Most of the 100 million people who signed up for Threads stopped using it

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 350 points – Most of the 100 million people who signed up for Threads stopped using it
arstechnica.com

Most of the 100 million people who signed up for Threads stopped using it::"We're seeing more people coming back daily than I'd expected," Zuckerberg said.

35

So we're gonna sit here and pretend that there weren't automatic sign-ups for Instagram users? They got signed up without choice. Facebook did that.

Edit: I was wrong! I remember reading about this early on, but I think I read misinformation. Sorry about that.

It wasn't automatic. Not sure where you got that idea. But you had to get the app and then sign in using your Instagram account to set up the thread profile. They had "shadow copies" of your Instagram profiles on threads so for example you could sub to someone's profile and when they'd join threads you'd get their activities. But no it wasn't automatic.

Upvoted for your edit. Publicly admitting you're wrong has become too rare.

I think because people's egos are more fragile than ever these days. Being wrong is like end of the world.

This is the key. There certainly were NOT 100mm people that signed up of their own accord.

There's no such thing as 100mm people. That's just 10cm, even infants are taller than that.

It was super easy to sign up but ultimately it’s missing a lot of features and is why people didn’t stick around. There’s still no search or hashtags so finding content that interests you is basically luck with the algorithm.

While it wasn’t entirely automatic they’ve showed ads for it in Instagram that easily fooled you into assuming, that the only way you can continue using Instagram was by creating a Threads Account.

It’s severe lack of features was its downfall. I signed up and my feed was full of random celebs with no way to filter it to people you follow (apparently they added this recently). But the main issue NO FCKING SEARCH, you can only search for accounts nothing else. Discoverability if you are not a famous person is basically 0. No hashtags so no discussion of specific trends or topics. No Trends in general.

This was my biggest driver as well, I liked the platform but it lacked features and I too hate being flooded with people I don’t know on my feed.

They are going to continue to bleed users because of lack of features.

They're going to add features. It's typical for software development nowadays.

You get out on the market early just to be there (or to exploit a favorable moment like feeding on Twitter's carcass), then add features later.

It works, too. People will grumble but at least they have something to grumble about right now. It beats a perfect service at an unspecified date later.

That's okay, it's still sending all your data to Meta, and that's the important thing.

FOMO was the big driver here. Once they saw Threads sucked, the peaced out.

In one sense this may be killer because even if it does improve people's first experience will impact them ever going back

Which part of it sucked the most for you to make you quit?

I'd say seeing content from random accounts that I don't follow would be part of that.

Yeah for sure, never heard of anything like that on social media before. So much scrolling.

Still curious what the original dude I was talking to left for. @housepanther

This is literally just what happens with new tech, nobody expects even 50% retention from when it's new and hot.

Remember that time when literally any new Google product would crash at release and then would be a desert one month after launch?

Actually I am one of them who signed up during the initial hype. I was on twitter few years before. Was fed up and deleted the account. Started thread since I like twitter like social media. But it was full of stolen post from reddit and twitter. The same stupid memes I saw in reddit, lemmy etc are present there. Nothing interesting. I can get all the news, memes and entertaining contents from reddit and lemmy. Why the hell should I see that again in threads? Then there are people who is using it like instagram and Facebook. Just posting thier photos in different poses. I still have the app, but hasn't spent 5 minutes in the last week.

Lack of trends and hashtag search is a big no for me.

i know a whole bunch of people who signed up just because, looked around, and the never used it again.

Launching a new social media network and not making it available in the EU is really dumb imho.

Not launching in the EU tells you everything you need to know about their privacy policies.