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> Moreover, once it [Threads] was developed, the infrastructure teams were given only two day’s notice to prepare for its production launch. Most large organiza
by vasco 2y ago
> Moreover, once it [Threads] was developed, the infrastructure teams were given only two day’s notice to prepare for its production launch. Most large organizations would take longer than two days just to draft a project plan involving dozens of interdependent teams, let alone execute it. At Meta, however, we quickly established war rooms across distributed sites, bringing together both infrastructure and product teams to address issues in real-time. Despite the tight timeline, the app’s launch was highly successful, reaching 100 million users within just five days, making it the fastest-growing app in history.
Kind of more impressive to have kept this ability to ship fast than anything else. A lot of work is needed to not let the bureaucracy increase and stop the lawyers or other functions from creating approval gates everywhere. Or at least to be able to have war rooms that can get it done so quickly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- silisili 2y agoI thought the same thing, but then realize that Threads was a huge flop. Is it really a skill to very quickly release a dud app? I don't know the answer to that. Bypassing bureaucracy seems like heaven, but it feels like it also bypassed the product folks entirely.
- ianlevesque 2y agoWhat? It has more than 300M users.
- silisili 2y agoToday, maybe? I haven't kept up. I'm talking specifically about its launch.
- OtherShrezzing 2y agoThey had 100m account creations within the first 5 days.
- silisili 2y agohttps://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/11/08/threads-dead-long-live-threads-the-app-s-decline-makes-it-sandbox-brands https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2023/11/08/threads-dead-long...
- linkregister 2y agoThreads' launch was intentionally rushed in order to capitalize on the user discontent at the time. Without a large alternative, enthusiasm to migrate to another social network would have waned. Note that Bluesky was still invite-only when Threads launched.
- ahoka 2y agoHow many of those are bots?
- linkregister 2y agoHow many users on X (Twitter) or Bluesky are bots? It's reasonable to assume the percentages are the same, given the lack of public information for the major text-based broadcast social networks. X is estimated to have 250M daily active users. Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that Threads' DAUs were 100M. Threads achieving a bit under half the size in such a short time is impressive, especially since Threads still lacks many features that X has had for years.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> It's reasonable to assume the percentages are the same It's reasonable to assume they're worse. Bluesky doesn't have Facebook's network or surveillance apparatus. Neither does Twitter, except it's a higher-value target than Bluesky and Threads combined.
- sn0wleppard 2y agoAnd how many are Instagram users who created a Threads account after being prompted but never actually use it?
- linkregister 2y agoDaily Active Users (DAUs) and Monthly Active User counts represent the amount of users that perform activity on the application daily and monthly, respectively.
- NBJack 2y agoThere is no industry standard for DAUs or MAUs. Take it all with a hefty grain of salt.
- mukunda_johnson 2y agoI think most of those are Instagram shoving it in your face. Yeah I'm a "Threads user", but only because of the inline feed in Instagram. I'm annoyed when there is a notification blip but it turns out to be Threads spam.
- notyourwork 2y agoSame annoyance here!
- pjc50 2y agoUsing it for what? Can someone list their fave Threads accounts so we can get a picture?
- cmdtab 2y agoWhat is threads lacking from a product perspective?
- yokoprime 2y agoNovelty
- silisili 2y agoIt was given no thought or advertisement or anything. It -feels- like an engineering marathon to make a safe space from Twitter. I don't know that it's a bad effort, but it's one that rose and died seemingly the same day. I feel like more time with a good product person would have given more thought to fit, advertising, release, and so on.
- captainbland 2y agoI guess its only real USP is "automatically import your Instagram friends", except that doesn't really work properly because only a fraction of people on Instagram seem to be interested in Threads. Its fediverse integration stuff isn't panning out because nobody in the fediverse is stupid enough to let them federate. The single thread per message instead of hashtags thing doesn't seem to add a lot either.
- pjc50 2y agoThe "product" in a social network is the community and the culture. Despite being terminally online I can't tell you what those look like for Threads. I can for FB/Insta/Twitter/Bsky/LinkedIn/Mastodon.
- naijaboiler 2y agoWhat's it lacking? purpose. value. actual users.
- chikere232 2y agoIt's certainly a skill to launch quickly at that scale. There are plenty of bureaucratically managed slowly launched duds too I hate meta with a passion, but I don't deny they have some great infrastructure and engineers to enable the bad things they do to the world
- Simon_O_Rourke 2y agoThey might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.
- 2c2c2c 2y agoincumbent networks don't really lose. they saw potential blood in the water at the time with the rumblings of a mass exodus and made an excellent attempt at capitalizing though. threads as a product was DOA when that didn't work. you need a network of interesting important people for it to be useful. when the migration didn't happen, you ended up with a bunch of instagram meme influencers reposting their content across two apps instead I think their strategy combined with an open offer exclusivity bonus could have given them the stickiness. up front 5k, 10k, 15k, etc to a twitter user that matches their follower of at least 25k, 50k, 75k, etc count on threads and agrees to exclusively post there for a year. people weren't getting paid on twitter so this would have been alluring
- hansmayer 2y agoPrecisely, for all the talk of efficiency last few years, how do we even begin to measure the total waste of effort and energy of so many smart people that this was? All that effort and stress for effectively nothing, or perhaps even net negative effect.
- wordpad25 2y agohow is it net negative effect? they have Hundreds of millions of ACTIVE users even if it was spun off to be stand alone product without Instagram it would still be worth billions
- hansmayer 2y agoDAU is a very one-dimensional and misleading KPI, one that gave us ever-growing, VC-backed unprofitable companies. The Threads is definitely net-negative in the sense of wider impact and not just single-dimensional KPIs. Take as example Uber and AirBnB. Both have had millions of active users and one could argue their service is even useful to a lot of people. It's still quite easy to argue that they are are net-negative, because even by the narrow metric of revenue and profitability, they are not even returning value to their shareholders - they turn a profitable quarter like what, every few years or so? The effects on society such as traffic congestion, real-estate market etc. are also quite visible in many major cities in the western hemisphere these days (and beyond even...). Now specifically for the Threads: as it stands right now, they are not even driving revenue at Meta, in the corpo-speak of their own CFO: “Specifically, as it pertains to monetization, we don’t expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time,” said CFO Susan Li on the earnings call. “We’ve been just pleased with the growth trajectory and again, are really focused on introducing features that the community finds valuable.” (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/31/metas-threads-app-now-has-275-million-users-zuckerberg-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/31/metas-threads-app-now-has-27...). As for the wider positive effects to the society at large, feel free to point out any. As far as I recall, they launched with the promise of sort of "sanitised" contents being promoted, kind of Pinterest 2.0 if you will, beyond that I am not aware of anything relevant coming out of that platform honestly.
- qwe----3 2y agoI’m jealous
- pinoy420 2y agoSounds like a horrific place to work. Imagine the pressure
- falconertc 2y agoI think the joy of working at this scale makes up for that for a lot of people. There are plenty of low-stress, low-impact companies that someone that's bigtech-approved can go to
- huijzer 2y agoI yesterday sat in a meeting where someone showed for an hour all kinds of organizational charts with acronyms and vague terms, and who could do what and who is the boss of who. The various organizations were there to help employees dealing with European privacy regulations while also publishing data open access when possible. Basically: Which parts of the org can help you to deal with the contradicting government regulations. I honestly find high pressure work more relaxing than these kinds of meetings.
- philjohn 2y agoYou get those meetings at Meta as well ... because there are re-orgs multiple times a year and so the org leadership is sent to sell their teams on how this is now the perfect org structure. Until the next one, of course. There's a famous poster from the Facebook days - don't mistake motion for progress. I always thought they should make one for re-orgs.
- spacebanana7 2y agoImagine the compensation.
- vasco 2y agoHaving been in both setups, the frustration and demotivation I got when working in the bureaucracy was way worse than doing the rare weekend work and on-call rotations at a place where things moved fast. Many people get pumped up by doing stuff.
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- javier2 2y agoThey already had these teams and they already had the infrastructure. 100M is a drop in the ocean to Meta
- thrusong 2y agoThat's what I thought too when they touted this meteoric rise to 100M in the early days of Threads. If it's tied to Instagram, and these users aren't using Instagram while they're on Threads, isn't it basically the same difference?
- speed_spread 2y ago> kept this ability to ship fast The secret of keeping deployment velocity high is having nothing important to lose. Facebook can drop or repeat a few posts and pics here and there and nobody will bother really. Anyway, who are they gonna call? The moment you start dealing with transacted data that requires immediate consistency and guaranteed persistence then yeah, managers get nervous, lawyers get involved and there's no way for guerilla ops to hold up. Nobody's paying for Meta's stuff except advertisers and something tells me that _their_ part of the pipeline is handled with _much_ greater care than the "consumer"-facing apps.
- NBJack 2y agoGiven the looming threat of sudden job loss at Meta for the past few years now, I'm not surprised. Fear can motivate, if temporarily.
- jjice 2y agoI'd hate to have this kind of pressure every day, but a week long sprint like this does sound like it was kind of fun. These things can _suck_ when they're out of nowhere and there's a lot of pressure, but I've also had product hack-weeks that were just an absolute blast. That said, I'm a young single guy. If I had a family and no lead time, this doesn't sound great.
- darkhorse222 2y agoWell, yeah. What's the privacy policy and retention policy of this new social network? How do you answer that in two days.