This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mr Zuckerberg - who made the comments in a call to employees, heard by the Reuters news agency - described the situation as “normal” and said he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.
The company’s chief product officer, Chris Cox, told staff it was now focused on adding more “retention-driving hooks” to draw people back to the platform.
Mr Zuckerberg also updated employees on the company’s enormous bet on a yet-to-be-created virtual reality world, called the Metaverse.
That prediction may intensify concerns that Meta has dedicated too much time and money to the Metaverse - its Reality Labs division, which produces VR headsets and other products, has racked up multi-billion dollar losses.
Mr Zuckerberg also addressed one other headline-making issue - his proposed cage fight with fellow tech titan Elon Musk.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Oh cool we have a TLDR bot on lemmy too! Good bot.
Good bot!
Good bot!
The main issue is that they assumed the rate limit was going to be the dumbest thing Elon was going to do, and they released Threads long before it was actually ready.
Yeah, I read an article from someone explaining the actual user experience in Threads and it’s abysmal. You try to curate your feed and instead of getting what you expect, you get content from the likes of people your followers followed followed and are left wondering who the hell everyone is. It’s far from the type of setup you get on Instagram.
With that said, Threads had lost half its users ages ago. This headline is sensational, and the platform could easily recover. I don’t want to give it much weight.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere on Lemmy, but I follow a ton of artists on the former birdsite, and almost all of them ended up flocking to Threads and Bluesky. I created a Threads account to see what all the hype was about, and it is a very half-baked experience. Ignoring all the privacy concerns, the whole thing is very unfinished. Like you said, the feed is full of people I don’t even know or follow and I have to chase down my friends to see their posts. The lack of hashtags is a problem too, and since it’s not available in the EU, that rules out one of my best friends as well as many of her other friends.
I don’t know if it will recover or not, but there’s the old saying, “You only get one chance to make a first impression.”
This is so fucking true lol
Isn’t half still like 50 million users? It’s not nothing
Yeah, I don’t get these articles. Most users don’t stick around on a platform, but if enough do and form a critical mass, it’ll succeed.
like lemmy! right! right?
Kinda. Lemmy doesn’t have anywhere near 50 million users, but the thousands we do have is enough to keep the community churning away.
Plus the bots help. Bots posting things from news organizations and taking from Reddit help this place have content.
I’m not a fan of the bots - they spam the same link across a bunch of communities.
I’d much prefer real engagement, but I can block them, so that’s fine, I guess.
I am here for it!
Those users who dropped $100 for Sync should at least stick around:
I’ve noticed it on all social media sites; this desire to talk down about the other platforms and reinforce why yours is the best. Which in part, I get it. If you really liked Twitter you wouldn’t necessarily be hanging out here, but these articles are definitely weird. It’s like following your ex just so you can tell yourself you’re better off now.
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I wonder what Lemmy is…
I am definitely bumping that stat up singlehandedly by an unhealthy amount.
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Username checks out ^(sorry for the redditism 🙈)
Lemmy isn’t here to sell ads so I hope we never have to find out.
I wouldn’t be surprised if users of most new apps with a lot of hype follow this trend. Everyone jumps in at first, as hype dies a lot of users stop visiting, and after that is when # of daily users stabilizes and begins the organic growth. We are still in the hype dying phase, transitioning to normal growth.
For that reason, I dont put much weight in headlines like this. It will take several more months or a year to really make a conclusion on whether the app is a success or failure.
I feel as though many of the new users were just squatting the usernames so they could sell t hem(ie someone takes mrbeast so they could sell it to the real mr beast)
You have to have an instagram account in order to have a threads account - it’s how you log in. I think whatever your Instagram handle is becomes your threads handle, or it’s saved for you.
I wanted to see what it was like so I created a new Instagram account (not linked to any of my real personal info) and then a new threads account. I had a look for a couple of days and decided it was dogshit so I deleted both. I suspect an awful lot of people did exactly that.
Exactly like any new game released on Steam. Massive uptake by users but it quickly peaks and dies down. Almost every time.
I’m not a fan of Meta, but this is sort of expected behavior for any company. You get a swell of account signups and then people go dormant.
This is just bad tech reporting; the tech press can only write 3 stories:
- This company is a success
- This company is a failure
- Look how much funding this company got
Often you get all three about the same company
It is quite normal for any business to lose customers after everyone try’s it out. This is being framed negatively, but having 50m users after only a few weeks is amazing. And I say this as someone that refuses to use FB.
Lack of tags or a working search feature broke it for me, I use twitter for news not to see quips from influencers I’ve never heard of. I might check it out again when it’s something other than marginally famous internet celebrities screaming into an empty void.
Threads never had enough substance for me to keep using it, half of Threads was just people subtly begging for followers, and the other half was corporate accounts making the same #relatable content that the did on
TwitterXPlenty of cute animals though.
Are the other half government bots and fbi agents?
A different half than the half lost weeks ago?
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I can see that, before I uninstalled it, it barely took 2 minute to open it and see that still only about 3 of the people I followed on Twitter are now on it, and my feed is still full of celebrity nonsense rather than anything interesting.
Threads is enacting Zeno’s dichotomy in real time, but with users instead of distances
I think Facebook and Instagram users had no need to use Twitter anyway, so its alternative doesn’t fill any need.
Yeah, I’m really not sure how this replaces the functionality of Facebook and Instagram. If anything, it’s more limiting.
Well I was using it but I got locked out due to living in Germany :/
I got locked out due to living in Germany :/
Germany has good data protections, so blocking German users says a lot about what they do.
Would have lost more if it wasn’t tied to Instagram.
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