, while their desktops tend to be at their desks. For better or worse, you can always reach me on my phone. Tencent developed QQ on desktop and then WeChat on mobile, but afaik, didn't bridge the two networks.
  - Zak 3y ago
    The iPhone app store and consumer Android devices both launched in 2008. Mobile providers didn't have a say after that.
    - bozhark 3y ago
      AT&T’s iPhone monopoly?
      - Zak 3y ago
        AT&T did not get a say over what was available in the app store. ICQ, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger all had clients for iOS and Android.
distantsounds 3y ago
I would absolutely love to run my own little TOC/OSCAR server and host my own private AIM community. The only implementation I found is the closed-source AIM Phoenix project, is anyone aware of one?
booleandilemma 3y ago
But the problem is that some of your friends went to Threads. Some of them went to Bluesky. Some went to Mastodon. Some went to T2. I don't think multiple social networks is a problem. I don't want one network that everyone is on. Let them be split up by interest or age or whatever. It's natural. What I post on HN isn't what I would post on "Social Network X" anyway, there's no need for syndication. The only people that need to care about having their comments go everywhere are influencers and marketers - and who cares what they want.
- esafak 3y ago
  It is if they target the same use case. I resent having to use WhatsApp alongside Signal. And iMessage and SMS. Want to review the conversation you had with so-and-so the other day ? You have to check multiple apps if you forgot where. I miss Trillian. I miss standards.
  - ajayyy 3y ago
    That will will be fixed Q1 next year thanks to the EU
  - rconti 3y ago
    That's ironic. At least in the brief time I used Windows, Trillian had the worst dumpster fire of a UI. I can't say I really liked Windows UI, but they didn't even attempt to conform to it to make it half-usable.
    - esafak 3y ago
      That's funny because the UI is one thing I think stood out positively about Trillian but that might be my rose-tinted glasses and youthful tastes talking.
      - Semaphor 3y ago
        Nah, I used Trillian (Lifetime licence) until just a few years ago when I realized that everyone is siloed in Signal, WA, etc. The UI was still great. But that might be related to me hating the UI of WA, Signal, Telegram etc. Even Gajim switched to this shitty UI style (sidenote: Any usable Windows XMPP/Jabber client that still looks good, with good = "userlist, plus chats in separate windows"?), so I’m starting to think it might be possible that most people don’t hate it ;) edit: There’s AstraChat which looks nice and apparently supports WA, alas, it’s commercial, and they don’t seem interested in selling to non-enterprise users.
jaimex2 3y ago
Jesus, another whiny Musk ruined everything sap. Twitter hasn't changed a bit other than no longer perma banning. You wouldn't even know its under new management if mainstream media didn't put the agenda in your heads. And for the love of god, we don't need another Meta social media platform or anything else for that matter. If Musk is cancer Meta is the cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, ALS suite.
- noarchy 3y ago
  >You wouldn't even know its under new management if mainstream media didn't put the agenda in your heads. Aside from Musk pushing his own tweets in your feed?
  - sidibe 3y ago
    Or all the ignorant blue check top responses to any popular tweet. You wouldn't know it's under new management only if you'd never been there before.
- spike021 3y ago
  I'm not sure if this is Musk-related, but Twitter has definitely changed. * More ads, not as easy to hide them with traditional blocker * More bots - I'm a baseball fan and follow a lot of baseball people, and players in particular are big on custom tshirts that are only usually sold by a special MLB-licensed vendor. However, there will be tweets with a photo or video and multiple replies by scam bots saying "tshirt available at xyz.example!!" and then a plethora more bots replying to that thread saying "thanks just ordered mine!" or variations of that * Not sure if "bot", but there are a few OnlyFans style bots or even maybe just users where I constantly see them reply tweets but only one at a time; I block them every time because I'm not interested, only for another variation with slightly different name but the same "person" showing up the next day or so. I don't know what's changed for those things to happen, but they've definitely increased or outright started just in the past year.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I mean, I used to go read new tweets from a few accounts every once in awhile, and now I suddenly can't do that without making an account. So now I don't go there at all, which is a pretty big change for me...
imwillofficial 3y ago
There is no Threads era
firewolf34 3y ago
Y'all remember when back in the 2000's there was so many IM apps that people made tools like Meebo to organize them all into one messenger utility? Why isn't there just one giant firehose API which merges all the socials into one intake feed. Then I could filter it down for useful data and discard the rest. This probably already exists, but, just my thoughts from the article!

72 points by cpeterso 3y ago

TheRealPomax 3y ago

Threads is an entire era now? Surely it's a liiiiittle too early to make that claim.

scrumper 3y ago
Maybe it's fair? It's the first major persistent broadcast messaging platform since Twitter popularized the concept with non-computer nerds.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  "Maybe" isn't good enough.
madeofpalk 3y ago
I think it's fair to say that we have a post-twitter, or elon-twitter era when all of a sudden Twitter has a bunch of competition that it's never really had before. I wouldn't say it's Threads' era, but it does seem like something has happened. Something has to be said about about the fact that now Meta decided to launch a Twitter clone.
- soperj 3y ago
  Why? Did something have to be said when Google launched Google+? Or any of the other social platforms?
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    Yes that was definitely an era of its own when there was lots of stiff competition for social networks.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    My memory is hazy of those years, but I do think it was a bit different. IIRC, G+ was a defensive maneuver. G was terrified of FB, who was executing successfully on many fronts and putting pressure on advertising revenues. And so G tried to make G+ happen. By contrast, in this case, Twitter keeps shooting itself in the foot. (I guess that's what happens when you lay off huge swaths of the company and demand that engineers print out their code on paper.) So Threads (and others) are moving into the vacuum that's been created. So things right now feel like much more of a competitive land-grab, and it's not entirely clear who's going to win (or even why/how they'll win, or even what the victory conditions look like).
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    Pretty sure Threads has more users in less than a week than G+ ever had...
    - soperj 3y ago
      I wouldn't trust uncorroborated numbers that aren't even talking about daily active users.
- mjfl 3y ago
  but Twitter didn't even matter when it was just Twitter. Twitter was a minor, failing social media site up until Musk bought it.
  - kalupa 3y ago
    not sure that's been corrected yet. Seems to be becoming more minor and more failing
    - nancyhn 3y ago
      By what metric?
      - dspillett 3y ago
        The increased number of viable competitors (in terms of mind-share, I'm not suggesting there has been significant movement in terms of capabilities in the last twelve months) and the level of interested in then certainly makes twitter's position rather less comfortable than it might otherwise have been. There certainly seemed to be a number of advertisers who reduced, or entirely removed, their commitments to purchase space on the platform. While many have since reversed somewhat on that, many have not or have not completely unless there has been a major change this quarter (the just full figures I've seen reported in were for 2023Q2 and IIRC the total advertising sales were down >55% compared to 2022Q2). That is two fairly negative indicators with demonstrable evidence. Do you have any positive metrics in mind?
    - aksss 3y ago
      I'm guessing they're financially healthier on the opex side of things than they've ever been. I mean, they've never been profitable, the revenue loss was reactionary and it's not crazy to think that will come back as Twitter hits record user minute metrics and such. Thread is probably going to be robbing its own revenue from other Meta platforms more than Twitter's, I'm guessing. I read somebody today remarking that Twitter was an indignation machine, but I think twitter is very productive if you're following people who produce content or information rather than following political pundits and reporters.
bonestamp2 3y ago
It has amassed 110 million users in a week. It feels like the start of something new and noteworthy. Maybe "era" isn't the right word, but I think we can still take away the message they're trying to convey.
- autokad 3y ago
  maybe, but massing users is not the same as massing people who actually use it. They just tied it to instagram no? It doesnt mean these users that clicked a button will actually use threads
  - spiderice 3y ago
    Correct. The 110 million users needs to have a huge asterisk next to it. I signed up for Threads to see what it was like. Haven't gotten back on since. Obviously plenty of people have. But that 110 million number is basically meaningless without knowing how many people have used it a second or third time.
    - MR4D 3y ago
      And you will continue to be a user because if you delete your account, your instagram goes too. More of Zuck cheating at life.
      - dspillett 3y ago
        Not that I'm one to defend Facebook and it's robotic overlord, but that sort of essentially meaningless user counting is commonplace. What proportion of twitter's official user count are regularly active and how many have not touched it at all recently?
        MR4D 3y ago
        I agree completely. I'm trying to highlight that this is a particularly egregious way of counting users. I fully expect that if this continues past a few months, then shareholders will demand real numbers ("active" users) as you mention to in your comment.
Jeff_Brown 3y ago
Indeed. What lawyers call "assuming a fact not in evidence".
catsarebetter 3y ago
Way too early
PaulHoule 3y ago
It threads is basically successful (say 20 million people stay engaged) and it joins with the Fedi successfully I won’t feel bad about them calling it the “Threads era”. I wouldn’t take either of the above for granted but I wouldn’t think either is impossible. What puzzles me the most is that Threads is seemingly 50 times larger than the Fedi already at which point there doesn’t seem to be any point in Thread joining it. Many people on the Fedi want to block Threads for various reasons, not least because some people don’t want to share a social network with anyone who disagrees with them, but also Threads doesn’t support features that are important to anyone who takes Fedi participation series such as image alt text and hashtags.
blitzar 3y ago
The argument, broadly, is that in the marketplace 2/3/4/5 years ago - anyone who launched a twitter clone, be it facebook, google, apple or god themself, was not going to get millions of users on day 1 and on day 2 would probably be shutting down. Various changes in the market place have opened up things, possibly to more competition, posisibly to less, but a new era nevertheless.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago
  There is no such thing as "a marketplace" when we're talking about a product with a user base of 3 billion users. There is no generalizing here: an immensely vast user base (with numbers you can't even phathom) was presented with a new service, signups for which had no downsides to click-through. This is nothing like "clone apps" on a "marketplace". This is Facebook pushing an app out, and the world pretending it's somehow not just another Facebook app that BY DEFAULT will have several percent of the Facebook/Insta userbase signing up because, again, there is no downside. Feeling cute, might cancel later. Except cancelling turns out to be a mild inconvenience compared to signing up, so people won't bother.

5- 3y ago

current pidgin lead developer has been writing rather entertaining posts on pidgin and generally im history: https://dev.to/grim https://dev.to/grim e.g. https://dev.to/grim/where-did-the-name-libpurple-come-from-478d https://dev.to/grim/where-did-the-name-libpurple-come-from-4...

Zak 3y ago

> John Gruber... has suggested... instant messaging was a dead-end technology I use Signal and WhatsApp daily. Most people I know use some sort of IM, though for some of them it's only iMessage. It's interesting and a little surprising that none of the PC-based instant messaging services popular in the early 2000s were successful in making the jump to mobile, though some did produce mobile clients.

lintroller 3y ago
Mobile providers had no incentive to let the instant messaging services on their network when they were charging 10 cents per SMS message.
- toast0 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure the major messengers all had integrations with at least US mobile providers. Because if you didn't have a messaging plan, you'd get charged 10 cents per message as it was delivered over SMS. IMHO, the reason a mobile first network was more compelling than a desktop first network is that people tend to have their phones on them, while their desktops tend to be at their desks. For better or worse, you can always reach me on my phone. Tencent developed QQ on desktop and then WeChat on mobile, but afaik, didn't bridge the two networks.
- Zak 3y ago
  The iPhone app store and consumer Android devices both launched in 2008. Mobile providers didn't have a say after that.
  - bozhark 3y ago
    AT&T’s iPhone monopoly?
    - Zak 3y ago
      AT&T did not get a say over what was available in the app store. ICQ, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger all had clients for iOS and Android.

distantsounds 3y ago

I would absolutely love to run my own little TOC/OSCAR server and host my own private AIM community. The only implementation I found is the closed-source AIM Phoenix project, is anyone aware of one?

booleandilemma 3y ago

But the problem is that some of your friends went to Threads. Some of them went to Bluesky. Some went to Mastodon. Some went to T2. I don't think multiple social networks is a problem. I don't want one network that everyone is on. Let them be split up by interest or age or whatever. It's natural. What I post on HN isn't what I would post on "Social Network X" anyway, there's no need for syndication. The only people that need to care about having their comments go everywhere are influencers and marketers - and who cares what they want.

esafak 3y ago
It is if they target the same use case. I resent having to use WhatsApp alongside Signal. And iMessage and SMS. Want to review the conversation you had with so-and-so the other day ? You have to check multiple apps if you forgot where. I miss Trillian. I miss standards.
- ajayyy 3y ago
  That will will be fixed Q1 next year thanks to the EU
- rconti 3y ago
  That's ironic. At least in the brief time I used Windows, Trillian had the worst dumpster fire of a UI. I can't say I really liked Windows UI, but they didn't even attempt to conform to it to make it half-usable.
  - esafak 3y ago
    That's funny because the UI is one thing I think stood out positively about Trillian but that might be my rose-tinted glasses and youthful tastes talking.
    - Semaphor 3y ago
      Nah, I used Trillian (Lifetime licence) until just a few years ago when I realized that everyone is siloed in Signal, WA, etc. The UI was still great. But that might be related to me hating the UI of WA, Signal, Telegram etc. Even Gajim switched to this shitty UI style (sidenote: Any usable Windows XMPP/Jabber client that still looks good, with good = "userlist, plus chats in separate windows"?), so I’m starting to think it might be possible that most people don’t hate it ;) edit: There’s AstraChat which looks nice and apparently supports WA, alas, it’s commercial, and they don’t seem interested in selling to non-enterprise users.

jaimex2 3y ago

Jesus, another whiny Musk ruined everything sap. Twitter hasn't changed a bit other than no longer perma banning. You wouldn't even know its under new management if mainstream media didn't put the agenda in your heads. And for the love of god, we don't need another Meta social media platform or anything else for that matter. If Musk is cancer Meta is the cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, ALS suite.

noarchy 3y ago
>You wouldn't even know its under new management if mainstream media didn't put the agenda in your heads. Aside from Musk pushing his own tweets in your feed?
- sidibe 3y ago
  Or all the ignorant blue check top responses to any popular tweet. You wouldn't know it's under new management only if you'd never been there before.
spike021 3y ago
I'm not sure if this is Musk-related, but Twitter has definitely changed. * More ads, not as easy to hide them with traditional blocker * More bots - I'm a baseball fan and follow a lot of baseball people, and players in particular are big on custom tshirts that are only usually sold by a special MLB-licensed vendor. However, there will be tweets with a photo or video and multiple replies by scam bots saying "tshirt available at xyz.example!!" and then a plethora more bots replying to that thread saying "thanks just ordered mine!" or variations of that * Not sure if "bot", but there are a few OnlyFans style bots or even maybe just users where I constantly see them reply tweets but only one at a time; I block them every time because I'm not interested, only for another variation with slightly different name but the same "person" showing up the next day or so. I don't know what's changed for those things to happen, but they've definitely increased or outright started just in the past year.
sanderjd 3y ago
I mean, I used to go read new tweets from a few accounts every once in awhile, and now I suddenly can't do that without making an account. So now I don't go there at all, which is a pretty big change for me...

imwillofficial 3y ago

There is no Threads era

firewolf34 3y ago

Y'all remember when back in the 2000's there was so many IM apps that people made tools like Meebo to organize them all into one messenger utility? Why isn't there just one giant firehose API which merges all the socials into one intake feed. Then I could filter it down for useful data and discard the rest. This probably already exists, but, just my thoughts from the article!