6 ms·

They might have launched it quickly, but nobody (relatively speaking) gave a tinkers damn about the end product. All form and no function.

2c2c2c 2y ago
incumbent 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 ago
Precisely, 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 ago
  how 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 ago
    DAU 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.
    - isaacremuant 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - hansmayer 2y ago
        Please read more carefully and don't shove your own words down other people's throats, it's rude and un-called for. What zealotry? The only politically-sided arguments in this thread are coming from you. By the way, if you took a few more seconds to read a bit more carefully, you would have noticed I never said they did not provide any value - only that the net negative seems to be outweighing the benefits to the society as a whole, and this is based on hard data, not ideology, mate. This is to make comparison to Threads, which is, unlike these two, not even providing a real-life service to justify it's existence. Plus, please learn: revenue != profits. I won't go down the rabbit hole of discussing the business models of Uber and Airbnb, you obviously haven't understood who carries the actual operating costs of those "businesses" and maybe in your world these are great services, as they come with an implicit ego-boost for all the Karens of this world?
        isaacremuant 2y ago
        [dead]
      - throwaway2562 2y ago
        Not being able to get your kid to sleep because the upstairs flat is now a weekend party place for tourists is… a non-problem? ‘Wonderful’ convenience for tourists, sure. Writing off reasonable objections as ‘ideological zealotry’ from ‘bad political actors’ is a very weird take. Case in point, I recently backed out of buying a house when I found out the house next door was an Airbnb, and the neighbours were not digging the thoughtless visitors. Is that an ideological preference or a pro-sleep one?
        isaacremuant 2y ago
        [flagged]
- motorest 2y ago
  > Precisely, 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. This comment is perplexing. Reportedly Threads has 130 million monthly active users (and growing) vs. 550 million accessing X (and shrinking). This alone already places Threads as one of the top social media services in the world. It's projected revenue for 2026 is over $10B. What exactly are you talking about?
  - hansmayer 2y ago
    See further below please, I wrote just about this kind of tunnel-vision focus on DAU/MAU vs. a more holistic view ;)
    - motorest 2y ago
      If you're talking about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43010781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43010781 You wrote a wall of text saying and refuting absolutely nothing. The only remotely tangible argument you made was the blurb on “Specifically, as it pertains to monetization, we don’t expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time,”. Considering Meta reports revenue around $40B and Threads, considering the EU snag, was basically launched last year, this is far from being the failure you are trying to spin it. But if you had any point worth making, and you didn't had an axe to grind, you wouldn't grasped at straws such as the "As for the wider positive effects to the society at large, feel free to point out any."
      - hansmayer 2y ago
        Sure mate, I am definitely the one with an axe to grind here ;) Now prove me stupid and show me and the HN readership how is a product which even it's own management sees as unprofitable for the next three-four quarters, producing any benefits at least to it's shareholders, not even talking about the society. Maybe lean into the argument with a pinch of how the latest Meta "free speech" policies augment it's positive contributions too ;)
- geodel 2y ago
  If so many people are so smart and still working on these products at Meta then either these product matter as per smart people or they are just ordinary people working for their paychecks.
Retr0id 2y ago
Threads feels more like a new feature in the facebook meta-app (heh) than a new app in its own right, especially with how it has to be bound to an instagram profile. "our new feature reached 100m users in 5 days" sounds a little less impressive (especially given meta has multiple billions of users to start with).
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  And how easy it was to start the threads onboarding flow inside FB/Insta... looked like a new feature.
WJW 2y ago
Form and no function is the essence of social media apps though, so they nailed that. 300 million monthly and 100m daily users is also pretty decent, so I don't think "nobody" cares. For comparison, that's approximately the same number of MAU as twitter.
- titzer 2y ago
  Zero of whom pay for the product. They are the product. What this leaves out is that the real customers, advertisers, already have a fully-functional hyperscale system creeping on users and pushing ads in their face. It's akin to crowing about how fast you can put up new billboard ads when the billboards are already built--someone else has already put in the power/network lines, poles, screens, routing, etc, and you just hooked up your existing ad feeds to it. Facebook doesn't give two shits if the billboards were in the middle of nowhere, as long as they can charge their advertisers some $$, they'd deliver seizure-inducing hallucinogenic drugs right into users' veins.
  - WJW 2y ago
    If you can put up new billboard ads ten times as fast as your competitors, that's still a competitive advantage. Whether you like Meta or not, two days to provide sufficient infra for a new service with 100m users is a technical achievement that not many organizations on the planet could match.
- throwaway894345 2y ago
  In fairness, that successful is probably less to do with the merits of the product and more to do with the timely exodus of users from Twitter and aggressive marketing from Meta’s other properties. I’m not saying Threads is bad—I haven’t used it—only that the success or failure of social media offerings is rarely attributable to the platform itself as opposed to the network of users.
pjc50 2y ago
Threads is odd. The thing about Twitter was its very high media profile; you'd see tweets quoted in all sorts of places like newspapers and TV. The sharp heel turn is in the process of killing that, especially by closing off the site to not logged in users, but you can still see people quoting/screenshotting tweets on other sites. Including bluesky. I don't think I've ever seen a viral Threads post that escaped the network? Meanwhile Facebook screenshots still circulate as memes (derisive, but hey, the motto of the modern era is that the world hating you is better than them not noticing you). And Instagram is fairly entrenched as a marketing channel. Is Threads the new Google+?
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Threads has a nice selection of extremely smart, interesting people, trapped inside a short text limit and an algorithmically curated culture of adversarial outrage porn and drama. BlueSky feels a lot more adult. Threads also has a huge oversupply of fragile mediocrities who love the drama and/or haven't worked out it's a terrible medium for self-promotion, and has generated some of the most jaw-droppingly stupid takes I've ever seen online. (And I used to be on AOL...) A good few people left Threads when the censorship started to become too obvious, and a lot more will leave when the ads become too heavy-handed.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  The most perplexing move for me was the decision to not automatically give Instagram users a threads account that they were logged into. I'm sure Meta has some internal reputation metric for Insta accounts, and it would have been trivial to give all accounts above a threshold immediate access to threads. But nope, you have to create a threads account to view threads.
monkeydust 2y ago
It this what happens with very engineering led businesses perhaps? In other places, there would have been a lot more focus on the the final product before shipping but nowhere near the speed of delivery Meta achieved which is impressive.
pavlov 2y ago
Threads has 320 million monthly active users and 100 million daily. It’s certainly not a flop. It’s almost as big as X globally. There’s a tremendous locality bias around Meta’s products. Social media use is very localized by geography and age. So if all your friends stopped using Facebook ten years ago, you assume that’s probably true everywhere, while in fact they’ve added several billion users on FB since then.
- stravant 2y ago
  It seems like a flop not in user count but in that I'm not seeing it originate any valuable content. I've seen several interesting posts from Bluesky referenced elsewhere already, but literally nothing from Threads despite it having had more users for longer.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Elon Musk's trans daughter Vivian has been very active on Threads. Maybe she's on BlueSky now too, but I think she started on Threads. (She's 20 years old, her father is the richest man in the world, and he regularly does interviews saying his child is literally dead to him. Enough drama for an Orson Welles script and a second-tier social media service.)
    - inemesitaffia 2y ago
      They feel the same way about each other
  - esafak 2y ago
    How would you know if you are not present in the circles that use the product? Maybe it's big in Japan.
    - anon7000 2y ago
      I think their point is that you see Twitter and Bluesky links shared to sites like hackernews or Reddit (ie the internet aggregators), but not anything from threads

2c2c2c 2y ago

incumbent 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 ago

Precisely, 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 ago
how 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 ago
  DAU 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.
  - isaacremuant 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - hansmayer 2y ago
      Please read more carefully and don't shove your own words down other people's throats, it's rude and un-called for. What zealotry? The only politically-sided arguments in this thread are coming from you. By the way, if you took a few more seconds to read a bit more carefully, you would have noticed I never said they did not provide any value - only that the net negative seems to be outweighing the benefits to the society as a whole, and this is based on hard data, not ideology, mate. This is to make comparison to Threads, which is, unlike these two, not even providing a real-life service to justify it's existence. Plus, please learn: revenue != profits. I won't go down the rabbit hole of discussing the business models of Uber and Airbnb, you obviously haven't understood who carries the actual operating costs of those "businesses" and maybe in your world these are great services, as they come with an implicit ego-boost for all the Karens of this world?
      - isaacremuant 2y ago
        [dead]
    - throwaway2562 2y ago
      Not being able to get your kid to sleep because the upstairs flat is now a weekend party place for tourists is… a non-problem? ‘Wonderful’ convenience for tourists, sure. Writing off reasonable objections as ‘ideological zealotry’ from ‘bad political actors’ is a very weird take. Case in point, I recently backed out of buying a house when I found out the house next door was an Airbnb, and the neighbours were not digging the thoughtless visitors. Is that an ideological preference or a pro-sleep one?
      - isaacremuant 2y ago
        [flagged]
motorest 2y ago
> Precisely, 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. This comment is perplexing. Reportedly Threads has 130 million monthly active users (and growing) vs. 550 million accessing X (and shrinking). This alone already places Threads as one of the top social media services in the world. It's projected revenue for 2026 is over $10B. What exactly are you talking about?
- hansmayer 2y ago
  See further below please, I wrote just about this kind of tunnel-vision focus on DAU/MAU vs. a more holistic view ;)
  - motorest 2y ago
    If you're talking about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43010781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43010781 You wrote a wall of text saying and refuting absolutely nothing. The only remotely tangible argument you made was the blurb on “Specifically, as it pertains to monetization, we don’t expect Threads to be a meaningful driver of 2025 revenue at this time,”. Considering Meta reports revenue around $40B and Threads, considering the EU snag, was basically launched last year, this is far from being the failure you are trying to spin it. But if you had any point worth making, and you didn't had an axe to grind, you wouldn't grasped at straws such as the "As for the wider positive effects to the society at large, feel free to point out any."
    - hansmayer 2y ago
      Sure mate, I am definitely the one with an axe to grind here ;) Now prove me stupid and show me and the HN readership how is a product which even it's own management sees as unprofitable for the next three-four quarters, producing any benefits at least to it's shareholders, not even talking about the society. Maybe lean into the argument with a pinch of how the latest Meta "free speech" policies augment it's positive contributions too ;)
geodel 2y ago
If so many people are so smart and still working on these products at Meta then either these product matter as per smart people or they are just ordinary people working for their paychecks.

Retr0id 2y ago

Threads feels more like a new feature in the facebook meta-app (heh) than a new app in its own right, especially with how it has to be bound to an instagram profile. "our new feature reached 100m users in 5 days" sounds a little less impressive (especially given meta has multiple billions of users to start with).

datadrivenangel 2y ago
And how easy it was to start the threads onboarding flow inside FB/Insta... looked like a new feature.

WJW 2y ago

Form and no function is the essence of social media apps though, so they nailed that. 300 million monthly and 100m daily users is also pretty decent, so I don't think "nobody" cares. For comparison, that's approximately the same number of MAU as twitter.

titzer 2y ago
Zero of whom pay for the product. They are the product. What this leaves out is that the real customers, advertisers, already have a fully-functional hyperscale system creeping on users and pushing ads in their face. It's akin to crowing about how fast you can put up new billboard ads when the billboards are already built--someone else has already put in the power/network lines, poles, screens, routing, etc, and you just hooked up your existing ad feeds to it. Facebook doesn't give two shits if the billboards were in the middle of nowhere, as long as they can charge their advertisers some $$, they'd deliver seizure-inducing hallucinogenic drugs right into users' veins.
- WJW 2y ago
  If you can put up new billboard ads ten times as fast as your competitors, that's still a competitive advantage. Whether you like Meta or not, two days to provide sufficient infra for a new service with 100m users is a technical achievement that not many organizations on the planet could match.
throwaway894345 2y ago
In fairness, that successful is probably less to do with the merits of the product and more to do with the timely exodus of users from Twitter and aggressive marketing from Meta’s other properties. I’m not saying Threads is bad—I haven’t used it—only that the success or failure of social media offerings is rarely attributable to the platform itself as opposed to the network of users.

pjc50 2y ago

Threads is odd. The thing about Twitter was its very high media profile; you'd see tweets quoted in all sorts of places like newspapers and TV. The sharp heel turn is in the process of killing that, especially by closing off the site to not logged in users, but you can still see people quoting/screenshotting tweets on other sites. Including bluesky. I don't think I've ever seen a viral Threads post that escaped the network? Meanwhile Facebook screenshots still circulate as memes (derisive, but hey, the motto of the modern era is that the world hating you is better than them not noticing you). And Instagram is fairly entrenched as a marketing channel. Is Threads the new Google+?

TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
Threads has a nice selection of extremely smart, interesting people, trapped inside a short text limit and an algorithmically curated culture of adversarial outrage porn and drama. BlueSky feels a lot more adult. Threads also has a huge oversupply of fragile mediocrities who love the drama and/or haven't worked out it's a terrible medium for self-promotion, and has generated some of the most jaw-droppingly stupid takes I've ever seen online. (And I used to be on AOL...) A good few people left Threads when the censorship started to become too obvious, and a lot more will leave when the ads become too heavy-handed.
Workaccount2 2y ago
The most perplexing move for me was the decision to not automatically give Instagram users a threads account that they were logged into. I'm sure Meta has some internal reputation metric for Insta accounts, and it would have been trivial to give all accounts above a threshold immediate access to threads. But nope, you have to create a threads account to view threads.

monkeydust 2y ago

It this what happens with very engineering led businesses perhaps? In other places, there would have been a lot more focus on the the final product before shipping but nowhere near the speed of delivery Meta achieved which is impressive.

pavlov 2y ago

Threads has 320 million monthly active users and 100 million daily. It’s certainly not a flop. It’s almost as big as X globally. There’s a tremendous locality bias around Meta’s products. Social media use is very localized by geography and age. So if all your friends stopped using Facebook ten years ago, you assume that’s probably true everywhere, while in fact they’ve added several billion users on FB since then.

stravant 2y ago
It seems like a flop not in user count but in that I'm not seeing it originate any valuable content. I've seen several interesting posts from Bluesky referenced elsewhere already, but literally nothing from Threads despite it having had more users for longer.
- pavlov 2y ago
  Elon Musk's trans daughter Vivian has been very active on Threads. Maybe she's on BlueSky now too, but I think she started on Threads. (She's 20 years old, her father is the richest man in the world, and he regularly does interviews saying his child is literally dead to him. Enough drama for an Orson Welles script and a second-tier social media service.)
  - inemesitaffia 2y ago
    They feel the same way about each other
- esafak 2y ago
  How would you know if you are not present in the circles that use the product? Maybe it's big in Japan.
  - anon7000 2y ago
    I think their point is that you see Twitter and Bluesky links shared to sites like hackernews or Reddit (ie the internet aggregators), but not anything from threads