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Threads has "just under" 100M monthly active users
- mikewarot 3y agoI have an instagram account, somehow... I almost never use it. Does this include me in that count if I use it to view some link that ends on Instagram? Twitter, on the other hand, is one of my regular hang-outs.
- gareth_untether 3y agoI tried it, but the only way I found to find people in my field was to follow a username that had the name in the title and then follow the followers. By that point I was pretty bored of talking into the gloom. I should give it one last check to see if it’s easier to connect with people.
- skilled 3y agoNo it doesn't. It has 100M Instagram users who once in a while (intentionally or not) click on Threads, and Meta is peddling that as MAUs.
- hef19898 3y agoIs that better or worse than having bots?
- yellow_lead 3y agoMonthly active users (MAU) is a key performance indicator (KPI) used by social networking and other companies to count the number of unique users who have visited a site within the past month [1]. There is no distinction of intention in this metric. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monthly-active-user-mau.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monthly-active-user-mau...
- cabirum 3y agoThe metric is broken
- 3c6bYDXLMj 3y agoAnd?
- throwaway2990 3y agoWhen you sign up you have to use Instagram. You then cannot delete you account without losing Instagram. So then Instagram gets thread notifications. Clicking on one becomes a visit and goes part of the MAU metric. Threads has no users.
- threeseed 3y agoIf you're seeing a thread notification that means a user has posted something. So by definition it has users. In fact quite a lot of them.
- throwaway2990 3y agoI have 6 followers and 30 notifications telling me I have 6 followers. It keeps notifying me I have 6 followers… it’s trying to get me to go look. So no notifications are not indications of people being active.
- meiraleal 3y agoYou need to be a little bit smarter than that if you wanna "fix" other people's comments. Understanding it is the bare minimum.
- yellow_lead 3y agoI don't think you understand my comment, can you point out where you think I lack understanding?
- meiraleal 3y agowe all understood your comment and know what MAU is. You didn't understand that 100M users clicking on the threads button through Instagram once in a month isn't active users. No pedantry needed.
- appplication 3y agoThat is, by definition, monthly active users and the same way that basically everywhere calculates it. And yes, one click a month is considered an active user. You could compute more satisfying metrics like “how active is my average user” and that does tell a story. But MAU says a lot about a product’s reach even if it feels uncompellingly broad.
- meiraleal 3y ago> That is, by definition, monthly active users That might be, by definition, "MAU", a vanity metric used by corporate-brainwashed people working to pump profit through financial quarters. Not "monthly active users", which is a phrase that has a meaning by itself - people actively using a product. Doesn't matter what Meta product managers say or other people trying to get raises by raising pageviews and calling it "MAUs". Not coincidentally, Meta is having a hard time keeping their real active users on all their platforms. Throwing tantrums saying that this is the definition of MAU!1! won't save them.
- xboxnolifes 3y agoMetric becomes target.
- benguild 3y agoyeah, this number has to be unreal. every time I go in and check it out it’s like a handful of content farms, and two to three real users (one of which works at Instagram)
- threeseed 3y agoMy experience is completely different. I see nothing but real people, no content farms and plenty of activity. As with every site like this it really depends on who you follow.
- raverbashing 3y agoYeah Note who shares Threads screenshots: either the person itself or it's a dunk on how threads is boring/meaningless Zuck created the AOL of short messages, it's as if the bluechecks on twitter got 10x more views than on Twitter itself
- pndy 3y agoSpeaking of, I think I haven't seen any screenshots of Threads or Bluesky posts anywhere on the Internet
- fredoliveira 3y ago> No it doesn't. Source?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 3c6bYDXLMj 3y agoYep. Instagram shoves Threads excerpts into my feed at regular intervals. I’m pretty sure I don’t have a Threads account, whatever that means. I at the very least don’t have an ICQ-esque number my name on my Instagram profile. I’m being explicit here to preempt someone well-actuallying me about a shared accounts database or something. Anyways, at which point am I considered a Threads user? If I stop scrolling to show my partner how absurd it is that they’re doing this? When I accidentally press in that item in my feed? My normal Instagram feed is at least 25% screenshots of Tweets anyway, and the Thread advertisement interstitial gives you the impression that you can press to “view more” of whatever recycled thing is in the Threads post they’ve decided to shove in your face. So it could very well just be 100M people that pressed “See more”, and that’s one of the more generous explanations.
- test77777 3y agoGoes to show you that a simple UX is really all you need for this type of thing if you have a lot of users. To me instagram was already better then twitter, so now I have twitter without twitter.
- mnky9800n 3y agoI mostly gave up all social media with the advent of threads and now only look at hacker news. It just seems like there's too much stuff being presented as interesting information that's not really at all. HN seems to at least have things I find truly interesting approximately daily.
- naillo 3y agoSame. This and youtube blocking adblock (causing me to just exit the page) has been a boon to my productivity.
- meiraleal 3y agoYoutube blocked adblock? It still works for me using firefox on both android and linux
- yellow_lead 3y agoAs someone "extremely online" I find that Reddit, Threads, Twitter all post a lot of regurgitated or previously posted information. It's nice the HN prefers calling that out, either w/ a "previous discussion:" comment, or pointing out the year, i.e (2018) in the title.
- daverep 3y agoAnother option are comment-free, multi-perspective streams of just headlines. E.g. https://mc.news https://mc.news
- pndy 3y agoI'd add https://brutalist.report/ https://brutalist.report/ - this one covers whole world and various topics while one you linked focuses on the US
- unicornmama 3y agoShow us the user retention curve :)
- mentos 3y ago\
- yodsanklai 3y agoIt may pick up when EU join? I think there's room for a better, less toxic twitter. Seriously, 15 min on Twitter really drags my morale down. So much negativity and hate. There are people who are interesting to follow but they are buried in an ocean of garbage. I don't know how otherwise smart people would spend so much that on that platform. My hope is that threads manage to provide a better culture, if it's even possible with this format. I like what HN has achieved in terms of moderation. I wonder if this could be replicated at Twitter scale, probably at the price of banning certain topics.
- Hamuko 3y agoI think they need to get Threads out to the EU before Bluesky opens up to the public since Bluesky is so similar to Twitter of yore that it'll definitely be attractive to European Twitter users. Not sure what the timeline for Bluesky opening up is though. Last I heard, they needed to make architectural changes to allow scaling before they could get rid of the invites, and the ETA for those were end of this year.
- distances 3y agoI think Twitter's new limitation to showing just the tweet itself was a great update. I don't have an account, so any time I follow a Twitter link I see only the relevant bit and none of the comments which basically never were worth reading anyway.
- bad_user 3y agoThreads isn't launched in EU possibly because it's spyware and not compliant with GDPR. Coming from Meta, and given Facebook, their main product, why would you think it can develop a better culture? On Twitter/X, the reality is that people get the kind of posts they tend to interact with. The "For You" page can be curated, however. My X/Twitter feed right now has no mentions of war, or politics. It's all tech. Whenever I engage with tweets, I end up seeing similar tweets on the "For You" page, that I am then careful about curating. The automated feed is now a feature of all social media, except for the Fediverse/Mastodon. I don't like it, because the algorithm is meant to maximize engagement whatever the cost. But have you seen Facebook's feed lately? It's much, much worse than Twitter, because on Facebook, whatever you do, you can't stop it from suggesting bullshit, drama and yellow journalism. BTW, Mastodon is nice. But even without the algorithmic feed, people tend to gravitate toward drama and shallow subjects, such as politics and religion. Some people like complaining about shallow subjects into the void, or to pick a fight with strangers. Instagram, being based on posts of images only, seemed to be different. Well, not anymore, right?
- andrewstuart 3y agoI'm going to put it out there..... if I had a trillion dollar company or whatever facebook is, then I think I would have done a better job getting Threads built. And now its built, I'd have done a better job advertising and marketing it. Let me ask you - when the latest Mission Impossible movie came out, when the latest Spiderman movie came out, did you see ads absolutely fucking everywhere? Yes you did - bus stops, TV, YouTube - everywhere you turned, that message was being sold to you. When the latest Apple phone came out, were you even able to escape the Apple advertising on radio, TV, YouTube, magazines, whatever? No, you were not able to escape. Let me ask you - how many slick, stylish, compelling ads have you seen for Threads? Is the answer "absolutely everywhere", or is the answer "nowhere, never, none"? Or is the answer "damn facebook is pushing Threads down my throat". The incompetence firstly of the technical build then secondly of the marketing is startling. The conclusion has to be either facebook genuinely doesn't care about Threads, it's just a distraction from trying to make the metaverse, OR they genuinely care but they genuinely have no idea what they are doing, despite having all the money in the world. I say I'd be better at making Threads than Zuckerberg because almost anyone would be better - for gods sake all you need to do is picj up the phone to the top ad agencies and tell them to pitch for a $500M adverting spend. It's not rocket science.
- rapsin4 3y agoArmchair internet neckbeard thinks he knows Social Networks better than Zuck; who literally has half the world using his products... lol They're obviously not advertising it due to the product being close to complete... it doesn't even have search or trending yet... Why waste money on advertising if the product isn't even done yet?
- zenmaster10665 3y agoOne property in a list of other properties. It is all a balance of attention.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andrewstuart 3y ago
- rvz 3y agoFor less than a year of after launch, that is a better result than Mastodon with 7 years with 1.7M MAUs and for the rest of the other so-called Twitter / X killers which one of them (T2) already gave up and killed themselves recently. [0] I'd expect, Hive, Substack Notes, Post.news, etc to follow suit. [0] https://pebble.is/gabor/status/340649 https://pebble.is/gabor/status/340649
- throwaway2990 3y agoMastodon is terrible and has a massive barrier to entry for majority of users.
- seydor 3y agoThis time it s going to be different. Do people really want another twitter? aren't they tired enough of the shouting? From here on it's going to be the various federated media, and it will be a lot more quiet
- hnbad 3y agoI don't think another Twitter can happen. That ship has sailed. Bluesky is trying its best to be "another Twitter" but its invite-only approach severely hampers its ability to fill that niche and even if it didn't have that, it isn't easy to build back what Twitter lost. Arguably even Twitter was no longer Twitter, even prior to the acquisition talks. Twitter was as much the place you would go to to get citizen journalism when big tragedies broke as it was the place you'd hear endless outrage over a person you never heard of before having done something inconsequential that everyone agreed was significant enough to try and end their career over. By the end, a common refrain was the hope never to become the "main character" because everyone's history had some rope to hang them by if presented in the most outraged and uncharitable way. But on the other hand it was also a way to be heard, a place to motivate millions for activism (as long as it didn't take any real risk or effort and could be tweeted about throughout) and to do viral marketing. It feels like that has been replaced with niches and auto-curation either presenting userbases of similar sites with disjointed siloed experiences or with a homogeneous repetitive timeline of what advertisers might like or what Elon Musk personally wants you to see (which seems to be mostly his own posts). Twitter feels like for a while it was the closest approximation to the "global town square" or the mythical "marketplace of ideas" but in all truth that didn't last long and once marketing departments, advertising agencies, internet trolls and state actors had caught on and mastered the new medium, it was already dead.
- will5421 3y ago“‘more positive’ than its competitor“ because its competitor has all the juicy stuff, right?
- TowerTall 3y agoi don't even know the url of the website and have yet to notice a link on HN pointing to Threads. I don't know if the url is being filtered out on HN or there just isn't any interesting content there worth posting here.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- egosinenomine 3y ago[dead]