A week in, Threads has lost half of its active users

Ignacio@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 456 points –
A week in, Threads has lost half of its active users | Boing Boing
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Honestly, keeping half is pretty good.

IKR? The massive influx of near-zero-friction signups is bound to create a large userbase of new/shiny window shoppers who quickly lose interest. I've got a couple of friends who seem to be attempting to create a presence there, but otherwise it's a terrible feed. Of course it's a terrible feed for me because I've done jack-shit on instagram and the algorithm is just throwing stuff at my wall to see what sticks. I've got ladies with large asses in spandex, some quote-meme spammers, and Jair Bolsonaro filling up my feed - that's just a fucking dumpster fire.

I'll keep the app (properly sandboxed) but I doubt I'll interact with it any more than mastodon or Post - which is monthly at best. I'd say that I dropper Twitter last year, but really I dropped it a decade ago as being useless as both a location for discourse and a source for, well, anything of interest to me.

Honestly, I'm surprised the algorithm doesn't start with more benign stuff. The best tuned algorithms start with low-controversy popular content, like pictures of cats, then slowly as it learns about the user begins introducing personal interests and rage bait depending on what the user interacts with.

Yeah, that really is pretty surprising. Haven't used Threads myself since I'm in the EU and I have zero interest in it, but this is pretty normal social media stuff. I'd understand it if Meta was some "two people and a dog" company, but it's Meta. I figure that a nontrivial amount of corners was cut, considering they couldn't even launch in the EU